Have you ever struggled to complete a design project on time? Or felt that having a tight deadline stifled your capacity for maximum creativity? This book is for you.
Within these pages, you’ll find eighty creative challeng- es to help you reach a breadth of innovative design solutions, in various media, within any set time period. By completing these challenges, you’ll round out your skills by exploring projects along the full continuum of design disciplines, from the bread and butter of brand- ing and collateral to the wild world of advertising to the user-centered practices of creating interactive projects. Along the way, we’ll take brief forays into wayfinding, editorial design, video and motion graphics, and many other areas of our continually expanding practice.
To aid you in conquering these challenges. I’ll provide useful brainstorming techniques and strategies for suc- cess. By road-testing these techniques as you attempt each challenge, you’ll find new and more effective ways of solving tough design problems and bringing your solutions to life.
BECOMING MORE CREATIVE TAKES PRACTICE
Designers are often encouraged to bluff their way through unfamiliar deliverables in order to bootstrap their way toward a stable career, and my experience was no different. My first decade as a designer was humbling. A typical day in the life looked like this:
Two fresh logo sketches for your new wine bar by tomorrow? Catalog cover designs for your cruise line’s venture into South America? Home and sec- ondary page user interface examples for a technol- ogy consulting web site by Friday? No problem. I’ll figure things out before I collapse on my keyboard, exhausted, at 2:00 a.m.
During those years in the trenches. I discovered that.