Finamore Design

There are many dif­fer­ent the­o­ries on how to come up with cre­ative ideas. The two main ideas are:

1.) You have it or you don’t, and
2.) there is a sci­en­tific step-by-step method that any­one can learn.

I believe in the lat­ter. I believe that there are seven steps in the process of devel­op­ing cre­ative ideas:

Define the prob­lem
Spon­ta­neous Tri­als
Research
Brain­storm­ing
Refine
Resolution

The more you know about the sub­ject of the mat­ter and the more you do this the eas­ier and quicker the process becomes. For exam­ple, if you are work­ing on a project for a client who you’ve been work­ing with for, say, 10 years. You have prob­a­bly already done so much research that not much more will be needed. And if the client already knows how to fill out a design brief and is good at defin­ing the prob­lem, there are chances that you can just skip straight to step 4. For the time being I will pre­tend you have never done this before and go through each step in detail for you.

Definition/Recognition of the Prob­lem
(aka: The Design Brief)
This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant part of the process. Not know what is needed will always lead to cer­tain fail­ure. In this step you need to answer the fol­low­ing ques­tions with as much detail as possible:

What are the objectives/requirements of the project
How do these relate to the com­pany posi­tion­ing?
Define of how achieve­ment and goals will be mea­sured.
Define bud­gets and time­frame
Define, char­ac­ter­ize and pri­or­i­tize the tar­get audi­ence?
(Keep in mind that it is impos­si­ble sell to every­one)
Are there styl­is­tic pref­er­ences? (Pre-existing brand image)
Explain inter­nal approval process

Spon­ta­neous Tri­als
in this step you need to quickly jot down your ini­tial thoughts & impres­sions based on the answers to the ques­tions above. These should be rapid sketches with a few words to describe your thoughts. This exer­cise acti­vates the visu­al­iza­tion of thoughts rather than detailed con­cen­tra­tion on a sin­gle con­cept, which is where most peo­ple get stuck when try­ing to come up with a cre­ative idea.

Research (text, image, sound, etc)
Back up your ini­tial ideas with facts. Go to the library, the book­store, search on the inter­net, talk to peo­ple in the indus­try that you are research­ing, cre­ate a sur­vey. You are doing all of this to find new infor­ma­tion that you didn’t pre­vi­ously know.Once you have col­lected your infor­ma­tion go through it again and orga­nize it. Put the infor­ma­tion into an out­line form, cat­e­go­riz­ing the infor­ma­tion. Write a brief based on the infor­ma­tion you col­lected for your own use.

Brain­storm­ing
Now that you have sci­en­tific data from your research, com­bine it with your ini­tial impres­sions to cre­ate new con­clu­sions. Make as many thumb­nail sketches (small 2×3 inch draw­ings with pen­cil on paper) as you can of a vari­ety of these combinations.

Try it larger, Try it smaller, Repeat it, make it the only image, Make it black & white, make it one color, make it two color, make it full color, Screen the type, Screen the back­ground, Shadow it, Crop it, Out­line it, Change the type style, Look at it in a mir­ror, look at it upside down, look at it upside down and in the mir­ror, Make it ele­gant, Make it bold, Fill it, Use more white space, Use straight lines, use hand drawn lines, use thin lines, use thick lines, Use bor­ders, Bleed it, Reverse it, Empha­size it, Extend it, Con­dense it, Use illus­tra­tions, Use pho­tos, Use symbols/icons, empha­size the type, cut it up and rearrange it, try it flat, try it three dimen­sional, try a tex­ture, try a pat­tern, con­nect them, over­lap them, space them, make them tight, do it free­hand, try one you know no one will like, redo the one you know they will, try some­thing far out, be con­ser­v­a­tive, be for­mal, be wild, be funny, be seri­ous, be weird, be ugly, be pretty.

Ana­lyze your new com­bi­na­tions to see which direc­tions you would like to fol­low. Some­times new ideas spawn from a com­bi­na­tion of two or more pre­vi­ous ideas. If this hap­pens is more research needed? If so, go back to step three. Don’t expect mind blow­ing cre­ative insight on the first round. Some­times it is best to back burner the project at this time and go to the movies. Dis­tract­ing your con­scious mind from the task at hand allows your sub­con­scious to work on it for a while. Carry a note­book with you wher­ever you go. You never know when insight will strike. If you don’t have a means to write it down imme­di­ately, it maybe lost for­ever. Believe me, this has hap­pened to me many times.

Refine
Once you have a few ideas that you really like, tighten them up. Start work­ing on the visual and ver­bal con­tent. Think about what you really need to show or say and make deci­sions involv­ing visual rela­tion­ships, mate­ri­als, etc.

Res­o­lu­tion
When you finally got it nar­rowed down to the one that baoth you and the client love it is time to pro­duc­tion the final piece.

Con­grat­u­la­tions! You are creative!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 8:39 am and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.