Apr 17
Apr 17
Would your approach to fixing a problem work better if you were thinking smaller and not bigger?
When people talk about ideation you often hear well worn phrases being bandied about – with ‘a blue skies approach’ and ‘thinking outside of the box’ coming up all to regularly. But what if your approach wasn’t to think inside the box, but to make use of the box space in a different way altogether?
Smashing Magazine have a inspirational collection of book cover designs. Almost every cover here (damn you Chabon!) is a perfect instance of a designer using all creative techniques available to them to maxmise the impact of a fixed amount of space. And if you look around, you can see this approach in action elsewhere: Twitter lets you express your thoughts, so long as it’s below 140 characters; A Brief Message are getting a lot of linkage from their concise, sub-200 word dissections of design; and Hemingway’s six word autobiography is becoming the Haiku of today’s intelligentsia.
What if you only had 2 colours to design that 6 sheet poster? What if you had 30 seconds, not minutes, to pitch that unique business plan? What if the perfect solution to your problem wasn’t to think bigger, but to think narrower?
Having just stared down a particularly aggressive powerpoint presentation, with a marathon number of slides made in combination with your post, me think of the 10-20-30 Rule of Powerpoint by Guy Kawasaki (http://tinyurl.com/96kww) - I wonder if we can stretch Hemmingway’s recountre to Powerpoint?
This post made me think of Shakespeare and his sonnets. A sonnet is a really restrictive form of writing–14 lines in iambic pentameter–yet Shakespeare managed to write over a hundred fantastic and unique poems! (Not to mention the other poets who wrote hundreds of others.)
It seems to me that creativity is at its best when it has to work within strict boundaries!