How Rejected Design Ideas Can Revive Future Concepts
As the old adage goes: “waste not, want not” – Mottainai (Japanese: もったいない,) is a Japanese term conveying a sense of regret concerning waste. Here at Isshoku, we understand that the design process is tedious, strenuous, and time-consuming. Piles of endless concepts and pitches – fragments of artwork flung into the bin. Would all those potential ideas be all for naught? All that time, all that effort – gone with the wind? What happens to the rejected design ideas that never get brought up again? What can you do with previous shards of creative eureka that lived in your sketchbook for that one fleeting moment? Here’s a few ways to bring back previous ideas to life, or gain inspiration from them.
Lay them to rest
An option is to give your design a good eulogy before submitting it in Recently Rejected, the design cemetery. Here, you’ll find a plethora of incomplete, unpolished and – you guessed it – rejected artwork from various graphic design companies like Twice Studio, MVM, Craig & Karl, Ordinary People and Non-Format.
Having a “curated graveyard” that gives a nod towards the time and effort of designers that would have been otherwise unseen. By unearthing and celebrating these showcases in the form of terminated artwork, it sheds light on the design process of someone else. From how an ordinary-looking concept was generated to how it can give someone else ideas on how to formulate their next design.
Wake me up inside
Forgetting a previous idea you had is easy. But putting your previous ideas into current design processes and using what you’ve archived to move forward with is what we should all be striving towards.
This is what Antwerp-based designer and educator Ines Cox constantly works towards. She enjoys keeping a “personalised graveyard” with ring binders full of sketches, test prints, scribbled ideas and various notes. “I’m a maniac about documenting my design process,” says Cox. “I feel it’s necessary to make (almost) every step of my process physical, which is why I print as much as possible. Comparing compositions and eliminating ideas is easier when I put things next to one another on a table. When a project is done, I carefully archive all these sketches and prints. I call them my ‘darlings’.”
Burying one’s experiences and never giving it a second glance again makes for little progress as a designer. Besides the works that were never finished or used, we should all be constantly striving to improve by looking at our current work, and the ones that never made it.
