Pro Motion Media Blog

When I began this jour­ney, I mis­tak­enly believed that it would be vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to define a process for cre­ativ­ity. After all each one of us is wired dif­fer­ently, our per­cep­tion and imag­i­na­tion is fil­tered through a myr­iad of events and expe­ri­ences that make us unique.  Add to this work­ing in a cre­ative indus­try where imag­i­na­tion and cre­ative flow need to be avail­able on tap, where do you begin??

For me it began with two books on logo design.

Logo Savvy is a com­bi­na­tion of case stud­ies form the top brand­ing agen­cies in the world and the in house processes used by WOW Brand­ing for nam­ing and form­ing brand strate­gies. The sec­ond book is ‘Design Mat­ters — Logos’ which is an extremely well writ­ten book that includes some excel­lent meth­ods for idea for­ma­tion and brain­storm­ing for logo cre­ation. So there it was, the rev­e­la­tion that although you can’t nec­es­sar­ily apply a process to imag­i­na­tion itself, it is pos­si­ble to have a process in place that pro­vides a frame­work for cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion to oper­ate in. Although the books men­tioned focus specif­i­cally on logo design, the inspi­ra­tion has been suf­fi­cient to research and derive frame­works that can be used for any design project.  I’m delib­er­ately skip­ping over a few details here as I believe that the inner work­ings of this part of the process help us to main­tain our ‘no house style’ proposal.

I’ll freely admit, some­times I’ll have a meet­ing with a client and have a very strong idea of what I’m going to pro­duce, in these cases I’ll make some quick sketches and pro­duce some­thing on the Mac ready to present. Other times it’s not so easy which is where the process comes into it’s own. Hav­ing a method­ol­ogy means that when faced with a brief and the prover­bial blank can­vas and equally blank mind, there’s a place to start and build from.  I’m also a true believer in start­ing with pen/pencil and paper, but I’d encour­age the use of sketch­ing and writ­ing by hand before com­mit­ting ideas to the com­puter.  I don’t know if it’s the phys­i­cal­ity of the mate­ri­als, the hand eye co-ordination or just my tra­di­tional back­ground kick­ing in but I firmly believe that putting pen to paper allows a greater free flow of ideas and pos­si­bil­i­ties. I also think it’s valu­able to be able to review your work­ings and thought processes. These don’t need to be great works of art, but being able to cap­ture a snap­shot of what’s in the minds eye helps to visu­alise the final ver­sion.
I find this process espe­cially valu­able when jug­gling mul­ti­ple projects as it makes pick­ing up the threads and the mind­set a lit­tle eas­ier.
It’s also dur­ing this part of the process that I’m most likely to pick up a use­ful tip or find that I need to learn a new tech­nique in the software.

To see exam­ple of our projects visit our Graphic Design Homepage.

Com­ments really welcome,

James