Creative Visualization

Visualization Techniques

For our purposes we are going to divide visualization into four categories:

• Thought Visualization
• Concept Visualization
• Create Concept Boards
• Final Visualization

1. Thought Visualization

How do we first put our thoughts to paper? This can be done through words, diagrams, sketches and found materials.

Some of the techniques we can use are:

1. Mind Mapping
2. Brain Storming
3. Others

2. Concept Visualization

At this point we have developed some ideas and concepts that we would like
to explore and we want to utilize different techniques to develop our
ideas and find the best way to express them. There are many techniques
we can use both by hand and on the computer.

It is always better to start by visualizing ideas by hand. The results are more
instant, fluid and will often lead us towards other areas of
exploration not previously conceived. The computer is better utilized
when a more concrete concept has been established and we can then use
the advanced tools the computer provides.

Here are some ideas of hand techniques:

• Collage
• Photo Montage
• Sketching
• Painting

3. Create Concept Boards

Similar to mind mapping, concept boards collect imagery and other found items
that are associated with your concepts. Place this material all on one
board. Examine how they affect each other; look for commonality and
contrast.

This technique will often help to identify styles for imagery, type, composition and an overall look and feel for
the design concept.

4. Final Visualization

These are the techniques or styles of visualization we use to present our final design.

Some of the questions we will ask ourselves include:

• Shall we use a photographic image?
• What kind of line or shape will we use?
• Shall we use color and what color?

The questions are almost limitless and a lot will be determined by how your
ideas have developed and the final message you wish to communicate.

Media

Almost as important as the elements and principles of design are the media.
These are the materials chosen to execute the design. In today's highly
technological world this usually means using the computer. However the
computer is still just a tool, and great concepts still come from you,
the designer. No tool can supplant the process of creation; you must
use your mind to develop ideas. Therefore you still want to begin any
project on paper, with something as simple as a pen or colored pencils.

Some of the design exercises for this class will be executed by hand
using simple materials: black, white and colored papers, glue or rubber
cement, and felt tip pens or markers. You will finish most of your
homework assignments on your computer. However, you will be required to
do all your preliminary thinking (thumbnails) by hand--and you will be
required to scan in and post all of this initial handwork for each
assignment.

Tools for Thumbnails

Pencil: Try sketching with a sharp pencil and now a
dull one. Try sketching with a soft one, and now a big pencil or a
chiseled pencil. Your ideas will change as you change your pencil.

Brush: Few designers take advantage of the
conventional painting and drawing tools from our training years. We
forget how we think differently with a brush in our hands. Fluid
strokes beget interesting form. Liquid color always begets happy
accidents.

Color media: A suggestion of color can change the spin
on a sketch. In a finished piece of designed communication, broad
strokes of color or spot color can change the emphasis, meaning and
impact of the message. Color sketching will help you see these shifts
early in the process.

Cut and paste: Remember the feeling you had when you
were a kid creating with crude tools? Crayons, blunt-ended scissors,
tape, white paste. We did anything we could to get what was in our head
onto the piece of paper.

Dimensional sketching: Your choices of paper, format,
materials and folds are all influenced by the content and, in turn,
affect the concept. The feel, sound and smell of the sketch will
enhance the concept.

Thumbnails represent a starting point for developing ideas and
concepts. When you begin a project, you have to put into visual form
the ideas you come up with in your head. You have to be able to see
your ideas yourself in a variety of forms so you can select the best
layout for your concept. You need to have a way to show these ideas to
a client (or an instructor.)

Thumbnails are the fastest, most flexible way to do this. Thumbnails are visual representations of
what you are thinking; of the ideas and compositions that come to mind
in solving a design problem. The more you develop ideas through small
preliminary sketches, thumbnails, the wider the range of solutions you
will have to choose from for your final design.

Types of Thumbnails

The two recommended types or levels of thumbnails are:

• Rough (or preliminary)
• Tight

Rough thumbnails involve thinking, experimentation and growth. Rough thumbnails should be done quickly and without censoring.

Tight thumbnails are refined versions that are done neatly and carefully to a
presentation quality, and may be shown to a client (or instructor.)

Do not censor your mind with rough thumbnails; put down anything that comes and don’t worry about flow or organization.

Why should rough thumbnails be done by hand?

Because all final work in today’s world is completed on the computer, you may
think that you should also begin on the computer. Not true!

When you are developing ideas, you need to be completely free from the needs and constraints the computer places on you.

Think of it this way: if all you know how to do on the computer is draw cats
and dogs, and you only use the computer to generate ideas, then all
your ideas will end up being about cats and dogs.

Furthermore, since the computer always draws cats and dogs perfectly, you’ll end up
being a perfectionist—too controlled a mindset for brainstorming.

If you sit down with a pen or pencil and start to doodle, or if you do a series of quick sketches to visualize the ideas you have in your head, then anything is possible.

You will always find a way to produce your ideas, but if you never give
yourself the chance to think of them because you are so controlled by
your computer, you may never do anything unusual or creative.

And, believe it or not, in the preliminary stage of ideation (when you are thinking quickly and without censoring), it is actually a lot faster to work by hand!

Working By Hand

When you work by hand, there is nothing to mark and move. There is
nothing to save. It is easy to work on several ideas at the same time
and, possibly most importantly, you will have a direct link between
your brain and your hand without the need to understand anything but
the ideas that are coming up.

Doodling and thumbnail sketching is by far the best way to generate
a lot of unique visual concepts quickly. Doodling is therapeutic.
Doodling is done while your mind is meandering in other directions,
while you are on the phone, for instance.

The beauty behind doodling or thumbnail sketching is that a thought is
captured as a pure and raw idea, not as a stylistic solution. When you
look back over several pages of miniature sketches, you’ll begin to see
things you didn’t intend to do while you were sketching. More
importantly, when someone else looks at these same sketches, that
person adds a whole new point of view to your raw ideas. As more people
look at the sketches, more ideas are created. This is because sketching
is not a precise technique. It leaves room for interpretation.

The computer is both a blessing and a curse rolled into one expensive tool.
And that’s just what it is: a tool. It is the pencil of the late
twentieth century [and now the twenty-first century], nothing more. It
is not the brain. It is not a designer, a photographer or an
illustrator. Designers have a responsibility to do what we are paid to
do: design. Although the computer can be a great tool for making
visions reality, too many designers use it as their only tool, or
worse, as a substitute for thinking. These designers use the computer
as a sketching tool, thinking tool, writing tool, typesetting and
illustration tool, and production tool. All this is well and good,
until you can’t tell where one starts and another ends. Then the tool
has mastered the designer, not the other way around, and the designer
may have begun abdicating his responsibility to the computer.

Rough Thumbnails

These preliminary thumbnails should be done quickly and roughly.
They do not have to be neat. However, you do need to know what you are
trying to accomplish. In other words: what is your goal? You also need
to have enough information so you can guide your mind in the right
direction. Keep in mind that you are just beginning to think about
concepts and develop your ideas, so it is absolutely essential that you
not censor yourself at this stage.

Understanding the meaning of the word censorship may help you to avoid the activity:

[To] censor: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable or not acceptable.

Do a series of quick, rough sketches first. Put down everything you can
think of. Then pick the best of these to develop further into tighter
thumbnails that really explain your concept and show what your final
layout(s) will look like.

These quick sketches usually work best when they are messy and rough.

The other important aspect of doing rough thumbnails is that if you know
you don’t have to show them to anybody, you are more apt to put down
unusual, funny, quirky, silly, outrageous, or crazy ideas. This keeps
your mind loose and relaxed. Some of the very best designs have
originated from far-out ideas.

You don’t want to evaluate ideas during your preliminary thinking, brainstorming and thumbnail
sessions. This means that you need to keep your mind and your
imagination wide open so that you do not say no to anything that pops
into your head. Put it all down! Everything!

Here are some tips for doing rough, preliminary thumbnails:

• Know where you are going. Have a goal; have enough information to direct your thinking.
• Work
  within the same dimensional page shape you want for your final layouts.
  If your finished design will be square, do your thumbnails in squares.
  If your final compositions will be rectangular, approximate the shape
  of the page when you do your thumbnails.
• If your final design is to use solid shapes, do your rough thumbnails with
  solid shapes by filling them in. You cannot see what solid shapes will
  look like if all you use are outlines. The balance and weight of solid
  shapes is different than outlines. Even though you are working quickly
  in this stage it is important to slant your mind in the right direction.
• If your final design is to be in color, use color right from the start.
  Use colored pencils or felt tip pens, but allow your mind to think in
  Technicolor. You’ll be more creative, and it is a lot more exciting to
  work with color.
• Carry a small sketchpad with you.
  You can jot down ideas at any time and anywhere. Many a great idea was
  first put down on a paper napkin.
• Experiment with a variety of media. Try felt-tip pens, colored pencils, collage, paints, pencils, ink, etc.

Sometimes when ideas fail to surface through sketches, a designer may
encourage a breakthrough by cutting and arranging his images. In any
event it is a worthwhile exercise that may expand a designer’s
perception. There are two levels of chance that can influence concept
formation. One is the pure accident of vision and events and the other
is the controlled accident, where the designer sets the stage for
chance. An advantage of working with collage or cutouts is the
opportunity that these techniques offer to produce and take advantage
of the accidental effect. Both random and controlled chance can be
effective if the designer is alert.

Tight Thumbnails

Once you have a number of ideas in rough form, you will need to look
at what you have and select the best ideas to develop. Remember that if
you look at what you have and don’t like anything you have come up
with, you can go back through the creative process again as many times
as you need to. You may need to go all the way back to the idea
generation stage.

When it comes time to present your ideas they need to be in tight thumbnail form and of professional
quality. Although you may be working smaller than the final size, your
thumbnails must be in the same relative proportions as your finished
layout will be.

Tight thumbnails should be in the correct
proportions as the finished piece and show all the major elements. At
this stage, in final roughs and certainly in tight thumbnails, a
computer is generally used.

You need to take the following steps for all (or tight) thumbnails:

• Develop your concept and layouts into a visual form that can be clearly understood.
• If typography is included, you need to look at the actual font and
  duplicate it in hand lettering that resembles the font. This means that
  if it is a serif font, the serifs must be included.
• If you are using colored pencil or pens, you need to apply the color smoothly and evenly.
• Your layouts must be in the same dimensional form as the finals will be.
  This means you need to figure out the reduced dimensions exactly. In
  other words if your final page will be 6 inches x 9 inches, your
  presentation thumbnails might be 50% of the full size or 3 x 4.5. They
  should be large enough to be clearly visible, but small enough so that
  they don’t take you hours to produce.
• How you present tight thumbnails depends on whom you are presenting them to. If there
  are specifications to a class project that tell you how to present your
  concepts in thumbnail form, follow them. If there are no instructions,
  find a way to present them in a professional manner. You might mount
  them on a single board. You might have all of them on a single sheet of
  paper. You might have each one mounted individually.

“Know where you are going. Have a goal; have enough information to direct your thinking.” What we’re talking about here is a concept. Thumbnails are a good way of getting to a solid concept

Mind Mapping

A mind map is a drawing of a concept or idea and those ideas related
to it. A mind map is a way to organize a subject using visual tools.
Often used by artists, mind maps are also used by information
professionals of all kinds to sort and make sense of a complex subject.

Mind maps use graphics, words, images, symbols and color
to create a 2-dimensional representation of a 3-dimensional knowledge
set. Basically you start with a concept and then create links and lines
relating other concepts to your starting point. Eventually you have a
map of how your own mind thinks about the subject and that can lead to
a lot of idea generation and spark creative thinking. The elements are
arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts in
your mind and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas.

Academics use similar devices called semantic networks, cognitive
maps and others that carry complex formal rules in order to solve
problems in engineering and computer science. A mind map is a
simplified version for everyday people where the interrelationships
between concepts are not structured but rather the choice of the “mind
mapper” (you!).

Mind maps increase the quality of thinking. They assist in systems thinking, allowing a visual
representation of an overview, showing connections and facilitating the
synthesis of ideas. They are helpful for creative thinking, allowing
you to access multiple intelligences and generate new ideas. Mind maps
help you to organize ideas, both your own and those of other people.
They help you organize information from books, workshops and meetings.
Creating mind maps increases memory and learning.

How to create a mind map

Although there are rules for creating a useful mind map, the process is intended to spark new
relationships and fresh ideas, so do not get stuck or bogged down in
the rules and details. That said, here are some basic instructions for
how to create successful mind maps. A mind map is an organization of
your own internal metaphoric connections surrounding a subject, so
there are never right or wrong answers to put on your mind map.

• Start with a clean large sheet of paper.
• Always begin in the center and work your way out.
• Feel free to use words, images, symbols, codes, pasted material, dimensions or anything else you find useful on your mind map.
• If you do use letters, try to print them rather than use a scrolling hand, the finished map will be much easier to read.
• Make the center strong and clear and (probably) visual in order to clearly identify the theme of your map.
• Make sure every element has a line.
• Lines can be arrows, black and white, in color or any other kind of connector
  that makes sense to you. Lines between elements connote relationships
  of various kinds. Use different lines for different kinds of
  relationships. Use colors as a personal code in your map.
• All lines must be connected, starting from the central image. Lines
  typically start thick in the center and become thinner and freer
  flowing as they grow out.

Try to develop your own visual style of mind mapping, as this is likely to be easier for
you to create and read in the future. If you get stuck, don’t stop;
simply move to another branch of the map. If you run out of paper,
don’t start over; paste more paper onto your work surface.