Creative Book Design- Exercise 4: 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.
Spending only 45 minutes on this task I found a struggle as I wanted to continue with more ideas or depth of certain sketches but I understand that the goal of this task was to explore initial ideas within a time frame. Instead of focusing (as I had initially planned) on one idea and expanding it, I found myself being inspired by the last idea for something relating to another phrase.
I began with writing words in a mind map, then sketching thumbnails and adding any notes to remind myself of the idea/concept I continued to add to the mind map and the thumbnails throughout the task.
I found myself immediately conscious whether the idea was ‘good or bad’ but continued with it anyway and look forward to critiquing and developing them in the next task.
