ITAP Lecture 7: Development of Creative Thought and Structure in Illustration and Graphic Art

Getting rid of assumptions

Approaching a problem with a completely open mind is one of the toughest things to do in my opinion when beginning a project. By approaching a problem with an open mind can help prevent your work becoming stale or predictable and it also causes us to push our boundaries as a visual communicator. Naturally we are constricted by the way we have been brought up through education, restricted through inhibitions and also by our routine way of working. It is all too easy to find a niece and become stuck there rather then broaden out. Using simple techniques when brain storming such as using simile’s, metaphor’s and analogies. These can help come up with different options of solutions, probably things that you may not naturally think of or even put together.

Restating Problems

A key ability to being a successful visual communicator is creating interesting and exciting work often produced in a unpredictable way. It is good to take a problem and look at it from a new angel and the results should be equally as fresh. Furthermore it is important not to simply run with the first idea you come to find but continue to explore ideas and you may find a far more successful creative and original concept.

Looking at things in a different light it can be a good idea to step away from the problem itself and use random triggers, different visual stimulus and maybe looking at an unrational aproach.

 A good method of working is to mind map or list ideas, but to keep pushing your self to find perhaps 50 – 75 ideas. The probability is that the first 30% will be the more obvious or predictable ideas, but as you continue the list and the longer the list gets the more obscure the results will be and quite likely that you will find a concept that would never have been thought of. Another way of doing this technique is one that I used as part of an advertising project aimed at finding the most creative response to the brief. Here instead of just one long list, we created an initial list of different concepts, themes, objects places etc which we then selected four things to explore further creating individual lists of seemingly random ideas. It was from this we then found a strong original idea to follow up.