In this post I’ll describe our very simple creative process. But before I do, I’d like you to read this simple and yet very interesting point of view expressed by Quian Quian, chinese designer, in his profile at the Apple’s PRO website:
Art or Design?
Fine art is fundamentally different from design for advertising or marketing. Although they may look similar, their purposes are not the same.
When you do your own work, it’s your own point of view. It’s how you see the world, your own perspective on things reflected in the artwork. But with advertising or marketing, you’re helping other people get their points of view across. You’re just an interpreter.
To me, that’s the fundamental difference between designers and artists. You speak for yourself, or you speak for someone else. They’re separate things, but I think I can do both. They don’t really conflict, as long as you know what’s right and wrong!
Our creative process is basically, but not purely, intuitive. Intuition is our subjective-self (is that correct?) speaking and if we let it loose, without any boundaries, it can go too far, ruining a design project by making it out of purpose and totally inadequate.
In a comercial design project, in order to achieve concrete results, we must adequate our creative power to suit a client and it’s audience needs.
In a fine art project we have to let our subjective-self loose and encourage it to speak out loud. But in commercial design it is dangerous and to prevent that we set some boundaries.
But what are those boundaries? They must be well determined on a meeting (or several ones) with the client and in posterior researches. They can be: the communication target, audience and client profiles, client purposes, competitors, business visual identity, client marketing positioning etc.
Barbara and I always have a talk after all client meetings just to set these limits, which we call creative platform and, once set, we let it go. Let our intuition, our little angel speak freely.
At the end of the whole layout process, which can take a long time to be accomplished, before we decide anything, we check if the creative results are still within the commercial limits imposed by the creative platform.
It always works. The sun always shines after a storm.
Another very interesting point of view about creative process came from John Paul Caponigro. He describes 5 steps that can help us to enhance our creativity.
Learn to be more creative in 5 steps:
1 – acknowledge you’re creative and commit yourself to be more creative;
2 – identify your habits and then consistently and systematically challenge your habits;
3 – become more versatile by expanding your technical and perceptual skill sets;
4 – study ways that other people are creative, practice and adapt these ways to suit your needs;
5 – place yourself into stimulating environments. That will prompt you to generate more work and new ideas.
Keep on creating. The world needs it.
Best wishes.
