David Sherwin - Creative workshop: 80 challenges to sharpen your design skills

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Dedication

For Mary

CONTENTS

Introduction

Difficult situations breed astonishing results.

Jeffrey Veen

Have you ever struggled to complete a design project on time? Or felt that having a tight deadline stifled your capacity for maximum creativity? This book is for you.

Within these pages, youll find eighty creative challenges to help you reach a breadth of innovative design solutions, in various media, within any set time period. By completing these challenges, youll round out your skills by exploring projects along the full continuum of design disciplines, from the bread and butter of branding and collateral to the wild world of advertising to the user-centered practices of creating interactive projects. Along the way, well take brief forays into wayfinding, editorial design, video and motion graphics, and many other areas of our continually expanding practice.

To aid you in conquering these challenges, Ill provide useful brainstorming techniques and strategies for success. By road-testing these techniques as you attempt each challenge, youll find new and more effective ways of solving tough design problems and bringing your solutions to life.

BECOMING MORE CREATIVETAKES PRACTICE

Designers are often encouraged to bluff their way through unfamiliar deliverables in order to bootstrap their way toward a stable career, and my experience was no different. My first decade as a designer was humbling. A typical day in the life looked like this:

Two fresh logo sketches for your new wine bar by tomorrow? Catalog cover designs for your cruise lines venture into South America? Home and secondary page user interface examples for a technology consulting web site by Friday? No problem. Ill figure things out before I collapse on my keyboard, exhausted, at 2:00 A.M.

During those years in the trenches, I discovered that:

Failure is a necessary componentof creativity.

Well-seasoned designers understand that resilience in the face of repeated failure is the only path to success. Improving as a designer requires us to consciously choose to explore novel territory as part of our daily work. David Kelley from IDEO calls this enlightened trial and error, and it is the best way to seek out a great result that fulfills your clients business need.

Process is more important thanthe final product.

As architect Matthew Frederick notes, Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop. Being aware of your working process as a designer and reshaping it to fit the problem presented to you is a lifelong practice that will define your career. However, dont forget what Mark Rolston of frog design says:

Topics Covered in This Book

Trying these eighty challenges will take you on a trip through most of todays prominent design disciplines. Theyre organized into the following categories:

FOUNDATION SKILLS

copywriting

design history

grid systems

illustration

paper engineering

photography

physical prototyping

research

typography

WORK DISCIPLINES

Advertising and Marketing

guerrilla tactics

online ads

out of home ads

print ads

posters

TV commercials

Branding

annual reports

collateral

identity development

product packaging

Editorial and Film

book covers

magazine layout

music packaging

film posters

Interactive Media

information architecture

interaction storyboarding

user interface design

Product Design

Store Design and Wayfinding

environmental graphics

retail store experiences

trade show booths

wayfinding

Type Design

Video and Motion Graphics

hand animation

storyboarding

Plans are no substitute for the real thing Process is a means to an end. Our purpose is to create.

Rote repetition rarely leads to deepdesign intuition.

Your design process consists of the living, breathing flow of actions that you takesome conscious, some unconsciousas part of solving a client problem. As you repeat similar types of design projects, you become more proficient in identifying which of these actions lead to a well-designed result. But we radically improve our skills when we are forced outside of our comfort zone and asked to solve problems that seem foreign, or use tools or methods that seem alien to us.

Youll never have enough time to workon a paid client project.

Having less time to work on a project can lead to more creative results, if youre smart about how you use that time. We often expend a good part of our projects bemoaning our lack of time to solve a client problem, rather than fully using our time to confront it. Deadlines come fast and furious, no matter whether you are a solo designer, work in-house at a company or have a role at a design firm or creative agency. Client deliverables will always verge outside your areas of expertise. A designers career is more like a marathon than a series of sprints, and maintaining a productive, yet creative pace is the only way youll stay sane.

Designers become more creative bylearning to access their intuition.

We become better designers when our design skills are grounded in intuition. One of my favorite designers, Paul Rand, said, The fundamental skill [of a designer] is talent. Talent is a rare commodity. Its all intuition. And you cant teach intuition. Thats true. You cant teach intuition in a classroom lecture. But you can become more intuitive by solving wildly divergent design problems in a disciplined manner.

UNDER CONSTRAINTS,CREATIVITY THRIVES

Completing the eighty challenges in this book and abiding by the unique constraints of each design problem will force you to confront your inner critic and improve your working habits in order to keep the pace, as well as develop a clearer sense of how to access your design intuition in the pursuit of more meaningful design concepts and visual executions. It will also teach you to embrace failure as part of your working process, and to become more confident in your capacity to create meaningful designs in any time frame.