Exercise: Spider Diagrams
Exercise: Spider Diagrams
This exercise is designed to help me generate ideas more successfully by creating a spider diagram for a series of words, those words were.
- Seaside
- Childhood
- Angry
- Festival
I had to remember my own experiences with those words to help list certain: colours, adjectives, textures and subjects associated with those particular words. This is most of the time my go too first move when creating something so I was happy to learn and to polish those skills.
I went through and understood and highlighted the information given to me inside the project.
From experience, I think its definitely really important to rip apart an idea and really challenge it, what can happen is that you improve the idea or realise it wasn't as good as what you first thought. Usually, for me, I build upon that original idea by fixing objections. These could be things that wouldn't work physically, perhaps with materials or could be perceived differently by audiences. I often will come up with different logo ideas and think that I've found the one only to discover it doesn't reflect the company as well and so I take that idea and develop it further. I think brainstormings offers a time to really delve outside the box and come up with ideas that you wouldn't have initially thought of without this exercise. These ideas are often the culmination of ideas or just appear in your mind because you're fueling and focusing it.
I think allowing yourself to add personal observations to projects is so important, as a designer you have a knowledge bank of ideas from other projects that can be used again and again. These ideas aren't the ones that surface easy and are common to other people, I strive to create ideas that others won't have thought of, I hope that it'll make me stand out more as a creative professional and impress and surprise clients. To get to this stage though you have to empty your mind through brainstorming, even just this process alone can help trigger other ideas, it's like a chain reaction. Once ideas are on paper certain elements of those ideas will trigger other ideas and so on and so forth. Often I also will get another completely different idea or area to explore and that idea will sprout new different ideas.
My girlfriend bought me a book by Craig Oldham called "Oh sh*t what now", in that book it has a great commentary about ideas. In the book, he says that ideas will try and charm you and make you fall in love with them, it is so easy to fall head over heels with an idea and think they're the one. However, you must let that idea meet your friends, Originality, Execution, Media, Relevance, Sustainability and Content. That idea needs to get the approval from each friend before it can be considered the one. Basically, the idea needs to tick boxes and to find out if it does it needs to be under the microscope, if it doesn't tick one box figure out why and then use that to generate other ideas or methods to craft the original idea into the one.
I then went onto generating my spider diagrams.
I think this was a very eye-opening exercise. It highlighted to me how my brain works and how ideas come to me. When I originally wrote down the word in the middle of the page I had about 3 things in my mind however on almost all occasions ended up with a full page of ideas. They just kept coming to me, brainstorming is the best way forward.
The hardest out of all 4 was Anger, I think that because its an emotion there is fewer things to associate, it's also very subjective as different things make people angry. I didn't want to just list things that made me angry because that could go on forever really. I did think that because it was an emotion the first thing that came to mind was the colour red which was interesting, colour associations are a powerful thing within the mind.
I then went onto bringing my mind maps to other people and getting their personal take on it.
This exercise is designed to help me generate ideas more successfully by creating a spider diagram for a series of words, those words were.
- Seaside
- Childhood
- Angry
- Festival
I had to remember my own experiences with those words to help list certain: colours, adjectives, textures and subjects associated with those particular words. This is most of the time my go too first move when creating something so I was happy to learn and to polish those skills.
I went through and understood and highlighted the information given to me inside the project.
From experience, I think its definitely really important to rip apart an idea and really challenge it, what can happen is that you improve the idea or realise it wasn't as good as what you first thought. Usually, for me, I build upon that original idea by fixing objections. These could be things that wouldn't work physically, perhaps with materials or could be perceived differently by audiences. I often will come up with different logo ideas and think that I've found the one only to discover it doesn't reflect the company as well and so I take that idea and develop it further. I think brainstormings offers a time to really delve outside the box and come up with ideas that you wouldn't have initially thought of without this exercise. These ideas are often the culmination of ideas or just appear in your mind because you're fueling and focusing it.
I think allowing yourself to add personal observations to projects is so important, as a designer you have a knowledge bank of ideas from other projects that can be used again and again. These ideas aren't the ones that surface easy and are common to other people, I strive to create ideas that others won't have thought of, I hope that it'll make me stand out more as a creative professional and impress and surprise clients. To get to this stage though you have to empty your mind through brainstorming, even just this process alone can help trigger other ideas, it's like a chain reaction. Once ideas are on paper certain elements of those ideas will trigger other ideas and so on and so forth. Often I also will get another completely different idea or area to explore and that idea will sprout new different ideas.
My girlfriend bought me a book by Craig Oldham called "Oh sh*t what now", in that book it has a great commentary about ideas. In the book, he says that ideas will try and charm you and make you fall in love with them, it is so easy to fall head over heels with an idea and think they're the one. However, you must let that idea meet your friends, Originality, Execution, Media, Relevance, Sustainability and Content. That idea needs to get the approval from each friend before it can be considered the one. Basically, the idea needs to tick boxes and to find out if it does it needs to be under the microscope, if it doesn't tick one box figure out why and then use that to generate other ideas or methods to craft the original idea into the one.
I then went onto generating my spider diagrams.
I think this was a very eye-opening exercise. It highlighted to me how my brain works and how ideas come to me. When I originally wrote down the word in the middle of the page I had about 3 things in my mind however on almost all occasions ended up with a full page of ideas. They just kept coming to me, brainstorming is the best way forward.
The hardest out of all 4 was Anger, I think that because its an emotion there is fewer things to associate, it's also very subjective as different things make people angry. I didn't want to just list things that made me angry because that could go on forever really. I did think that because it was an emotion the first thing that came to mind was the colour red which was interesting, colour associations are a powerful thing within the mind.
I then went onto bringing my mind maps to other people and getting their personal take on it.
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