Exercise 4: Generating ideas

Use one or more of the following book related sayings as a starting point to generate visual ideas and responses:

• Bookworms
• A closed/open book
• The oldest trick in the book
• You can’t judge a book by its cover
• In someone’s good/bad books
• By the book

During this early formative stage, aim to be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal merit. Let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations.

Record your thought processes and ideas using thumbnail sketches, spidergrams and annotations.

Thumbnail sketches are a way of recording ideas through quick pen or pencil line drawings. The quality of the drawing is not important; a drawing of a person does not need to be anatomically accurate, for example. The drawing serves as a visual reminder to you of a fleeting idea. Aim to make thumbnail drawings in the same quick way that you make short written annotations – keeping up with the flow of your ideas.

Draw a range of visual and conceptual possibilities using the book sayings as your starting point.

Aim to spend 45 minutes working on this, generating as much content, potential ideas, thumbnails, visual metaphors or imagined books as possible.

Thumbnails can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Thumbnail sketches, along with annotations, are a good starting point to begin exploring these aspects.

The concept I was most drawn to was ‘the oldest trick in the book’ so I decided to proceed with this.

I began by creating a mind map around the concept:

With these ideas I proceeded to create some thumbnail sketches:

My concepts included visual ideas for book covers as well as some ideas that could be employed across multiple pages. With some of the ideas I tried multiple approaches. I have used mind maps and thumbnail sketches in a previous Graphic Design unit and I find that it’s a very enabling way to work.