Vasil Velchev explains:
By this adage, I mean that imagination is the true starting point of meaningful design. Skills, education, and experience are undeniably important. They shape our hands, discipline our thinking, and give us the tools to execute ideas with precision and clarity. Lifelong learning refines our abilities, and experience teaches us what works and what fails. None of this should be underestimated. However, these elements alone are not enough to create something genuinely new. Design that merely rearranges what already exists may be competent, even beautiful, but it is not transformative. A highly skilled artist can paint a breathtaking landscape, yet the source of that beauty already existed in nature. The artist translates reality onto a canvas, but does not invent a new world. True design innovation begins when we are no longer limited to what we see around us, but dare to imagine what has never been seen before. Imagination allows designers to move beyond imitation. It is the ability to mentally travel into unexplored spaces, to envision forms, systems, emotions, and experiences that do not yet exist in the physical world. While skills determine how well something is executed, imagination determines what is worth executing in the first place. Without imagination, design risks becoming repetitive, predictable, and constrained by existing references. In the field of design, significance comes from originality. To create unseen things, a designer must possess a rich inner world — one that is not bound by trends, conventions, or existing solutions. Imagination is what allows a designer to connect unrelated ideas, to challenge assumptions, and to construct entirely new visual or conceptual realities. It is what opens doors to worlds not everyone can access or even perceive. This adage emphasizes that imagination is not a decorative addition to design; it is its core. Skills make ideas possible, experience makes them efficient, but imagination makes them meaningful. Design truly begins at the moment when imagination dares to go further than reality has already gone.