Good Dog Creative

Are you suffering from designer’s block? Are you stuck in a rut and producing the same types of designs over and over again? Why not take a lesson from a drawing class and loosen up your creativity with some “gesture” designing.

In my college life drawing class we often practiced the exercise of gesture drawing. Gesture drawing means different things to different people but the gist of it is to quickly sketch a subject in order to capture it’s essence instead of create a realistic rendering. We would do this at the beginning of every class in order to clear our heads, loosen up, and expand our vision of what we were going to be creating. If you find yourself, as a web designer, stuck in a rut you can apply these same concepts to your designing process.

Prepare

1. I have various folders on my computer containing background images, stock photography, vector graphics, textures, icons and anything else I find that I think I might have a use for in a design at some point. If you don’t have a collection of resources already, take a few moments to grab a few of these things and have them handy in a folder on your desktop. Don’t spend much time analyzing what you are grabbing just grab a handful of images, textures and backgrounds. A great site to find these things quickly is Stock.xchng.

2. Now that you have a general mishmash of resources, open up Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or whatever program you use to design your sites and create a new document. I usually start with a document sized at around 1600 pixels X 1200 pixels.

3. Place some guides in general areas. I like to create a general working area and size. I usually frame out an area in the center of the document at 960 pixels wide and the full 1200 pixels tall.

4. Once you have your guides placed create a folder in your layers pallet and name it something along the lines of “design 1″.

Ready… Set… Design!

5. Choose 4 colors and quickly block out areas with shapes. Don’t think too much about the layout of the site while doing this just quickly and generally create the various areas of a page.

6. Pull in some random images. Use textures, stock images, icons etc. just jump into your collected resources and place them in the first areas you can think of. Don’t think too much about the images you’re grabbing or the areas you’re placing them.

7. Choose 4 more colors and add some text. You can keep a clipboard full of lorem ipsum in your resources that you can quickly copy and paste or you can just type randomly in the areas that you want your text and headlines.

8. The key to this whole exercise is doing it quickly. While gesture drawing is usually 30 seconds to a minute long I find that 15 to 20 minutes is generally a decent time frame for “gesture” designing. Try to give yourself a set time to do the actual “gesture” designing. Remember, this is not a finished design; it’s just a quickly done framing of a random design idea.

9. When your time is up hide your “design 1” folder, create a “design 2″ folder and begin again. This whole process can be repeated as often as you like or as often as you have the time for but when finished you’ll want to have at least a few different folders to look at.

10. After creating a handful of designs, go back and look at each individual folder. Look at where you placed things and what resources you used. You may find layouts that you hadn’t previously thought of or a texture that you may not have considered using before. Make some simple changes or tweaks where you think they may be needed.

11. Save the file and refer back to any ideas in it for inspiration on future designs.

Don’t expect to find a goldmine in this exercise or the next award winning design. The real point behind working like this, working quickly and with no real direction, is to just get you creating instead of banging your head against a design block. Hopefully it helps to create a crack in the dam and soon the ideas will be flowing again.