What Designers Can Learn From Wildlife

Everyone agrees on the basic idea of learning and getting an experience. They may think it’s a strange way to learn and make the title of your article “How to learn from wildlife”. But actually it is not because the human being is also part of this natural creation called wildlife. The civilization covered this fact but every one has his own wildlife inside that we are not aware of sometimes and this needs to be discovered.

 

 

Creative minds are always seeking resource for inspirations and one of the important resources is the wild gene inside each artist. This gene allows the creative person to think in a different way than anyone else. What proves this true is the famous saying “artists are born not made”. This is what makes the creative mind unique as well.

The nature around us is built on amazing complex and creative algorithm. This promotes to be the best learning resources not only for creative minds but also for building systems and solve problems. The secret word behind this is the balance that connects with all these complex systems inside the nature for thousands of years.

Through this creative huge system, we will try to pinpoint some of the lessons that designers and creative people can learn from wildlife.

Creativity

No one doubts that nature is an essential source of creativity and fuels the artists’ minds with new ideas, colors and elements through the time. Nature has inspired traditional artists, photographers and digital artists. However, designers can get inspirations from nature through creative ideas, choosing descriptive photos or choose specific color palette based on specific scheme in nature.

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Perseverance

Wildlife is not easy, and the designer life as well. You always need to develop your skills, get more experience to have more clients. All these requirements need your perseverance to be able to handle your daily routine for a long term basis. Then put plans for your work on both the long-term and the short-term as well.

The wildlife teaches us how to be perseverant and how to manage all our inner and outer resources to achieve our goals whether it is in work or in life. Nature and wildlife teaches us to be strong and be able to accept the critic and ups and downs you work and learn from our hard times. Here is an article about how to set a short-term and long-term plan for your design self-training process How to Build a Self-training Plan.

Adoption

The ability to adopt your work plans and regime to your current situation and circumstances is one of the good behaviors that you can learn from the wildlife animals. Many people who face changes in their life and cannot adopt may lose a lot of their work achievements and even move from the work field they love because of their lack in the ability to face the new life changes.

The ancient dinosaurs that could not adopt in the ice age although their straight and great sizes reminds me with the company that could not stand during the recession time that happened early in 2009. On the other hand, small companies that could adopt their business with the current situation got a better chance to go over the crisis and rebuild its business and grow again.

Balance

The nature around us is a balanced system that every element has a role to affect and be affected with the rest of the elements. Your design is the same. It needs to be balanced to appear to the viewer as a closed system. However, you should analyze your design very well and how to arrange the elements in it and how the colors are reflected to each other.

Art’s basic concepts such as color balancing, the role of thirds and positioning the elements in the artwork can help you understand how to build your design with balance. The Guideline for The Principles of Design article gives you a brief knowledge of these basics and how to use it in your design.

Talent

In wildlife, without the talent of survival you will die. In the design industry, your career will die without developing your creative skills and improve your talent. You can do this through looking at many artworks and get inspired to have new ideas all the time.

Many designers forget to improve their talent and learn about the new ideas when they are busy with clients and clients’ requirements. However, you should have part of your daily work to learn new ideas and improve your talent with new discoveries too.

Practice, Experience and Learning

In wildlife, the lions are not born as predators; they started their life as cute small animals that get their food from their parents until they learn how to hunt their prey by themselves. Based on this, do not expect that you will be a great designer in a day or two. It will need a lot of effort and practice to excel with your tools. This is what makes you a good designer? If you do not have good experience with your tools, you will not be able to do the effects or visualize the ideas you have in mind.

Image by shutterstock

Problem solving

It may be strange to mention how you get inspired through solving problems from nature. Wildlife is full of the lessons that teach us that problem solving skill is very important since life does not go smoothly as we desire all the time.
The early human being teaches us how to find solutions for the problems we have from the things around us before thinking of asking help from other systems and places. For example, the first human being learned how to build their homes from the basic materials around them which came from nature before they looked for other materials elsewhere.
However, nature can teach us how to solve our problems by creating a priority list for the solutions based on its applicability, cost and ability to achieve.

Business scale

There are two types of predators in nature: the large animals, who hunt big few victims and the small animals that hunts small creatures which are so many. The companies in the business scale are the same. Big companies that gain large projects, these projects are hard to acquire and many are not be available in the crisis time or need special skills to get it. The other type is the small projects with small profits but a lot of chances.
Based on this role, it is a good point when you start your design business to set your client target. Actually, this is usually based on your ability to get any form of the two types of business and your ability to continue the relation with your clients in both types.

The above tips and lessons are examples for what designer can learn from nature and wildlife around us. There may be other lessons that you can discover by looking at nature and try to learn more from it. But the most important lesson is to consider that nature is one of your mentors and inspirational resource. This will help you get the most of this talented system.

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