Design Philosophies - Reflective Practice
This week:
Design Philosophies can help others better understand my approach to the creative process. This includes the parameters I might work to, what is important to me or the reasons I may take certain briefs, the theory that drives my practice, strong influences on my design choices or a more robust guide to my workflow and pipeline.
Here is a list of Design Philosophies that underpin my creative practice and provice context into my workflow and decisionmaking.
Cynthia Kingsley-Smith! - Design Philosophies est. 2025
Connecting with the source material
Rather than immediately making a collection of loose sketches based on my very first ideas - My initial concepting and development phase consists of becoming very familiar with whatever the subject matter or brief is. I believe that allowing myself to become more educated about the subject I’m working on will allow me to quickly filter out boring or overused lines of enquiry and create higher value concepts that should appeal to both the layman and the specialist.
High-Concept vs Low-Concept
As in film and other media, I will try to appropriately match the content of my concepts to the brief. Each different project requires a unique and tailored approach to achieve the best outcome. It is essential to strike the right choice between delivering a clear and concise message effectively or conveying a more visceral, emotional impact in my illustrations.
Cast a wide net
While it is important to begin a new project quickly and flexibly, I believe it is equally important to ensure that the initial enquiries also look for multiple different ways of communication via media testing. The value of well thought out multi-media solutions to illustrative questions will rise in response to the massively increasing amount of AI being used to promote products, especially in online spaces.
Clean Visual Communication
I believe that sacrificing the complexity of a concept to retain a more simplistic, accessible illustration that can be understood by a wider audience is always a worthwhile and obtainable goal.
Visceral Visuals
Where appropriate, I will elevate the initial purpose of my illustrations by including elements of “feeling” to diversify the original concept. This could be through a colour palette that elicits a particular emotional response or through use of contrasting textures that add a more kinetic feeling to an image.
Abstract IMPACT.
To maximise the impact of my work, I will always look to bend “the rules”. Initially, by being experimental with my chosen mediums I push layouts, gesture and abstractions to the extreme to find new methods of communication that were not obvious before. By
combining this approach with graphic design sensibilities, I can
consistently create strong designs that are both thought provoking and commercially viable.
When creating these philosophies, I avoided going over topics that are hopefully implicit in my workflow (eg. maintian a high quality of work) and instead wrote about things that I believe could seperate my work from the fields (eg. a focus on using traditional and digital media in my outcomes)
Supplimentary Reading:
https://qz.com/work/1877935/a-tribute-to-graphic-design-icon-milton-glaser
https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-Ambiguity-8192.pdf