Introduction
What This Book Is and Is Not About

INVENTION, MY DEAR FRIENDS, IS 93 PERCENT PERSPIRATION, 6 PERCENT ELECTRICITY, 4 PERCENT EVAPORATION, AND 2 PERCENT BUTTERSCOTCH RIPPLE.

—WILLY WONKA

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was once charged with determining whether or not a film was pornographic. In his ruling, Potter said he wouldn’t even attempt to define pornography—“but,” he added, “I know it when I see it.” Many people feel the same way about creativity. They can’t explain exactly what constitutes creative visual communication, but they know it when they see it.

If merely defining creativity is tricky, teaching creativity is even trickier; teaching creative design is downright challenging; and teaching creative graphic design is veritably daunting. One can be creative in business, homemaking, diplomacy, community living, and the like by developing underutilized cognitive thinking skills that function irrespective of the media or communication genre. Creativity in product design and architecture is constrained by real-world technical specifications that mercifully limit the number of possible solutions, since a chair must support a person’s weight and a building must not collapse in a storm. But creativity in graphic design can be a very subjective, elusive goal because it is constrained only by the open-ended nature of human visual communication, in which there are as many exceptions as there are rules.

The problem, in other words, is that creative graphic design is not like algebra. There’s no single right solution to any given design problem. There are a handful of best solutions, hundreds of fairly decent solutions, and millions of bad solutions. Not that graphic design is without its handbooks of principles, systems, laws, doctrines, rules, and regulations. All are valuable and have their place in design education. But at the end of the day, knowing grid systems, color theory, and the history of typography doesn’t necessarily make you a creative designer any more than knowing a pinch from a pint and how to operate a Cuisinart makes you a creative chef.

Literally hundreds of books are available that cover the basic principles of graphic design. This is not one of them. I will revisit some fundamental design principles in order to tease out various creative solutions, but this book is not a graphic design primer. Instead, it tactically applies various design principles within the context of the creative process.

This book does not champion any single design philosophy or school. Instead, it shows you how to balance and apply various approaches based on your own personal strengths and the particular requirements of each individual project.

Modernist design expounds a set of principles that are self-assured, utilitarian, and codified. In many ways, Bauhaus-inspired modernism has dominated twentieth-century design. Yet its success and proliferation may have less to do with its objective correctness than with the fact that it is quantifiably teachable—there are right ways and wrong ways and not a lot of in-between. Usability and information architecture have inherited modernism’s self-assuredness and quasi-scientific/psychological methodologies. But just because something is systematically teachable and comprehendible doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best approach to a given problem. Any design problem includes stages that require a more intuitive, less systematic approach.

All that is to say, this is by no means a modernist or neomodernist design book. Nor is it an antimodernist book. (I love grid systems, and the work of my students consistently improves once they learn grid systems.) This book strives to do more than dogmatically support or systematically refute any single historical design approach. It strives to inspire creativity.

Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers is a notebook of methods, tools, habits, and paradigms that various successful designers use. They range from what might be considered best practices and trade secrets to some pretty wild experiments to just plain common sense. Some may drastically alter the way you see your role as a designer. Others may affirm your current methodology. Taken as a whole, these approaches are meant to supplement, inspire, spark, rev up, and otherwise hot-wire your current creative process.

THIS BOOK STRIVES TO DO MORE THAN DOGMATICALLY SUPPORT OR SYSTEMATICALLY REFUTE ANY SINGLE HISTORICAL DESIGN APPROACH. IT STRIVES TO INSPIRE CREATIVITY.

As such, this book is less of a “how-to” technical manual and more of a sourcebook for creative approaches. Art, philosophy, history, play, discipline, balance, chance, passion, and hiking will all be involved. This book proposes to be of real, practical use to the working designer. As design historian Philip Meggs observed, “A design philosophy is merely an idle vision until someone creates artifacts that make it a real force in the world.” In other words, theory alone is useless apart from the working creativity of individual designers. My goal is simply to increase your creativity.

If creativity is ultimately something that transcends textual instructions, the idea of a book instructing you how to be more creative may seem paradoxical—a bit like teaching jazz improvisation. Yet music departments do offer courses in jazz improvisation. Improvisation is learnable, but it requires a less pedantic approach than merely memorizing and practicing scales. Likewise, creativity can be taught and learned. It’s just that sometimes you have to go the long way around something in order to get at the heart of it, and creativity is one of those somethings.

What’s So Great About This Book?

I am not the only person in the history of the civilization to have thought a bit about creativity. My research has taken me from Jungian psychology to post–World War I Soviet engineering, from aleatoric music to the elongated illustrations of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, from hacktivist tactical media to the handcrafted symmetry of Celtic illumination, and to a good number of points in between. I’ve tried to distill all this research and thinking into a useful book with several salient advantages. Here are a few of them.

This Book Contains Applicable Interviews

In his 1999 book Why Are You Creative? advertising agent Hermann Vaske conducted a series of interviews with famous “creatives” (the adjective that has become a noun). He asked them all, “Why are you creative?” David Bowie said he likes being creative because it allows him to crash his proverbial airplane; Mel Gibson likes it because it’s a form of psychotherapy for him, like basket weaving; and so on. Their answers are all interesting, but none of them practically helps me become any more creative at Web design, new media art, multimedia education, pop music journalism, or any of the other creative things I do. They tell me more about the individual artists than they do about a universal path toward creativity.

THIS BOOK IS NOT A GUARANTEED PRESCRIPTION FOR MAXIMUM INCREASED CREATIVITY. INSTEAD, IT FUNCTIONS LIKE THE 12-STEP PROGRAM OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS: “IT WORKS IF YOU WORK IT, AND IT DOESN’T IF YOU DON’T.”

Likewise, most creative people find that certain things help them get in a creative frame of mind. Personally, I love Stereolab. I love maroon. I love wandering the back roads of western North Carolina. I love the all-you-can-eat sushi bar at the Asiana Oriental Buffet. I love a bracingly cold shower after a long, hot run. And honestly, who really cares? What do these personal preferences have to do with hot-wiring your creative process? It would be presumptuous and foolish to assume that a bunch of subjective things that work for me are going to work for you.

At best following such advice is like wearing a lucky hat—merely a kind of psychological placebo. At worst, it can interfere with your own creative process. It’s much more advantageous to hear from creative experts in your own field talking in detail about specific practical issues they have wrestled with.

Consequently, Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process is not a compendium of interviews with a bunch of creative people sharing their own abstract thoughts and idiosyncrasies—things that don’t directly relate to your daily creative process. This book does contain occasional interviews with designers, but the interviews are about specific facets of the design process and not about basket weaving or metaphoric airplanes.

This Book Helps You Rock the Creative Process, Not Just Follow It

You can’t really hot-wire your creative process until you have one. (In a sentence, the creative process is all the phases of a project: predesign, design, development, and implementation.) The way in which a designer approaches a project has a profound impact on its success or failure, and following a clearly defined creative process is much better than flailing about aimlessly—putting the cart before the horse, putting the design before the concept, and generally behaving like a freelance designer on her first gig. Intentionally following a clearly defined (or even loosely defined) creative process may be the single most useful practice in any designer’s arsenal, and this book will show you how to do that.

Nevertheless, a creative process can’t design a project for you. You still have to design the project. Although I will go over the fundamentals of the creative process in the first chapter, this book is less about project management and more about how to inject creativity into various phases of your project.

My main concern here is how you work the process. Having a creative process and following a creative process (even working a creative process) are not the same as rocking a creative process. It’s easy to learn guitar chords and scales; it’s much more difficult to rock. It’s easy to learn color theory and grid systems; it’s much more difficult to consistently find the quintessential heart of each design problem and address it with a solution that satisfies, surprises, and invigorates.

I do believe creativity can be imparted. The problem is that most teachers vacillate between abstract philosophical theory (like “the ramifications of deconstruction on interactive narrative”) and practical how-to minutiae (like “creating custom Adobe Photoshop color swatches”), and never bridge the gap between the two. The key to rocking something is bridging that gap. This book broaches some heady, big-picture topics like semiotics and dialectics, but I try to translate each theory into practical approaches that you can apply to specific aspects of the design process.

This Book Gets You Unstuck

All designers occasionally get stuck at some point in their process. It can be in the predesign phase when you’re trying to generate concepts. More often than not, it’s at the beginning of the design phase when you’re staring at a blank page or screen, trying to give visible form to the invisible concepts and goals of your project. Sometimes you get stuck in your ability to usefully delimit the nature of a design problem, to assess the scope of a project, or to collaborate with a client. You may even be stuck in your career, dreading yet another client interview, wondering how you’re going to convince them of the value of your input—that you’re more than just a glorified cake decorator, that you actually want to get in on the ground level with the marketing team or product development team and help bake the whole cake.

There are dozens of obstacles to creative design that perpetually threaten to bog you down and get you stuck. Wherever you find yourself stuck, this book is full of ways to get you unstuck. It is true what they say: You can’t steer a parked car. Once you come unstuck and regain the confidence to move your project forward, connections begin to emerge, ideas begin to flow, and you’re back on track. While you’re stuck, all you are is stuck.

This Book Is Full of Creative Yeast

Think of the creative process as a bread recipe. You can follow it to the letter, but if you leave out the yeast, the bread comes out flat. These strategies, tools, habits, and paradigms are like the yeast—active ingredients that help your creativity rise so that the project comes out plump and tasty. These approaches are not merely the butter on top of the bread. They are more integral and fundamental to the creative process than just finishing touches.

IT’S NOT CHEATING TO USE OTHER PEOPLE’S STRATEGIES, TOOLS, HABITS, AND PARADIGMS. NOBODY WILL KNOW YOU USED THEM.

Yeast in a great bread recipe gives rise to delicious bread. Hot-wiring a great creative process gives rise to tasty design.

Each strategy and tool should be applied during the appropriate phase of the creative process. Some paradigms are to be continually revisited and balanced throughout the entire process. Others will affect the overall way you think and work as a designer. This book is not a guaranteed prescription for maximum increased creativity. (Any author who makes such a guarantee is deluded or lying.) Instead, it functions more like the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous: “It works if you work it, and it doesn’t if you don’t.”

How to Use This Book

You don’t need to read this book sequentially or in its entirety to get something out of it. Having said that, here are some things to keep in mind as you proceed.

Take What You Can Use and Leave the Rest

Each design project is different, and each designer is different, so take what you need for each project and leave the rest for later—or never. One approach may work for you on one project and be totally inappropriate for another. One may work for you as a designer and another may never work. You probably won’t agree with everything in this book. It doesn’t matter. My goal is not to start a historical design movement or put forth an irrefutably cohesive design methodology; my goal is to help you do better design work.

Will these approaches help you be a more creative CEO, software developer, sculptor, or entrepreneur? Some of them will, and some of them will be largely irrelevant. Take what you can use and leave the rest.

Leave Your “Designer As Hero” Badge at the Door

There will probably be some proud and defiant souls who shun this book. They don’t need templates. They don’t need advice. They don’t need help. All they need is their own personal experience and their thrice-blessed muse. But the rest of us (and even those self-styled heroic designers) need help from time to time.

It’s not cheating to use other people’s strategies, tools, habits, and paradigms. Nobody will know you used them. Nobody will know your work is not from scratch, pure and unadulterated from the wellspring of your prodigious creative soul. Great design is solving a problem gracefully, humanely, and always with that inexplicable something extra.

There’s no shame in being influenced by others, anyway, because we’re all influenced by others in some capacity. It’s simply unavoidable. Better to admit the inherently derivative nature of design and begin devising intentional strategies for coming under the positive influence of work we admire. Ultimately, you’re still the one who has to come up with the design solution to a particular problem and execute it. You still have to decide how to balance your influences and incorporate them into your working process. As long as you’re not outright plagiarizing, your work will be judged on its effectiveness alone, not on how much of it was influenced by someone else’s input.

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO KEEP CRANKING OUT MEDIOCRE CRAP. ASK ANY COMMERCIAL DESIGNER, “WHY DID YOU GET INTO DESIGN?” AND NONE OF THEM ARE GOING TO ANSWER, “I GOT INTO IT SO I COULD CRANK OUT MEDIOCRE CRAP.”

Go Overboard

Simply put, don’t be afraid to do whatever it takes to design your best. If it takes a book or a seminar or a degree or balancing an egg on your head while reciting the Declaration of Independence from memory in order to design greatly, then that’s what it takes.

Everyone fears failure, and designers are no exception. But fear is the mind killer. It paralyzes. The approaches in this book may challenge you. They may take you out of your comfort zone. They may cause you to modify your familiar practices. They may cause you to risk. They may cause you to reengage and get passionate about a career that you’ve taken for granted and no longer really care about. Excellent! Welcome back to life.

Honestly, life is too short to keep cranking out mediocre crap. Ask any commercial designer, “Why did you get into design?” and none of them are going to answer, “I got into it so I could crank out mediocre crap.” Rediscover the love you originally had for design. Go for it. It works if you work it.

Embrace the Fact That Design Is Freaking Sexy

Design is sexy. It just is. End of story. You know this intuitively. Every designer knows it. Granted, all of us have our own particular fetishes. For some it is the tactile sensuality of embossed cardstock. Others get off on the seamless staccato cadences of jump-cut motion graphics. For others, it’s the irreverent, irregular, distressed textures of grunge typography. For the hardcore design fetishist, a generous use of white space in conjunction with an expanded Futura light typeface may be all it takes to illicit serious arousal.

In 1887, Arts & Crafts designer Selwyn Image wrote, “When you begin to realize, that all kinds of invented Form, and Tone, and Colour, are alike true and honorable aspects of Art, you see something very much like a revolution looming ahead of you.” We need to stop thinking of design as the trailer-park cousin of art.

I have a friend, a great designer, who is going through a crisis of faith in the value of design. “I can make it look good. I can crank out working solution after working solution. But what’s the point? Can design make any real difference in people’s lives?” I believe great design can make a difference in people’s lives. Design is applied human creativity in the service of human communication, in the service of human use, and that is worth something. And creation, any form of creation, can be a celebration of existence, a kind of fulfillment of purpose, even a communion with the Divine.

As you apply the principles and approaches in this book, don’t just seek to do passable work. Make it your goal to create something extraordinary. The craftsmen of Bali have a wonderful saying: “We have no art. We do everything as well as possible.” Such a holistic attitude doesn’t distinguish between “high art” and “applied art.” Anything worth making is worth making as well as possible.

Even the most minimal typographic treatment can elicit a sensual response from the hardcore design fetishist.