Generating ideas

Use one or more of the following book related sayings as a starting point to generate visual ideas and responses:

• Bookworms
• A closed/open book
• The oldest trick in the book
• You can’t judge a book by its cover
• In someone’s good/bad books
• By the book

During this early formative stage, aim to be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal merit. Let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations. Record your thought processes and ideas using thumbnail sketches, spidergrams and annotations.

Thumbnail sketches are a way of recording ideas through quick pen or pencil line drawings. The quality of the drawing is not important; a drawing of a person does not need to be anatomically accurate, for example. The drawing serves as a visual reminder to you of a fleeting idea. Aim to make thumbnail drawings in the same quick way that you make short written annotations – keeping up with the flow of your ideas. Draw a range of visual and conceptual possibilities using the book sayings as your starting point. Aim to spend 45 minutes working on this, generating as much content, potential ideas, thumbnails, visual metaphors or imagined books as possible.

Thumbnails can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Thumbnail sketches, along with annotations, are a good starting point to begin exploring these aspects.

Choices

I picked a couple of the titles to play with – You can’t judge a book by its cover and The oldest trick in the book. 

As this was meant to be a quick exercise I got straight into mind-mapping and sketching out a few ideas on the iPad using Procreate.

This one seemed to easier to generate than the next. I think by spending more time on the exercise more ideas may have been possible.

The second verbal cue I found harder than the first. The mind-mapping didn’t generate as many ideas but I felt that the thumbnails were better then the first lot, but this could be because I spent more time on these.

Reflection

This exercise refreshed some of the skills covered in previous modules. Generating ideas quickly is an effort for me as I do tend to mull things over before commiting. The 45 minute time limit really makes you concentrate and forces you to work quickly and put any and all of your ideas onto paper. I find mind-mapping is a useful tool to generate ideas that aren’t obvious and can be on a tangent to the original brief which can make the end product a lot more interesting.