ITAP: Critical Commentary

(Level 4) Lecture 7

This week I had a lecture on ‘Development of Creative Thought and Structure in Illustration and Graphic Art’. The key principles were:

1. Overcoming Mindsets

2. Getting Rid of Assumptions

3. Restating Problems

4. Developing Ideational Fluency

5. Managing a Creative Environment  

I would be discussing Principe’s 3 & 4 pacifically today.

Restating Problems

Restating your problems basically mean finding an interesting way to redefine the problem. Designers/artists often have to imaginatively challenge problems from different angles. The designers or artists develop an idea and within an idea, the possibility of designing the one original idea has variety of possibilities/outcomes.

If making a visual list of 50-75 ideas. The first 20-30 would be those you are most familiar with, but the bigger the list the greater the probability of achieving original insight as a result of the fusion of two or more ideas.

You could also think of ways of producing it not going for the obvious thinking outside the box or even breaking the rules of design.  For example my recent project I am working on at the moment is to redesign a guide for new students coming to BIAD next year. I considered using graphic illustration because it felt that playful, handmade to feel personal for the target audience which is students. Also thought of using colour because it’s more attractive and would catch the eye of my target audience rather than black & white. I wanted to look at other ways of presenting this information, for instance I could design a mini animation, print campaign or could be web-based this is me thinking outside the box and looking at the design from the audiences point of view.

Developing Ideational Fluency

Ideational fluency can be defined as easily produced ideas that fulfil certain requirements and this can be achieved through tools such as classification, brainstorming and mind mapping. Ideational fluency refers to the quantity and diversity, but not necessarily the quality of ideas.

Classification is where ideas can be organised by recognising both obvious as well as hidden common denominators, sometimes removing artificial boundaries and generating diverse connections.

Brainstorming is an opportunity to develop impulsive thinking and generate more ideas.

Mind Mapping allows you the ability to organise the thought processes as a network, encouraging associations between different thoughts.

Below is my final major project (FMP) brainstorm image from my sketchbook. When brainstorming it helped me drop down my idea when inspiration came.

                                             

Image from Kawsar Ahmed

Rob Ryan is a British artist who majority of work is papercutting and screenprinting. He had designed illustration for books, album covers, greeting cards and magazines.

When recently reading the October issue of Computer Arts magazine, I fell across a page on how to make ‘stunning papercuts the easy way’ and found it very useful in fact so much that I consider doing it. If you are interested in learning the technique it’s on page 64.

Written by Kawsar Ahmed

Image courtesy of http://mr--yen.blogspot.com/