The importance of the Creative Process
Boost your design creativity and get your thoughts out of the box
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Most people take the same journey to work every day. Sit in the same place and attend the same routine meetings. Sometime it’s very hard to do it differently and get inspired with innovative ideas. Attract creativity into your daily work life isn’t something easy to do. Creativity play a big role in how a solution to a problem is outlined, what alternatives can be chosen, and how to identify new ways of looking at the problem. It is the ability to create new ideas to design new perspectives on existing ones. That’s why everyone should have a creative process, no matter what job it’s related to.
“creativity is not just about Design — it is one of the most important human quality. It is the core value of innovation, thereby it is an essential necessity that every human should develop”
Most of the people don’t actually take the time to consider and define a creative process to use on a regular basis. Everyone have a creative mind and it’s important to use it every time it’s needed and make practice to progress it at work as well as in life.
In this article I would like to share with you my own creative model. I usually tend to progress through a series of four main stages, but ideas can come also anytime “in a flash”. This can sometime happen at the end of a process and it’s always a good practice to take note and integrate the plan.
Before to start I would also like to highlight that this is not the perfect creative model. It’s just a personal process that works nice for me. It doesn’t mean should work out for you too. Everyone is different, like so every creative approach. I just think that this could be a good reference point to start developing your own one, or if you have already, to reinforce it.
But for now here are my 4 stages of the creative process:
1) Gather information with research, create a brief and define goals
As a designer, when I start a new project, a period of training and education it’s vital. I usually begin by gathering all information of the project. I involve everyone at different levels and get as many information as possible. Therefore it is my good habits to write down everything I collected into a general brief. This is very important because it allows me to realise what it’s still missing and where to explore to gather more information.
When the brief it’s done, I create precise adjectives and keywords that will help me to define my main goal. A keyword would describe the look & feel of the design and direct me into the main design direction I think is most appropriate. After that, in the next stages, I transfer progressively the ideas into the main prototype, defining styles, colours, fonts, etc.. (e.g. A keyword like “friendly” would take my choices in a more rounded design or warmer colours). A well built brief in the end will allow me to start the engine of my creativity.
2) Brainstorming. A period of intense concentration
When I managed to gather all information needed about the project and when I’ve defined accurately my main goals, I start brainstorming. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Media, surrounding or things that fit the adjectives established in the brief. One of my first best practice to come up with good ideas is to let my mind wander starting on internet. I am looking at what others have done for inspiration, but I also go through all my collections and I take inspiration from all my past projects as well. I have also the habit to collect a lot of pictures with my phone and I save it into the project.
The practice is to collect ideas everywhere. Once I feel I have it enough, I start to make a connection between them. It’s like putting together all the pieces of a puzzle.
This is the phase where creativity take the main place and get boosted to the highest level of expectation. It is ok to allow your thought and imagination to go a bit out of track. One thing I always do is to get many ideas out very quickly, so I can move onto the next one without loosing too much time. With this structure in mind it’s much easier to locate all the ideas and which one to take out.
3) Organize the plan. Sketches of a concept model with a spontaneous breakthrough
The sketching phase for me it’s one of the most fascinating and exciting part of the creative process. It is the core of all the plan and allow me to organize and finalize. Here I observe all the connected ideas and thoughts, and here is where takes form the initial design solution. Sketching and wire-framing, gives me the necessary elements to execute the main foundation of a future performing product.
At this point the focus of the creativity is centralised to the actual sketches and iteration. The sketches are all very small and quick. It is important to practise the creativity to experiment various design choices with the tendency of not spending too much time in details. This is for me the right time to contemplate and questioning what typefaces might be more appropriate, what sorts of colours I might use, etc.. Here is where I decide how the product will function and move, how the interface will feel, how the animation will be, and what the potential issues and solutions could be.
Making changes, iterating the brief, or adding new keywords and ideas are also all consideration made at this stage. Basically this is a back and forward game between phase three, two and one where creativity need to remember the final goal. By the time spent sketching and sketching, finally I come up with a pretty good idea of the direction I want to bring my final product.
In other words here is where the general visual language of the design solution take form and relate to the mail goal of the plan. Sometime sketching and wire-framing can take time and effort, and come up with a working design model isn’t easy at all. But in the end the hard work it’s worth it and well paid!
4) Execute End-Product and make details final
This is the phase of the creative process I like the most! It’s where I have in my hands a pretty solid design foundation system and most of the possible UX wire-frames scenario. My philosophy is to never start design until I know exactly what the final solution is going to look like, making sure I never forget my final goal. Here is where the details of the final design take place and I start pushing pixels. Indeed my focus goes in polishing the whole product, making sure everything is working smooth and properly. At this stage of the product development it is incorrect to think that creativity don’t play a big role any longer. When I was a junior I was often order to pushing pixel from my Creative Director. My hunger to become better gave me the ability to continuously look at the design with a creative mind and a critique eye.
Indeed sometimes can happen that I realise things during my final design execution, and I jump into the sketching phase again. Obviously I never completely change the whole design foundation at this stage, but I allow myself to make some tweaks and a final quality check control.
I consider this phase the happiest part of the whole creative experience because brings me back in time when I was an apprentice. It always reminds me that’s never too late to learn some more and have and open mind for flexibility. Creativity is eager for knowledge. The more you want to learn, the more creativity is maximized.
How to think out of the box and generate innovative ideas
One of the things I’ve learned through the years is that be creative is not only a matter of having a well structured plan. This need to be accompanied by a good dose of spices. This extra ingredient of creativity, sometime can be found by thinking out of the box.
The box is simply our mind. A structure of knowledge made from everyday life and experiences. Thinking inside the box makes us feel safe because of our knowledge and awareness. In fact whenever we need to think about something, we have precise ideas on how things should be. All these ideas are our standard requirements and specifications coming from our cultural experience.
But how do we think out of the box then? We need to go far with our concepts. We need to open our mind and look for alternatives, not for correct answers.
“A creative thinking should be flexible enough to step away from the conventional ways and allow to break the boundary of the mind. Thinking in between what we know and what we haven’t still thought about. Something which takes us far beyond our conventional knowledge. Something still unknown. That’s why it is so difficult to come up with innovative ideas”
I hope this article will be a good inspiration for some of you and help you to understand better your road trip to creativity.
Thank you very much for reading it and have a great day!
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