> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too.
I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.
I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.