Jen, I love this post. I really enjoyed the talks and found
them insightful and also very reassuring. I often start a project feeling as
overwhelmed as I am excited. Often, I feel like am staring at this big, complicated task
and I have no idea where to begin or how I will ever come up with the perfect
solution.
My creative process? Here it goes. I am not an incredibly
neat person, so I find this odd – but I’ve got to have a really clean and
organized workspace before I feel like I can get started. It’s a weird
compulsion – my space has got to be neat and pretty, or something, ha ha. Once I stop procrastinating, the first thing I
do is scribble tons of words that come to mind with what I am trying to
communicate in a design. I sketch a lot
(which always look terrible because I cannot draw) and always hit Pinterest or
even tumblr for inspiration, not only design ideas, but colors and texture as well.
I’ve always been a researcher and my educational background is in strategic
communication, so trying to understand the root of any design problem is
important to me. This equals lots of googling, reading, etc. I can almost never just start digitally designing; I’ve got to
do lots of pencil-to-paper exploration first. I used mood boards for the first
time in Words & Images, and actually found them to be very helpful.
Once I (finally) get started on the computer, this is where I get in
that design flow zone. Unfortunately, I
find that I am most creative late at night, which doesn’t exactly mesh well
with working full-time or enjoying the morning hours most on the weekends.
Nevertheless, my process usually finds me staying up into the late hours of the
night obsessing over details, getting frustrated, overwhelmed, excited and so
on. I pinned this on Pinterest a while back, and think it so accurately
describes what I suspect is many people’s creative process (excuse the language):
Once I have something or a few version that I love, I have to walk away for a
while – even if it is just an hour to come back with fresh eyes. I usually ask
my husband (who does not have a design background) what he thinks/if what I am going for works through his view and decide if I need to come up with more or better solutions than the several I have ended up with. When I need to start over, it is, as Amy warned, hard to let go of the idea I spent so much time developing. I don't know that I really have a set way of dealing with this - I feel like it just comes from a lot of deleting, deconstructing, looking at inspiration pieces again, and moving elements around on screen and getting re-inspired this way. A lot of times I will end up with something that is completely different than my intention that way.
Bob Shelley, a logo designer, came and spoke in my Design-Business Link class last fall and said his process involves taping all his sketches to a wall and just studying them- even the ideas he hated. This helped him to come up with new and better solutions. He would visually group them, remove, move around, and sketched more while staring at the wall. He'd leave it up during his whole design process. He also said different music influenced his process. Although I almost always design with music on, I haven't tried to use this exact method of sketch posting but I think it would be a great way to flesh out ideas no matter the design phase.
Again, great post- I guess I kind of rambled here. I will definitely be watching the full length talk!
