Assignment Study your field's innovators – the ones who make difficult things look easy. Bring examples of game-changers in your medium who break rules beautifully.

• Find creators who successfully mix different aesthetics in your medium
• Analyze their techniques for:
  • Maintaining coherence
  • Managing transitions
  • Balancing elements
  • Creating harmony
• Document specific examples
• Begin experimenting with your own combinations

The Rule of Cool: Effortless Innovation

Today you'll learn what makes someone cool, what questions you should ask to take inspiration for your own style, and practice building an outfit around a piece. Afterwards you'll be designing a new outfit for yourself, which you can use for the Hone Your Craft skill line.

What is Cool?

• Cool is the appearance of ease coupled with a difficult act.
• This is why attempting to be cool doesn't work and appears "try hard".
• Fonzie from Happy Days, doing difficult things with no effort is the epitome of cool.

• Dieter Rams is an iconic designer who used the principle of "less but better" to bring function to the fore without sacrificing style in the SK 25 and more.
• For our purposes, looking cool is giving the appearance of having such a cohesive style and look that it seems effortless to put something together that looks good.

Case Study: Prince on the street

• What do I like about this person and their look?
  • Prince is gender bending without being androgynous, a modern dandy
• What does it communicate that I want to copy?
  • A sense of laughing at tradition
• What doesn’t work with my look and style?
  • Leather pants and heels
• How can I integrate this in future dressing and purchase choices?
  • Long jackets, hats, and more prominent jewelry

Case study: Braun SK 25

• How does it balance innovation and simplicity?
  • The space age curviness along with punched cardboard grille.
• Is the function intuitive?
  • Yes, but there's still ambiguity about the volume vs tuning.
• What can I incorporate into my own design?
  • Use similar shapes to keep things cohesive

Cohort Activity: Analyzing Innovators

Take turns sharing and analyzing your favorite innovator(s), using these questions to guide your analysis.

• What do I like about this person and their style?
• What do they communicate that I want to copy?
• What doesn’t work with my own style?
• How can I integrate this in future creative choices?

Thinking in Outfits

• You may have noticed a pattern here: all these people aren’t wearing 1 item, they are putting together outfits.
• The way to appear effortless - and cool - is to balance a modular wardrobe with an eye for accent pieces that tie it together.
• The way to not get decision gridlock in the morning is to start training yourself to see the items in your wardrobe in an outfit/holistic way.
  • Buying thing as individual purchases = broke
  • Putting together outfit and purchasing things to complete it = woke
• In another field such as product design, you start from existing designs and incorporate new ideas in harmony with the features you already have.

Cohort Activity: Build an Outfit

Now we practice our aesthetic eye. Last week we had you build around a theme to create an outfit. This week we will do a similar exercise but based on a randomly chosen item of clothing, in a more realistic scenario. Feel free to find another generator for a different medium.

Whether you are window shopping and see something that catches your eye and makes you wonder if you should buy it, or if you receive an ugly sweater from a relative at Christmas and know they expect to see you wearing it the next day, often we work with what we have, not what we idealize. So you and your cohort will use this generator and select one item to base an outfit around, using other pieces found online to tie it all together. Before you begin, pick a constraint to follow. Constraints can make you push boundaries and inspire creative solutions. If you make it look easy, constraints are the best cool generators.

COLOR
□ Monochromatic only
□ Maximum three colors
□ Only complementary colors
□ No neutral colors

FORM
□ Only curves
□ Only geometric shapes
□ Must be asymmetrical
□ Must be radially symmetrical

SPACE
□ 80% negative space
□ No empty space > 20%
□ Must work in all orientations
□ Elements must touch boundaries

PATTERN
□ Single repeating element
□ Must mix three patterns
□ No repetition allowed
□ Must create visual rhythm

After you’ve created your outfit, ask the key questions again:

• What do I like about this outfit and their style?
• What do they communicate that I want to copy?
• What doesn’t work with my own style?
• How can I integrate this in future creative choices?

Homework

1. Choose an underutilized element in your medium
2. Build something new around it using a constraint
3. Document your process

• Initial constraints
• Reference inspiration
• Development steps
• Final result Show off your creativity and be cool!