The difference between being an original and an effective thinker.

I’ve been picking my brain all week and I’ve finally come up with a kick-ass concept for a marketing campaign. With great bravado, I show it to one of my co-workers looking for the level of admiration given off by a religious zealot. “Oh yeah. That’s just like that ad campaign that [insert your favorite brand here] ran last year.” Five minutes later I awoke from my shock induced coma, slough-fully returned to what I thought was my drawing board, but apparently is a scrapbook of other people’s ideas, and tried to keep my shoelaces in their rightful places.

Now-a-days you have a higher chance of winning the lottery than coming up with an truly original idea. That said, we as designers have had to come up with a way to cope with our near impossibility of being original.

Instead of striving for original ideas, we embrace the materials that subconsciously make up our thought process. Anything that we have come in contact with – old movies, music, literature, ad campaigns, a high school lecture – we internally reference during our bouts of creative development. The result is well-informed concepts that aren’t independent from our inspirations, but rather created by them, filtered through our personality, and squeezed into effective ideas.

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George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea