Latest in the popular series, this edition features 44 projects chosen for excellence in store planning, visual merchandising, innovation, graphics and lighting design.Stores & Retail Spaces 11 ...
Sometimes, we're better off when (creative) accidents happen.
"Innovation happens when least expected, a combination of hard work and happy accident. Yet, no matter the specific area of investigation, there are elements that need to be present to promote creativity — imagination, curiosity, persistence, daring and playfulness."
Architectural Lighting magazine
April, May 2006
If your company builds signs, you surely study this magazine's New Product pages, because new and innovative products give your shop a design, cost or production edge that your competitor may have overlooked. Studying these pages provides your shop with the necessary items to apply a fresh, unique appearance, technique or light source to a sign design.
Oppositely, the Internet, although it deserves a thousand or more honors, stinks if you're searching for new ideas, especially when compared to magazines. Internet pages narrowly focus on one object at a time — a brand, company or product type — and lucky accidents, discoveries, seldom happen in such focused searches. A magazine provides a page turn that, like an uncharted hilltop facing an inquisitive explorer, gives you news or actions you may not expect.
All artists and designers speak of "lucky accidents," the unplanned application of a color or shape that somehow makes a design, painting — or product — better, if not extraordinary. The same theory — that one should explore all sources — applies to all design, and, in the custom-sign field, such unexpected discoveries may easily evolve to innovative signage applications.
Many creative people use the word "accident" to describe the results of an experiment that's been implemented with uncommon tools or materials and that will, hopefully, produce unforeseeable, but interesting, results.
For example, digital artist Bonnie Lhotka once coated an unprintable substrate with rabbit-skin glue, to see if her digital-print machine's ink would stick to it. It did. Photographer and author Theresa Airey digitally prints her photos, paints them and prints them again. Each photo is unique because of the planned, yet capricious, outcome of her search for accidents.