I jumped on the Eurostar on Friday excited to spend the weekend in Paris. The city on the Seine was the destination of my first overseas trip at 18, when I would have run into 100 different directions to experience foreign cultures, breathe, and take them in.
At the time, Paris and I did not quite get along. I was less versed in the language of Molière and the French are well known for preferring to be addressed in their own dialect.
Years passed and I took the opportunity to polish my French spending a semester at France Business School in the Southern region of Auvergne (near Lyon) thanks to one of those nifty Erasmus scholarships the European Union dishes out to its student members.
I speak French well enough now to live and (almost) work in the land of Molière if I so desired, however I still don’t feel Paris is 100% my scene and “Emily in Paris” is so not my character. Nevertheless, I fell in love with the French sense of conviviality, conversation, and community as I experienced it in my university days, when the entire cohort used to flock to the bistro-bar across the street for a couple of verres de vin au fin de la semaine.
It is in the name of this conviviality and more recent, pleasant memories of Paris that I boarded the Eurostar and found myself walking the halls of the Louvre this weekend. And just as I did when I was 18, visited the apartments of Napoleon III remembering how with tired feet I scoffed at their sight back in the day asking the group I was with “But why do we even have to see these apartments, they only belonged to Napoleon III”, pretty much like Emmanuel Macron scoffed at increasing the legal age of retirement a couple of weeks ago.
I digress, as this isn’t a post about Paris, the French, or the recent protests, which I saw none of during my weekend stay.
This is a post about how the things that inspire us, such as travelling, speaking foreign languages, and marvelling at art stay with us over time. About how they can give us a sense of direction and identity in addition to whatever sense of self we are deriving from our work.
How we should be actively pursuing these things outside of work at the very least to jolt our creativity and senses and “cleanse our souls”, as a former colleague once said about her fondness of painting.
How when you’re marvelling at the sculptures in Louvre’s Cour Marly, you’re getting new perspectives on creativity beyond the pixel boundaries of a graphic screen.
The groups of arts students that plonk their chairs and start sketching in front of masterpieces at the Louvre, the V&A, and – wait, I don’t actually recall chair-plonkers in New York museums, people there move too fast, make me wonder if design agencies shouldn’t be associating themselves more with these repositories of classic and modern art and sending their designers to work on briefs, plonked on chairs, at the foot of a Rodin or under a Pierre Paul rather than at rows of perfectly aligned screens in a rented office space somewhere in, let’s say, East London (this is not a dig, this is a for-instance).
Perhaps graphic design schools support this practice while students are working towards their degrees, however the dozen agencies I have worked in have never practiced or instituted the practice of regularly sending their designers to find inspiration or come up with a response to a design brief in a gallery or a museum.
I wonder if this could be the next flex in the age of hybrid working, a nod to the fact that graphic design, art, and culture have always been intertwined. A sort of nod to the fact that the times I stood in design meetings at work, breathing stopped, jaw dropped while staring at the work being shared on screen, I seriously thought Adam was re-created and a design God was born.
Shut up, you witch, I hear CDs say.
Bof.
Irina Gheorghe 
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