in your field (i'm presuming many of us are designers in some field or other) what would you say was the ratio of people who are inspiring to others vs. run-of-the-mill?

just a thought based on a conversation ive been having as to whether just because you meet a designer (architect/engineer whatever) what is the likelihood that they will excite or inspire you?

in architecture and urbanism i suggested that you need only look around to see what buildings you can see and to say that what you see as a ratio of cool:dross could be a good measure of the talent behind those buildings

of course thats too simplistic as it ignores timescale/purpose or budgets but i still think its as good a guide as any

what do you think?

until ihc brought it up, i hadn't really thought about it like this. which is strange in itself.

i think i'd go with meska's figures here, but i'm sure that it dependent on quite a few different factors, and not just the ones that ihc put forward. maybe it is partly my the clients 'fault' in that i they need to first enthuse the designer, and let them know that they should be creative. i guess that the timescale does enforce quite strict limitations on them too. if this where about me, or my brief, i'd want a designer to be creative, and let me worry about timescales and budgets (at least to begin with*).

20:80

of course, 'cool' and 'dross' also mean different things to different people

I second meska. But in my case, someone being inspiring is not related to whether they are skilled or not. Sometimes people just are incredibly inspiring.

this is by no means a scientific study - don't stress about the parameters

having said that i'm more pessimistic than sock/meska - even with budgetry and client shortsightendness constraints i'd put it at about 10%

which considering the output of diploma/degree students is pretty poor

the machine just grinds you down - and then you get a mortgage and then some bairns ....

People that make cartoons think they are teh creativeness. But really it just means that have a few Kubricks on top of their monitors.

i don't really think about it because I think as creatives we all have different cycles in our lives: sometimes in life your creative energy is spent elsewhere - on a house, a garden, cooking, planning a wedding, building a relationship with that significant other.....and then sometimes it's all about design, all the time and you turn out some outstanding work.

Even here at my job (almost 5 years) there are peaks and valleys, I've had some great stuff and i've had my share of boring work - manuals, photo rosters, and jobs where i had an amazing idea, but the client (department) didn't choose it.

One of my co-workers is a fine artist at heart so i find his design work quite below average, however he's begun doing his fine art and his art I love. So I find his art inspiring.

so i'd beg the question where do you find your inspiration? I find mine on the street, in the mountain views as i drive home, in my dogs face, in design annuals, in yoga, in cooking, in the sunday paper, in a piece of fabric, in the choas of life......

ive given up with design.. it is totally uninspiring when you see so many mass produced boring fucks being turned out by design schools that only care about taking their money and not harbouring creative talent.. to get in all you need to do is produce money.. no interview to find how good you are creativly. i got sick of being undercut buy these masses who have no design sense but can use some stupid program like dreamweaver adequtly.. you see the odd person (with is very very rare) that could inspire you to turn on the old illustrator/photoshop again.. but then you have the mass that drives that inspiration away.. there just isnt the talent all around that it used to be. id say there would be at most 1 : 1000 that is cool.. the rest are fools

I'm currently in college in the USA. Here, all the art majors smoke weed all day and set up absurd "exhibits" on the lawns. When asked about it, they usually say they are to "promote discussion." I haven't seen one I like yet.

Local Ratio (this college only): 0:100

in architecture, except for the incredibly vain/smug ( jk) talented people don't often start making a name for themselves under the age of 40. Those that do are genuinely talented and can execute. Whether you like what they do nearly always comes down to tasse rather than any assessment of whether what they do is good or not. its always good.

in the uk the most significant award i believe is not the Stirling Prize or the Pritzker Prize or any of the others that tend to go to the ubercool int he eyes of the media and therefore the wider public...[separate discusssion in the offing]... but instead the Architects' Journal: 40 Under 40 award. I am lucky to be at a practice that a dozen years ago were in that list. Incidentally, they are lucky to be one of those listed to still be going this long after its announcement. Notoriously this award, above others, puts a prestige note very early on for a nascent studio therefore a burden on the recipients.

perhaps expectedly, the current list of practices at that site is a wealth of pretentious websites - some are also cool but along the cool for its own sake argument, sadly

"Personally I always thought that one end of the scale the good designers (run of the mill) borrow constantly, blatant and shameless.

And that on the other end of the scale, scarce and few, are the brilliant inspiratinal designers that steal!"

How true is that statement? A lot of the stuff we're really impressed by, for example the Honda ad, the Sony Bravia advertising etc, all these ideas have been executed previously. None of those ideas were original, but the (re)execution of the idea, just highlights how much design keeps on borrowing and borrowing. Can any designer claim to be truly original? I don't believe so.

On a different slant, just recently, three of us here in Creative were asked to fill in a work 360, a document that claims to probe the inner workings and processes of creative dept and its interaction with the account handling. Our problem is that increasingly, our work is being hampered by client indecision and account handling adopting creative tendencies. They insist on changes to design etc, in order to feed the "correct" creative to the client. We insisted this is detrimental to the creativity of our dept and overall the big picture of our company (from a client perspective) is that we will start to look more like a client-led agency. This means that the two art directors that work here (and have won a considerable amount of work due to their ideas) are not needed, and the account handling team feed amends, creative etc, directly into the creative artworkers. This angers and annoys us to the point where our voices feel lost amongst the greater weight of the company - that is to bring profitability to us all. We as a creative team are being smudged out. Our ideas and experience count for nothing.

What will come out of this 360 document we don't yet know, but i hope the management make a strong decision about where we go next. We have always been a Creative led agency and if we start to move away from that, then it's time to fly.