on 19 January 2007Subtitled 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain, this book adopts the premise that ‘the only thing keeping you from reaching a new level of creative thought is inaction’. It’s all about the need to get yourself out of ruts, remove your mental blocks, and force your brain in new directions. Creative types have occasionally been known to use more aggressive substances than caffeine to achieve this, but the idea here is to leave your chemistry alone and stimulate your thought processes by pinging rubber bands at imaginary rabbits, designing a carnival ride for bugs, or re-engineering the business processes of the company reception desk.
Refreshingly, authors Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield don’t claim to be world authorities in their field, just a couple of jobbing graphic designers who’ve scribbled down some of the exercises they’ve used to shift their own creative blocks. They’ve included plenty of contributions, interviews and testimonials from others, though, to reassure us that the book isn’t entirely the product of their own deranged imaginations.
With chapter titles like ‘It’s Good To See A Happy Potato’ and ‘What Is That Thing Dangling From Your Other Arm?’, you know this isn’t going to be some dry lateral-thinking primer. Just in case, it’s been laid out using
generic sans and serif typefaces in a wild mix of sizes, weights, tracking and leading. Pretty it ain’t, and some pages can only be read with persistence and determination, but the whole thing is very dip-into-able.
Some of the exercises are a bit obvious: drawing a random squiggle and then trying to turn it into a picture, for example, comes up at least four times in the book, and you just might already have thought of writing your name using the non-text characters on your Mac keyboard. Others are tasks that could easily pop into your head without assistance, but which you probably wouldn’t follow through unless you had a book telling you to: designing a political poster, inventing a new sport, photographing every brown object you see, and so on. As well as general waker-uppers, there are techniques that you could use more directly to brainstorm design concepts for real projects, such as finding a letter in a chosen typeface that conveys the feeling of a certain photo, or creating a pictogram to represent an adjective.
Not all of the suggestions reflect the real world of the struggling designer. Nice idea to set up a game of basketball using items of office stationery, but who has the time? Or the stationery, come to think of it. Contributor Peleg Top pays for classes that his staff want to attend, encourages them to ‘have balanced lives’ (he takes Fridays off), and they all cook each other lunch in the house he bought and remodelled as a studio. Are you feeling inspired now, or are your teeth grinding as you cast aside Peleg’s account of his charmed existence to indulge in some creative contemplation of last quarter’s VAT bill? If we could all have this kind of existence, we probably wouldn’t need brain-wakening exercises.
The authors aren’t insensitive to the ironies. When illustrator/animator Mike Dietz says ‘Ideas are the real currency in our business,’ they ask: ‘Can you tell that to my client, Mike?’ More often, though, they maintain a kind of U-certificate wackiness which is so relentlessly white-toothed that you occasionally wonder if all the contributors are played by Will Ferrell in drag. But you should be able to cope as long as you don’t try to read the whole thing at one sitting.
This is a handy tool to keep by your desk for those moments when you realise you’ve been staring at a blank screen or re-kerning the same comma for half an hour. It’s small enough to carry around with you when you leave the office, too. (If the words ‘leave the office’ are confusing you, that may be another clue to why you’re creatively blocked.) And it even has an index, so if you wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘I never tried that stick-figure drawing exercise’, you can look it up – as long as you remember to look under D for ‘Do These Shorts Make My Line Look Big?’
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?