I am a little late in updating the blog (as you probably noticed). In deciding what to talk about I thought, why not discuss what you do when you find you are stuck in a design or piece of art.
I recently worked on a design for a website. Updating a design is, to me, harder than designing from scratch. You see what the client has and have to expand, making it better. But what happens when the design they have isn't so bad? Of course you are given what the client wants (which in this case was way too much information) and have to come up with something to blow their mind. I started strong on the design, and when I hit the layout part of the content I hit a brick wall of pixels. My mind went blank and I just sat there staring alternately at my computer screen and sketch book. Asking my roommate and friend their opinion really didn't help much, though I appreciated their insight. I walked away from the project for a day and tried to go back, full of vigor only to look at what I had already and realize that the wall was still there.
For most of us we can't afford to have a block, a wall that is in our brain preventing us from even a bad idea. So what do you do to jump start your ideas again? Getting the creative juices flowing, as it were, can be really hard or pretty darn easy. Sometimes I walk away from the project, other times I will grab some markers or crayons and just do random doodles (which is how I came up with Fred in my Flash class, I should tell you about him someday). I have a plastic envelop which has clippings, papers, and all sorts of other things that I will go through when I am working on something. Sometimes it helps, other times all I do is waste a bit of time going through the fat file.
How do you get out of the block? Do you even experience it or is it something that is purely in my head? What do you do when you hit that wall of pixels or shall we call it the "wall of mental anguish"?
Well, one thing one of my instructors told us to do was to freewrite when we were preparing a paper. That meant anything, no matter how silly or off topic, we thought of, we wrote down. That way, eventually we could go back and wind our way full circle and get back to where we needed to be. I think something similar would work with your designs too. I'm not an artist and don't pretend to understand much of what you talk about here, but fighting the wall I know a lot about and that helps me a lot!
ReplyDeleteHope this helps!
I am going to have to post about Fred and my webpage design class. This might be something that requires pictures and captions.
ReplyDeleteI do keep a sketch book for doodling when I am having problems focusing on design, however there are days where I wish I had one for focusing on my day job :)