We came. We saw. We Spoke.

I had the pleasure of interviewing a talented and very recent BGSU (my alma mater) design grad. She had the usual assemblage of class assignment work, but it was clean, well-presented, inventive, and had more than the usual care applied to it. It was a solid book. Midway through the interview I asked who she followed (no, not in the Twitter sense) – whose work she admired and emulated. I instinctively knew the answer from the contents of her portfolio, but I was unprepared to hear it aloud: “Margo Chase, David Carson, Rick Valicenti...,” she rattled off. The list went on.

I was dumbstruck.

Twenty years ago, when I was a student, the hottest emerging designers du jour were Margo Chase, David Carson, Rick Valicenti, Rudy Vanderlans, Zuzana Liko, Paula Scher and countless others. And here, twenty years on, was a burgeoning designer repeating names I’d once similarly revered and made part of my own design lexicon. It was then I realized how doomed we are as designers to repeat the past. Each generation of creatives bestows the heroes of their own creative nascency upon the next – imbuing it with the fame and foibles of the design rock stars of yore. Back in the day, my professors had impressed us with the Design Immortals of their youth: Chwast, Glaser, Moscoso, Bass, Dunst, Chermayeff & Geismar, etc. They had reclaimed the work of those who had made the earliest and institutionally-sanctioned impressions on them decades prior. Now, once again, a fresh batch of twenty-somethings are being released into the vocation by well-meaning, but reprising, forty-somethings.

Where does it stop? Should it? Is it possible? What do we gain from insistently recycling our rich and storied visual communications history – each designer latching onto Hollis and Meggs as if he or she discovered them?

Originality is arguably impossible to achieve. Everything we do as a culture is derivative. It takes time to weigh the “sui generis” and importance of the works of others, and it is only through the passage of time that we can give these things their rightful place, and elect to (re)apply them to the zeitgeist. Yes, it’s important for a profession to have a continuum, to be able to draw upon tradition. It’s an effective means of evaluating the progress of any industry’s Darwinism. But if we’re ever to evolve; truly make the impact we believe ourselves capable of making; and sincerely fulfill Paul Rand’s declaration/edict/prophesy, “Design is everything,” then we have to be willing to put the past in its place; reinvent ourselves, our profession and portfolios. And kill our idols.

Special thanks to @endcycle for jogging our memory on the Sonic Youth origins of ‘Kill Your Idols.’

by W. Gene Powell