Whimsical illustrations. Breathtaking photos. Meaningful poems. Inspiring quotations.

If you’re thinking that a muse is a thing of beauty and wonder, you can’t go any more wrong than that. Always provocative, and not often pretty. Sometimes, even messy like Britney. Such is the catalyst that shapes the world we live in. It gives the jaded and weary senses a mind-blowing jolt and an enlightening shake-up, showing the way with a fresh, purposeful voice.



Title: Inspiration = Ideas: A Creativity Sourcebook for Graphic Designers
Publisher: Rockport Publishers
Editors: Petrula Vrontikis


Author-designer-educator Petrula Vrontikis attempts to make sense of something so intangible, yet so powerful. She raids through treasure chests of 19 globally acclaimed designers and throws up questions that she, through a glimpse into the minds of these geniuses, answers clearly and succinctly.

Are designers creative hunter-gatherers? Is there a method of inspiration? Or is it random?



Then again, it’s not so much of what they have in their chests. Rather, what gave it potential to be a stimulus? How does one differentiate between a rock and an unpolished gem? What did Stefan Sagmeister see in the girl doing her math homework in the subway? How does fear motivate Saul Bass? What in Wolfgang Weingart’s childhood inspires him? How does Aporva Baxi derive his ideas from nanotechnology? What does wild dancing do to Maxey Andress? What did Vrontikis herself discover in chance meetings? (Yes Marion, stimulants don’t only come in vials and syringes.)



“I don’t know,” replied Primo Angeli. So brutally honest and unpretentious. And maybe other design leaders agree with him. Perhaps it’s just something that clicks so naturally, you don’t think about it until you’re asked. Milton Glaser sheds a little more light: “It comes from the most unlikely places. Usually when I pay attention to something I haven’t paid before.”

Denise Gonzales Crisp doesn’t even believe in the notion of inspiration. “Sometimes I have them, sometimes I don’t; but they always seem to appear just when I need them.



“I think we’re always looking for answers, for systems that we can return to again and again with assurance that these systems will generate consistently good work; however, these very systems can become rules, and rules can often hinder inspiration.”

Is that what is trying to communicate with this irony of a “sourcebook”? Flip through this giant scrapbook and pick a page from any one of the 224 pages at random. Inspiration = Ideas feeds and indulges your voyeuristic pleasures as you connects the dots between seemingly broken links. Vrontikis invites you to change your mind and look with new eyes at the wall in New Orleans. Or the Chinese candy packaging. Or the lime containers. Or the Gaudi rooftop sculptures. Find the Edie Sedgwick for your Andy Warhol.



And maybe Margo Chase agrees with me. “He’s [The Buddha] an image that I’ve saved for years in the hope of finding an application for his smug expression.”

19 is not a perfect number. It tempts you into asking: Why not round it off to 20? Maybe muses alone aren’t perfect either; after all, it takes two hands to clap.



And no one deserves a greater applause than Vrontikis. It’s striking how an award-winning principal-creative director, one of the most highly regarded design practitioner of the times with a career spanning over 20 years, still possesses a ingenuous curiosity echoing that of one who’s just been introduced to the design industry.

Her modesty humbles me.



Perhaps, as Vrontikis felt, “they are seeds looking for the right soil to germinate in”. I don’t have green fingers to know much about seeds and the right soil, but as a writer who also designs, I couldn’t agree with her more. Either it’s just not the right time, or the right project to justify (or that is befitting of) a particular inspiration.


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