My Unexpected Design Success
My name is Balázs Kétyi, I’m a young UI/UX - Graphic Designer from Hungary. Let me share a short story with you. A story about: How can sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected moments?
I always tried to live my life in a very systematic way. I like planning my next steps. Either the next step in life, next step in my career or a next step in a project. When I’m creating a new project, my goal is always to create something new, fresh and unique. By forcing yourself, you can get good ideas and unique solutions, although it’s rare. But sometimes life or mother nature can give you the greatest ideas even when you’re not expecting it.
It’s similar to what Feng Zhu (a concept artist god) calls:
“Happy Accidents”
Even though the chances are low, happy accidents did happen to me a few times. I also believe, that we can do certain things to make the chances higher.
On December of 2016 I created a soap packaging design called PAOS, using vectorized soap patterns. This project turned out to be one of my most successful project. It get featured on Behance, a lots of bigger design portals, and it get published on design magazines and books. Even though I made it in 2016, I still get emails on a weekly bases asking about this particular project. Back then I was an amateur designer, with less than 2 years of experience, this was a huge moment for me.
A lot of people have been asking me:
“How did you come up with this idea? It’s so original.”
I also see these questions on design forums regularly: “ How can I come up with a creative solution? How can I create something unique? Where can I get inspiration or reference from? ”
So how did I come up with this idea?
Coming up with a creative solution is not easy and sometimes it seems impossible. You need to do a lot of things right to accomplish it. I would like to talk about one particular component:
Be open minded, curious and be a good listener.
There are couple of thing is my life I hate doing… Dancing, singing, and washing dishes. It happened to be one day that the sink was so full, I had no choice but to wash some of the pots and plates. So with all my power, I began to wash the dishes piece by piece. I was doing this depressive washing for a decent time, when I suddenly looked down to a half washed pot with soap in it. I noticed that there’s a strange pattern forming in the bottom of the pot.
Since I’m a graphic designer who’s always ready to be visually inspired, I told myself: “Hm that’s a pretty good shape, I might take a picture of it. It can be useful some day.” So i took a picture…
I didn’t know it at the time, but: That was a gift from mother nature.
(Yea I know… both the pot and the soap are man-made, but whatever!)
A couple of days later I went to my university, where the lecturer introduced us a new packaging design project. We could choose from three themes. To my biggest surprise, the third option was soap packaging. As soon as she mentioned that, I knew what my project will be. It was a typical “eureka” moment, that you might see in a Hollywood movie.
I showed her the picture i took a couple of days ago and I told her my idea. She liked it, and I delivered the project in a couple of days. From my point of view as the creator, I liked the design.. it was all right. For some reason I decided to publish the project.
Well, I did not expect what happened in the following days…
It went “viral”.
I woke up in the morning, after publishing it and i got a message from my friend, with a picture, and a short message: “yuhee”.
My answer was: What is my design doing on Pinterest? (Obviously I did not know what Pinterest really is, or how does it work.) I found out later on that my design got featured on the Packaging of the World webpage, then it went viral on Pinterest. I got a lot of views, comments and feedback on Behance and on my Hungarian Design page, I got featured on both websites. It was the most viewed project on the Hungarian Design page in 2017. As a young designer it meant a lot to me.
I still get emails about my work, notifications on featuring it, job offerings and questions. Even though I still hate washing dishes… every time I touch a pot during washing I remember the moment when I saw the pattern.
I realized that you can’t plan everything in life. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow and let “faith” to decide. Since that time, I know sometimes the best idea can come from the most unexpected situations.
So what would my answer be to the question:
How can I come up with a creative solution?
For anybody who’s struggling with these questions, my advise would be: Keep your eyes open, be open minded and learn from everything that surrounds you. Don’t be stressed out, and what’s more important: Don’t try to be something you’re not.
“Mother Nature is the true artist and our job as cooks is to allow her to shine…”
— Marco Pierre White.
If you are interested to see the full project, you can check it here: Behance
If you have any questions or suggestions don’t hesitate to comment or contact me! Thank you for reading this post!
