Creative Workshop

80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills

David Sherwin

• Publisher: HOW Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781440319402
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Grafikdesign

Have you ever struggled to complete a design project on time? Or felt that having a tight deadline stifled your capacity for maximum creativity? If so, then this book is for you.Within these pages, you'll find 80 creative challenges that will help you achieve a breadth of stronger design solutions, in various media, within any set time period. Exercises range from creating a typeface in an hour to designing a paper robot in an afternoon to designing web pages and other interactive experiences. Each exercise includes compelling visual solutions from other designers and background stories to help you increase your capacity to innovate. Creative Workshop also includes useful brainstorming techniques and wisdom from some of today's top designers. By road-testing these techniques as you attempt each challenge, you'll find new and more effective ways to solve tough design problems and bring your solutions to vibrant life.

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, you’ll 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, you’ll 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, we’ll 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, I’ll provide useful brainstorming techniques and strategies for success. By road-testing these techniques as you attempt each challenge, you’ll find new and more effective ways of solving tough design problems and bringing your solutions to life.

BECOMING MORE CREATIVE TAKES 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 line’s venture into South America? Home and secondary page user interface examples for a technology consulting web site by Friday? No problem. I’ll 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 component of 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 client’s business need.

Process is more important than the 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, don’t 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 today’s prominent design disciplines. They’re 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 deep design intuition.

Your design process consists of the living, breathing flow of actions that you take—some conscious, some unconscious—as 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.

You’ll never have enough time to work on a paid client project.

Having less time to work on a project can lead to more creative results, if you’re 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 designer’s career is more like a marathon than a series of sprints, and maintaining a productive, yet creative pace is the only way you’ll stay sane.

Designers become more creative by learning 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. It’s all intuition. And you can’t teach intuition.” That’s true. You can’t 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.

These are worthwhile goals for anyone seeking a long-term career in design. Rather than being endlessly driven by the fear that you may not have enough talent to be the next über-designer of the century, you can be confident that you have the necessary skills to solve a greater breadth of design problems.

HOW TO COMPLETE A CHALLENGE

Getting Started

Before diving into solving a challenge, read it carefully. They’ve been crafted to test your design skills regarding everything from visual aesthetics to nuanced business strategy to product innovation. You may need to conduct research before you can complete the challenges in the last third of the book.

What Tools Will You Use?

Here are some of the tools you can use when executing these creative challenges:

PRODUCTION TOOLS

black marker

colored markers and pencils

colored paper

craft knife

cutting mat

glue

needle and thread

pencils

ruler

tracing paper

transparent tape

DIGITAL TOOLS

digital camera or mobile device

visual design software, such as

Adobe Creative Suite

About the Time Limit

Each challenge includes a time limit for how long you can spend on idea generation. Within this time limit, you should be exploring a range of ideas with pencil sketches. Working with pencil and paper is the fastest way to land on a direction for a com...