Exercise 4

Generating ideas

For this brief, I was provided with a selection of book-related sayings. The task was to generate lots of visual ideas and responses to these starting points. The brief specified that I must not discount any ideas at this point; it was important to be as imaginative as possible and explore all possibilities. As per the instructions, I used spider diagrams, thumbnails sketches, and annotations.

First, I wanted to spend about half an hour looking at all the sayings, one at a time. I used a black biro and simply drew what came to mind for each one. This gave me a sense of which sayings were sparking more ideas and providing the most inspiration.

From this, I discovered that I struggled to come up with much for ‘closed/open book’ and ‘by the book’, whereas I still had lots of ideas for ‘bookworms’ and ‘the oldest trick in the book’. I decided to take these two further and spent about an hour on each one, drawing whatever came into my head. I started seeing that one idea quickly lead to another idea, and I also found myself redrawing or refining images, but tried to stop myself doing this. I kept reminding myself of the brief and the fact that I wanted a wealth of ideas to critique later.

Bookworms

Below are the pages of my sketchbook filled with ideas linked to the phrase ‘bookworms’. This was a nice saying to explore because, not only could I consider the meaning of the phrase (a person who enjoys reading), I could also visually explore ‘books’ and ‘worms’ and how to combine all of these.

The oldest trick in the book

Here are the ideas I generated for the saying: ‘the oldest trick in the book’. Again, I took a similar approach in breaking down the phrase and considering visual ways of representing these concepts or terms. ‘Tricks’, ‘old’ and ‘books’ all combine to give a sense of the saying.

I found this task to be enjoyable, although I soon yearned to narrow down my ideas and select ones that were working best (as is probably evident from my refining too early on). I think, because I was so focused on producing lots of ideas, I did end up with a wealth of content to critique in the next task, but I definitely need to work on separating these processes a little more. It is so important to be free of expectation and restriction in this first stage of the creative process.