CreativeExercises

Creative Workshop: Time Machine

Creative Workshop: Time Machine

Have you ever struggled to complete a design project on time?

Or perhaps felt that a tight deadline stifled your capacity for maximum creativity?

I surely have, and the book Creative Workshop, which I have mentioned in earlier posts, is all about building skills to face this constant battle we have as designers.

Creating on a constant basis is what makes us improve.

Because it's easier said than done, not only I want to encourage you to put out imperfect work. I'll actually show you the process behind my exercises

Feeling the Mark

Feeling the Mark

I love drawing exercises and today I'm sharing some of them with you. What I like about them is that they impulse us to start from basics. Drawing, like most arts, is a result of practice and self improvement.

I consider mark making a development of a very unique, personal approach, it is an almost sensual process. The exercises below are built from the intention to feel and strengthen our drawing language, and they belong to the book Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern, which I have found extremely helpful and enjoyable. 

Creative Workshop: I'm Drawing a Blank

Creative Workshop: I'm Drawing a Blank

Besides the relevance of learning about theory I believe it is important to create blocks of time in which we allow ourselves to explore out of our comfort zone. This applies to any area where we would like to improve: drawing, painting, creating music, dancing, and of course, designing too is a result of practice.  

This week I re-encountered this awesome book that has been in my shelf for a while: Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills (also available for Kindle). The book presents a compilation of exercises that range from creating a typeface to designing a paper robot, and all of them within a time set period. 

Also, it is not strange to be surprised by tasks that are unfamiliar to us, tasks that present a problem that needs to be resolved as soon as possible. In moments of crisis we might better access our intuition as designers. Even though intuition is something that cannot be teached, we can become more intuitive by frequently solving wildly divergent design problems.