General Principles
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Design problems are really design opportunities, an opportunity to explore inherently imperfect solutions to the problem.
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Create what you, yourself would consume, use or find meaningful.
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Remember: Artforms are nothing but substance given meaning by humans. Strip away the meaning we imbue them and they are nothing but words on a page, or sounds, or pixels on a screen.
- Thus, break creative works down to their simple parts. They are not complicated in so far as the ability to have a keen aesthetic sense and direction.
- Art is good in so much as it fulfills or conveys something meaningful to the audience.
- Art shouldn’t aim to be real, but rather to provide an experience.
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Remember: There is no such thing as original.
- The trick to making something “original” is to take inspiration, to learn the history of the craft.
- Understand the design decisions of others. While we may take inspiration from others, when doing so take note of why those design or aesthetic decisions were made. 1
- Give me the same thing but different.
- TomSka’s Guide to Plagiarism . Taking “inspiration” can come in a sliding scale
- No Correlation from the Work
- Parallel Thinking - Coming up with the same idea independently
- Subconscious Appropriation - Consuming the source and, without realizing it, applying it to one’s own work
- Inspiration - Copying one aspect of a work into something vaguely related
- Influence - Copying an entire ethos or approach to creation into one’s work
- Reference - Overtly calling out the source material that was copied
- Allusion - Calling out the source material in some obscure manner (and trying to hide it intentionally)
- Derivative - Copying the creative idea or concept of the source work, subject to a “new” execution
- Imitative - Copying the creative concept and execution of the source work
- Cloning - Copying the exact work, exactly how it was done
- Freebooting - Stealing the source work directly and passing it off as one’s own.
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Inspiration comes from everywhere else. Which is to say, we may imitate others but we cannot imitate inspiration. Inspiration comes from one’s own perspective and how one applies that perspective to their art. 2
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Use multiple layers of meaning — that is, touch on many dimensions of life.
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At our core, we want to be able to make our own living worlds. Yet, the beautiful arises when we let nature takes its course than be heavy-handed in our design.
The Process
The Workflow
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The best way to get started is to just start. You needn’t wait for inspiration to hit. Keep going by creating what you would enjoy.
- The best way to start is to have a goal in mind. Ask — what do you want to accomplish with the creative work?
- Do something that is outside your comfort zone This is the only way to get better since it primes your brain to find your mistakes.
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All creative endeavors benefit from an iterative design process 3. Drafts do not have to be perfect the first time around, and circumstances change. A creative output is as emergent as it is creative, and it is about both inclusion and exclusion 4
- Design with intent in mind.
- An iterative approach: When the solution becomes unclear, ask a simpler question, again and again until a point of understanding is reached.
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In actualizing a creative output, is natural and even preferred to start from broad to specific 5 6)
The Components
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Much of creative endeavors involves setting and responding to expectations— that rooted in perceived and actual needs. To provide an experience for the audience is to play with their expectations:
- Use contrast to highlight certain qualities. Play to the salience bias.
- Beware too jarring a contrast.
- Use counterpoints to highlight certain qualities. They respond to the aesthetic qualities of the piece.
- Beware counterpoints that only cause clutter.
- Use Symbolism to give more weight to the experience (see here).
- Beware inappropriate, misaligned or offensive symbolism
- Use subversion to supplement contrasts and respond to the appropriateness of the expectations themselves.
- Beware subversions that are not set up properly.
- Use flow to give the work a sense of motion and progress 7.
- Beware flow that causes confusion or makes the piece disorienting.
- Use rigidity to give the work a sense of strength and firmness 8.
- Beware rigidity that implies the work is boring or unengaging.
- Use perspective to obstruct certain parts of the piece or to give a rich view that entices the imagination. Use level of detail (i.e., layers) to hide or show appropriate details that adds to the appreciation of the craft
- Both techniques frame the user’s experience with the piece. Multiple perspectives or levels of detail give richness and depth.
- Level of detail also allows us to leave some things to the audience and their imagination.
- Additional tips are given in here.
- For temporal art, use pacing. Save the best for last, control anticipation.
- It is common in design to introduce cycles of tension and relaxation.
- In particularly interactive media, pacing correlates to traversing the flow channel.
- Use contrast to highlight certain qualities. Play to the salience bias.
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Do not underestimate the first principles and primitives available to you. They are composable and give rise to rich expressions.
- Define the design problem in terms of its primitives to understand the problem better.
- There are three aspects that we may look at 9:
- The forms that compose the product and how they interact with each other.
- The experience the audience will have with the product.
- The cultural context the product operates in.
Principles
- Learn to kill your babies. Do not become attached to a failing idea as this limits the potential of what is possible. Some ideas do not belong in the work, despite how good they are. 10 Design decisions meet a particular need
- Set limitations. Limiting yourself encourages creativity (see here and 11 4). Design meets a particular need, not a universal need.
- Less is more. Bloat only makes the “special” elements look mediocre. Less is a bore. Add richness to the piece through appropriate detail. Balance between the two philosophies as appropriate, while remembering the intent behind them.
- Break the rules when needed, especially to stand out. Take bold, but calculated, risks 12
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A piece is viewed as a whole, not just as a mish-mash of disjointed parts. A piece is viewed as part of the wider whole (its cultural context).
- Respect the audience’s time and intelligence lest the creative work comes off as pretentious or dull.
- Get Things Done
- Your creative power is tied to your pattern language. At the time of designing, we rely on the rules of thumbs that we have and these rules are expressed in this pattern language. It helps to be precise even if it is hard.
Learning something Creative
- Adapted from here
- Every creative endeavor is an exercise in Problem Solving.
- It helps to be objective. When there is a problem, step back and look at the big picture.
- Learning is about making mistakes. Mistakes give us opportunities to improve. Everyone starts as a beginner.
- When learning, reality will almost never match our initial expectations.
- Your goal when you are learning is to learn.
- Rather than set expectations, set specific challenges that will help you learn and bring you out of your comfort zone.
- It’s alright to have a big goal, but break down the steps towards this goal into smaller goals.
- Start anywhere. Just make something. Learn to start anywhere.
- Before beginning a learning session, warm up. Just mess around. The goal is too get into the right mindset.
- Learn to let go. When learning, treat your work as disposable. The goal is not the output but the learning.
- Your creative outputs are byproducts of your learning. Not the other way around.
- Have a goal in mind. Learn skills related to this goal. Learn to give up unrelated things.
- Look back on your progress. Learning is an incremental struggle.
- Start with the basics and the fundamentals.
Footnotes
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For example tropes are not inherently bad so long as they are used appropriately. ↩
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Schell Ch. 7 - begins with a recounting that changed the author’s perspective on Creativity forever. ↩
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Salen and Zimmerman Ch. 1 - they describe it as Rules, Play and Culture respectively. ↩
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101 Things I Learned in Architecture School Items 20, 28, 29, 86 ↩