When everyone expects you to be creative and full of ideas every second of the day, it’s exhausting. Many designers end up having an art block and feel worthless because of it. Here’s a hot take: people cannot pop out incredible ideas all the time, we are not wired this way. At least talking about people I know of.
I’ve had my share of self-doubts because my muse just wouldn’t come to me, so, I went the other way. When looking for inspiration, I found out that it’s a pretty common issue, and there are some methods to help with that.
Since then, I have been gathering ways and exercises that help designers get that creative juices flowing. And I am gonna share some of them with you. Let’s go.
Imagination and creativity exercises
Looking for inspiration, designers often look for something set, determined, that fits the medium of the project they work on. What I found useful is to train the brain instead, rewire it to become more polymathic.
The Upside-Down Circus.
Remember and write down stereotypes about, let’s say, circus: animals, a show, fun music, big pavilion, clowns. Now, let’s write down the antonyms, like Cirque du Soleil with no beasts, with ballads playing and immersive plot.
This is an exercise from Tina Seelig’s book ‘What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20’. The author claims that this simple practice helps to move away from the stereotypes of any business and create something truly innovative.
Tiny truths.
Choose a photo or a painting with a lot of small details. Sit back, set your timer for 10 minutes, and look at the picture with full concentration. Do not let your mind wander and look for associations. Your task is to memorize as many details as you can. When the timer goes off, look away and try to remember what you saw. After that, from time to time, try to get back to that memory of a picture.
An American photographer Minor White thinks that with every memory of the painting you’ll see more tiny truths, more valuable details. This is supposed to help you see something small on a bigger scale, and pay attention to details. As a bonus, you will get memory and visual thinking training.
Idea quota.
Michael Michalko offers to write down ideas about your work and creativity every day, without fail. Set yourself a quota, for example, 5 ideas a day. The generation of ideas will then quickly become a habit: and the more ideas you generate, the more good ones you’ll find in there.
“But creative ideas, like pearls, occur infrequently. So the sensible thing to do is to produce many ideas before we evaluate. Just as a good idea may stop you from going on to discover a great one, a great idea may stop you from discovering the right one.” — Michael Michalko.
How to come up with an idea
You know that feeling when you sit and stare on the white canvas and there is a need for an extremely creative idea that just won’t come? Yeah, frustrating isn’t it? Here’s how I fight with it.
Combine what’s uncombinable. Think of the two absolutely opposite things. Take a marshmallow for example — something sweet, cute, and overall sends off a pleasant vibe. Then think of something scary, enormous, and unpleasant — say, a cyborg that went out of control and kills people.
Now, you need to combine them somehow. Maybe marshmallows are the only thing that turns the cyborgs kind? Maybe people had to come up with a special gun that shoots marshmallows, and they run around shooting pink sweets into cyborgs’ mouths? Go crazy with your ideas and see what happens. It’s fun though :)
Hyperbolize. Take something small, a single marshmallow in our case. Single out its most prominent features, they are sweet and make people happy. What if there was a planet with sweets, where people would go to harvest marshmallows to later bring people happiness?
Downplay. Marshmallows under a microscope, what are they made of? Little pieces of joy, little rainbows the mission of which is to spread happiness.
How to understand the brand better?
Oftentimes I find myself struggling to come up with an idea just because I don’t understand the brand well enough. Especially if it’s a small startup and they don’t have any style yet, or I am in fact developing one for them.
What I find helpful in such cases is to personalize a brand, give it some character, personality. I use this scheme, which I found in a branding workbook from Gingersauce (cool PDF, very helpful).
I don’t usually spend too much time on it, or go about every point on the picture — just a few ones help me know in which direction to work.
After the analysis, I am left with something like this:
The brand looks like rugged jeans
It sounds like thunder
Its favorite phrase is “Nothing is impossible” (here you can use a slogan of the brand, or their mission statement).
It’s cold to the touch and smells like rain
It tastes like black chocolate
It is much easier now to see how their illustration would look like. Dark blues, greens, and blacks; mountains or woods scenery comes to mind; strong will and struggle overcoming at the center of the story. Well, at least this is how I personally see this.
If you liked the article let me know! Also, do not be hesitant to share your personal tips and tricks to stay creative at all times.
Until next time 👋🏻
