# finding your own style A random collection of quotes about finding your style. I personally think that it isn't that important to find your own style. A good designer needs to be a bit of a chameleon because each project and client are going to have different needs and visual responses. Many of my students seem to think it is important to find their own unique thing though. I do what I can to help minimize that desire. The first and most important goal is to do quality work. If you are doing quality work that responds to the particular creative challenge then the style will take care of itself. Maybe these quotes from thinkers smarter and more experienced than me will help disabuse the notion that you have to find your own style. --- "Don't worry about style. It will be expressed no matter what you do. Style is part of the way your brain is wired." —[Luke Sullivan](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/3067812435) "I never went out of my way to invent a style. I haven't got a style — I just draw and it's that way." —[Ralph Steadman](https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/60174446469) "The problem with art today: the artist believes he must find a style (or a schtick really) and defend it with his life. And if all the schticks are already taken, he must pull one out of his ass. He must find one, invent one, fabricate one, for he can be nothing if he cannot be original." —[Eddie Campbell](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/29284065) "'One of the problems for the great modern dancers is that they developed their own style,' which led to an overuse of the same muscle sets. A body needs balance and, as it ages, different ways to build strength and stamina." —[Twyla Tharp](https://t.co/n9G4nfYriS) "Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless…" —[Art Spiegelman](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/8051436248) "Self-plagiarism is style." —Alfred Hitchcock "The way to professional accomplishment: you have to demonstrate that you know something unique, that you can repeat, over, and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it… The model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success….Whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it." —[Milton Glaser](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/6564661369) "In our current cult of originality, the pressure is to have a personal style as soon as possible, and the classroom environments often have this mentality as well. Everyone is freaking out: "What's my style? What's my thing?" It's too much too fast. This race for originality has, over the years, spread from that future-goal timeline to just after college to (now) inside college itself. A safety zone no longer exists." —[Dash Shaw](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/234000475) "When I talk to young composers, I tell them, I know that you're all worried about finding your voice. Actually you're going to find your voice. By the time you're 30, you'll find it. But that's not the problem. The problem is getting rid of it." —[Philip Glass](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/magazine/philip-glass-and-beck-discuss-collaborating-on-rework.html) "Don't worry about a style. It will creep up on you and eventually you will have to undo it in order to go further." —[Gary Panter](https://href.li/?http://unbored.net/gary-panters-drawing-tips/) "Style is selection. These things all exist in the world. We don't invent anything, but we do look around and go towards the things that connect with something within us." —[John Patrick Shanley](https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/14148424113) "Artists; you do know, don't you, That your mistakes are your style." —[Jerry Saltz](https://www.instagram.com/p/CqinwPmJzbo/) "I always think of style as something that's the distance between what you want something to look like, and what your hand and brain make it look like unintentionally. And there's quite a gap there, and there's some interesting stuff in that gap." —[Daniel Clowes](https://www.tcj.com/i-feel-like-comics-needs-its-own-thing-an-interview-with-daniel-clowes/) "Originality, personality, or style can neither be encouraged nor prevented. Forget the matter." —[Lou Harrison](https://austinkleon.com/2021/04/22/cherish-conserve-consider-create/) "Comments about style sound strange to me. 'You work in this style or that style.' As if you had a choice in the matter. What you're doing is trying to stay alive! And continue! And not die! What you want is an experience of making something that you haven't seen before." —[Philip Guston](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/alifelived/258699734) "You heard the style / I think you missed the point" —Beastie Boys "Punk was not a style of music. It was the state of your mind." —[Mike Watt](https://t.co/wdjTbNC8oC) "Your style comes out of your attitude — what kind of a person you are, your personality, how you see things." —[Elmore Leonard](https://austinkleon.com/2021/04/06/getting-out-from-under-the-influence/) "A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth." —Zadie Smith "After 40 years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life." — [William Maxwell](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/01/arts/william-maxwell-91-author-and-legendary-editor-dies.html) --- tags: #creativity #process home: [[! creative process]]