Personally, I often find it hard to come up with an idea for a design to help keep my creative juices flowing and my portfolio up to date. Over the last few days I’ve been brainstorming ways to come up with my own design briefs that are not only going to help me gain content for my portfolio, but also give me experience of trying new techniques or areas of design.
Here are my suggestions. I’d love to hear of ways that help you to keep creatively active via a quick and easy comment at the end.
Keep a Sketchbook
This is a no brainer really but I’ve listed it anyway because it’s fundamental. Any designer who doesn’t keep a sketchbook or at least some way of scribbling down ideas or notes is surely doomed to fail. Inspiration has a habit of striking when you’re least expecting it so be sure to have one to hand to make a note or quick sketch of that idea before it’s lost in the recesses of your mind. Going back and looking over your random doodles or sketches at a later date can often jump start fresh ideas that you can expand on and work into a finished idea.
Rebrand a famous company
How would you have designed the now infamous ‘Google’ logo if it had been you that were tasked with branding this little known company back in the day? Would you have gone for the mis-matched colour scheme? Which typeface would you have used? See what you can come up with.
Redesign poorly designed content
How many times have you looked at a generic-looking flyer that’s dropped through your letterbox advertising a company, a local restaurant or takeaway for example? Now how many times have you thought to yourself “I could do better than that!”? Maybe you should. Perhaps you could even offer the finished design as a template to be sold via your site or modified to fit someone’s needs, for a small fee of course.
Work for a non-profit organisation
Approaching a local charity organisation with an offer to lend your expertise will more than likely see you helping out in some form or another. Whilst it’s likely in this day and age that they will have a website online, they are unlikely to have the funds available to pay a web professional to create a slick, modern and valid site, hence the likelihood that it will look like it’s been written in html using notepad with none-CSS ‘hard-coded’ styling.
If you’re a web designer, perhaps offer to design a simple, yet impressive site than can easily be modified and expanded by someone who knows what they’re doing.
Working with charities is fantastic as it allows you to help others, whilst doing something that can also benefit you. Plus you never know who else will be working with the charity, or which contacts you will make. Be sure to carry a few business cards with you just in case.
Work through tutorials
This is probably one of the best ways to kick-start inspiration. Working through tutorials created by other designers helps you to keep up to date with the current design trends and learn the techniques to create pieces in that style. Of course, don’t follow them step for step, setting for setting. Allow your own creativity to take over and lead the artistic direction of the piece you’re creating. Take a look at the Computer Arts website for fantastic downloadable design and illustration tutorials.
Recreate pieces from a famous artist
This is a technique that has been used by several famous artists, and allows you to pay homage to someone you admire in the highest possible form, whilst at the same time demonstrating your personal style and artistic ability. Salvador Dali painted the classic ‘Temptation of St Anthony‘ in 1946 which was emulated many years later by Peter Goodfellow for his illustration ‘Parson Nathaniel‘ that featured inside the CD booklet for Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of ‘The War of the Worlds’.
Temptation of St Anthony’ | Copyright Salvador Dali
‘Parson Nathaniel’ | Copyright Peter Goodfellow (Courtesy of…)
Recreate your earlier designs
As the current design trends change and you gain experience, you’ll find that many of your older designs will be replaced by more current and interesting pieces to prevent your portfolio becoming outdated. Instead of letting these pieces simply sit dormant on your web server, why not breathe new life into them by recreating them in a fresh, new style? To reference Dali again, he recreated his classic ‘The Persistence of Memory‘ in the form of ‘The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory‘, which is effectively the same image, but re-imagined in an almost cubist style.
‘The Persistence of Memory’ & ‘Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory’ | Copyright Salvador Dali
Create Modern Day Equivalents
Why not take a now unused concept and re-imagine it for the modern day? Take for example classic WWII propaganda posters that were designed to sway civilians opinions of the enemy and provide advice on what to do in emergency situations. Nowadays, ‘public service’ posters generally tend to warn you about eating too much salt or contracting chlamydia, but imagine posters were still used as one of the primary forms of providing important and invaluable information or striking fear into the population, as opposed to TV broadcasts and websites. What would these posters look like when created with contemporary techniques in a modern style?
Alex Varanese recently used a similar concept to create several vintage advertisements for modern day gadgets as though they were invented in 1977. Take a look at these, they’re spectacular.
Listen to Music
This is a technique I’m particularly fond of. Pop on some headphones, turn it up to 11 and listen to some of your favourite music in your own little world. Get away from things, zone out and let your imagination run free. It’s amazing how music can affect your emotion, especially if that particular song is personal to you. Listen to the lyrics and the emotion in the music. What images do they conjure up in your head? Jot them down and expand on them.
Try something new
Perhaps THE best way to increase your skills, portfolio and experience is to try something new. Step out of your comfort zone and push yourself to expand. Experiment with new, different or lesser known software packages. Instead of creating 3D typography in a 3D software package, why not attempt to create it in real life from cardboard, paper, random objects and photograph it? Maybe it will grow into a whole typeface that you can use solely for your own work? Perhaps create a poster as a giant card stencil that can be held up to a wall and spray-painted over to create a lasting (literally) effect? Try new ideas, experiment, and above all, HAVE FUN!
Have you used any of these techniques? Will you be trying them out? Do you have a trick that helps you overcome a creative block? Be sure to let us know with a comment!
Responses
This can apply to my portfolio as a photographer- but really interested as my friend has just finished a media course in Portsmouth and tips about getting her portfolio together are welcome- Cheers Grant
Funny you should mention that, I came up with the idea for redesigning bad leaflets after several were posted through my girlfriend’s student house in Portsmouth! I happened to notice that we’d get about 2 or 3 a day, and they were all very similar.