Material, by Design

by Charles Mouyat

My career as a designer was not by accident, but by design. My entire life I have been motivated, fixated and inspired by the beauty of applying aesthetic virtue to generate value. Great design is never an accident, but is instead a product of focus and determination. Its purpose is to disseminate meaning from archetype and construct order from chaos.

There’s no pretence – the truth remains not only true, but essential. Despite passing trends of fashion, classic ideals of aesthetic have always driven and resonated with me: symmetry, proportion and harmony. The Greeks called the confluence of this valued elemental property ‘the Golden Mean’ – and by elemental, I mean gold.

The Demand for Freshness

While freshness demands the introduction of new ideas, the evolution of meaning depends on attachment to what has come before.

Whether tradition, legacy or ‘old news’ – the new does not resonate with the old to ground or inform it. This is why chaos is the necessary ingredient for generating interest, because the unknown is essential to creating new value.

In the end, it comes down to balance as the essential element of stability and growth. A professional creator will split the difference between exploring new vistas, and grounding it in the comfortable space where society routinely functions.

Established designs generate goodwill as the measure of their worth, like totems and glyphs arising in the mind of the observer and become avatars of that ‘thing’ through mere association. Virtual virtue ascribed to a cheap t-shirt by the addition of a brand logo will push the price of that cotton rag up, up and up – because design matters.

Value by Design

Value is not an accident, but exists by design – ascribed to things that have been fashioned out of emptiness, into fullness.

That’s why logos and brands rule as totems of value, because by design they hold intangible virtues to become the prized embodiment of material value.

In essence designers are like alchemists, using base material to conjure value by generating something from nothing, which is why the success of a professional designer depends on their ability to spin straw into gold, on demand. At Studio Nero, we do this with panache!