The Art of Deconstruction
I’ve been a creative professional for over 15 years working in branding, advertising, and design. With every project I’ve been a part of, I’m presented with new challenges I’ve never faced before. Needless to say, creative problem-solving has been the most common theme of my career.
One of the most valuable approaches to my work has been The Art of Deconstruction. This method helps me rapidly develop new skills and techniques to meet the demand of just about anything; like this interactive music video I created for Coldplay, or this viral video I made on YouTube that’s amassed over 3 million views.
I share the above two examples not to flex, but to tell you that I didn’t have the tools or knowledge before I started those projects. Instead, I had a meticulous approach to dissecting similar examples out there and applying what I learned directly to my work.
In short: I figured it out
My goal in this article is to share this process with you so you can develop your analytical lens to break down, understand, and learn from the success of others before you.
Here is the Art of Deconstruction in 5 Steps
1. Identify the goal
2. Research the subject and platform
3. Deconstruct, Analyze, & Understand
4. Emulate & Apply
5. Improve Upon
1. Identify Your Goal
What do you want to do? It’s very important to identify your goal before you start anything. (I talk all about this in another article.) This will help you hyper-focus, save time, and give you a clear filter to help you evaluate your efforts
Here are a Few Examples of Goals:
- Take great portrait photos
- Paint like an Impressionist
- Remodel my home office
- Give a presentation
2. Research
Find the top performers or best examples on a subject and particular platform.
- Who else has done this before?
- What do you like?
- What does everyone else like?
- What metrics are valuable to measure?
Once you’ve done a deep dive and can pick up on trends and patterns, select the cream of the crop. Pick the top 3-5 examples and include at least one anomaly—the example that performs as well as the rest, but breaks the common threads that link the others together. Anomalies will help to challenge the conclusions you might have from your findings to help you form a better hypothesis moving forward.
3. Deconstruct, Analyze, & Understand
If you’ve gone to art school, you might be familiar with the “masterwork copy” assignment. You take a popular piece of art and simply copy it. Stroke by stroke. Color to color. The purpose is to help students develop their skills quickly by understanding how the masters made such great pieces of art. Through this process, they train their eyes on how to see and their hands how to make. Students add new tools to their toolbox as they solve the challenges of their own work.
Whenever I Seek To Understand The Success Of Something, I Ask Myself A Few Questions:
- What are the main components and ingredients that make this up?
- What specific attributes make it effective?
- How did the person make it?
- How would you go about making that?
If We Were To Apply This Line Of Questioning To A Van Gogh Painting, You Might Analyze It This Way:
- The main components that make this up: the subject, Van Gogh, slightly off-center of the frame. He’s facing us 3/4 and is lit with a single key light.
- What makes it effective (beautiful): its organized rhythmic brush strokes, subtle muted split-complementary color palette, and high contrast at its focal point: his eyes and expression.
- How did he make it: Using oil paints, Van Gogh created his self-portrait using repeating patterns of brushstrokes that follow the contours of the shapes of the subject.
Become A Reverse Engineer
Being able to reverse engineer something is one of the most effective ways to understand how great things are made and why they work. This is The Art of Deconstruction and can be applied to anything:
- A dish from a Michelin star restaurant can be broken down into raw ingredients, seasoning, and cooking techniques.
- When studying a successful business, you can research their industry, the need they fill for their consumers, and their perceived brand in the marketplace.
- With a beautiful website, you can take note of the colors, typography, and hierarchy. You can even open the page source, and see every line of code it took to build it.
- When watching a film, you can break down the story arc, its characters, themes, cinematography, visual effects, and editing style.
- For comedy, you can analyze a standup artist’s jokes: their stories, cadence, and method of delivery.
4. Emulate & Apply
When you can decode the ingredients that makeup something great, you demystify its genius into elements you can understand. From there, you can begin to emulate and adopt these pieces into your own work.
