1 Apply the seat of your pants to a chair in a very quiet room.
2 Focus with undivided attention. There shouldn’t be any distractions, especially no music blasting through earphones.
3 Conceptualize, conceptualize, conceptualize. Students often say they made a design because they felt like it. They too rarely say they did it because they thought it through and wanted to use THIS concept.
4 Sketch out thumbnails with a thick black marker—a pencil or pen will make your drawings too fussy. Fussy is good when refining an idea, but you can’t refine “nothing.”
5 Ask yourself questions to help define the problem—you are your own best resource.
6 Push yourself to explore something new. There are wonderful things inside you, and if you don’t try things you’ve never done before, you will never find them. Keeping yourself off balance will help.
7 Enlarge some of your thumbnail sketches. There are times when a wonderful little fragment of a drawing is there, but you don’t know it or see it when it’s too small. Do it mechanically—on a copier or scanner. The tools are there, so use them.
8 Don’t be afraid to put stupid things down as ideas. The point is to keep moving forward—you can weed out bad ideas later.
9 Use symbols. Don’t make pictures of whatever happened—there is rarely an idea in that approach. BUT, don’t take the search for a symbol too literally by making a trademark.
10 Be your most severe critic. The only person you ought to be competing with is yourself. Push yourself in your sketch phase. Think of it as climbing a hill with a rock on your back—it seems like you are never going to get anywhere, but what you’re actually doing is investing—in the project and in yourself.
From Guide to Graphic Design, by Scott W. Santoro, Pearson Education; it came to me via Scott W. Santoro
See some of Goslin’s designs here.
Christian Leithart 