I was reading an article called ‘Beat the Creative Block’ in this months issue of .net magazine. Numerous designers were talking about how they inspire themselves and others in their company, so I thought I’d talk about what inspires toggle beyond books and magazines.
I think it is very easy to become over saturated. I read design magazines, I subsribe to design feeds, our office is full of books, we have posters on the walls and I collect lots of things that inspire me. I feel that looking for inspiration in these places can sometimes be part of the problem. You are bombarded with nice typography, great layouts, colour schemes and fantastic ideas. This gets your creative juices flowing and you start to think about all the little elements you want to add to your final solution. But no matter how hard you try to shoe horn them all in, they just don’t fit.
Talking
Sitting silently at our mac with our tunnel vision hats on not suprisingly doesn’t do much good. When we get a new brief, we’ll talk about the project, our ideas and usually come up with ideas we wouldn’t have thought of if we’d just sat in silence. Sometimes I can be talking about something I am having difficulty with and from doing that I can end up answering my questions I didn’t think I had the answer to.
Doing something else
…even if it’s just answering emails. We often find having a short break and doing something else for a while gives us a fresh perspective on what we are doing.
We have been doing some branding for a natural body care site we will be launching very soon. We had done plenty of brain storming, sketched, looked in plenty of books but didn’t feel like we had quite arrived at our solution. At the weekend when I was in the shower that I noticed the way some some soap suds formed on a bar of soap. Seeing this then gave me some ideas and we went and created the final brand.
Eating
toggle loves eating. If we get stuck, we will grab some food – usually Cadburys buttons from the local shop :) Taking time out to feed our brains seems to work wonders for producing ideas.
Walking
We are lucky enough to have the River Thames at the back of the office. Not only a great place to eat lunch but also a great place to go for some ‘thinking space’.
Sketching
We think sketchbooks are a great dumping ground for ideas. I think it gives you a different kind of freedom than you get from the computer because it’s a quick fire round of ideas. By looking at these ideas in their most basic form, you get a better idea of whether it is going to work or not. I think jumping into Photoshop too early can lead to more focus being placed on colours and effects rather than the actual idea.
Moodboards
Moodboards are great guides for a brief becuase they stop you going too far off from where you need to be. This goes back to what I said earlier about becoming saturdated with ideas. It can be quite easy to get carried away and lose sight of what is really appropriate; moodboards are a nice visual reminder of where you need to be.
Having a process
Processes are probably one of the most important aspects in design and they don’t have to limit your creativity. Having a process means you have all of the key elements you need in place. For example, when we design websites, we create tone of voice boards, site maps, work out what type of content will be going on the site – video, plain text, images etc. Once we have this information we start to create wireframes. All of these steps ensure we have really thought about the funcationality of the site. After we have got this right we move onto the design, colours schemes, imagery and typography. Working in this way means we don’t leave anything out and we have a site that works the way it needs to as well as looking great.
What are your tips for creative block?