Being a designer is a full time job – and by full time job I mean 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One’s inner designer can never be turned off, no matter how heroic the attempt to ignore it. Each and every thing - from the Chinese take out menu on your refrigerator to the pattern on your sister’s tank top - triggers some sort of designerly critique. You can call it whatever you want - designer’s insomnia, the designer zombie, designer intuition, or just plain observation - but you can’t make it go away.

In many ways a designer’s ability to constantly absorb visual inspiration is a great asset, but for every spark of creative mojo that comes my way, there is always a counterpart that ruins a perfectly good conversation with friends or romantic moment with a loved one. What follows is my most recent account of the many ways my inner designer has tried to sabotage my life outside of work:

The Ice Cream Incident

A few weeks ago I spent the evening walking around one of our city’s great lakes with some friends. We stopped for ice cream afterwards, and that is when the trouble started. My eyes became affixed to the pattern on my sister’s tank top. I couldn’t keep myself from staring rudely at her chest, trying to decipher where I had seen the pattern before. Was it one of the pages from Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament? Or had I seen it on the website of a restaurant I recently visited? I could not wrap my mind around where this familiar pattern was haunting me from, and in a moment of frustration I finally blurted out “WHERE is that pattern from!?”. I was completely zoned in to my sister’s shirt, and equally zoned out of the conversation the rest of my friends were engaged in. Naturally, I didn’t realize that my call of distress came at a most inopportune moment in the conversation. Silence followed, along with some blank stares and laughs. How could I have missed out entirely on what my friend was talking about because of some pattern on my sister’s shirt? Was the origin of this graphic subconsciously more important that what my friends had to say? Doubtful. But how do I explain my deep frustration over this pattern to an actuary, teacher, and event coordinator? After an unsuccessful attempt, a few sighs, and shaking heads the interrupted conversation continued. Secretly, my mind still searched and searched for the source of the pattern.

Weeks later, I still have not completely figured out where I recognized the pattern from. I have spent many wasteful hours searching the internet and racking my brain for an answer, but still haven’t gotten to the source. What I have learned is that the pattern is Persian in nature and based on a geometric system. Yes, a similar pattern is illustrated in the Grammar of Ornament (see above), but it’s not a dead ringer. So….if anyone has seen this pattern and can identify its origin…PLEASE…help my put my inner designer to rest!