Toolkit - Invisible Cities Ideation

In our lesson with Jordan last Monday (I'm a little bit behind!), we explored how to come up with ideas for our thumbnails. We started off by studying the work of Sterling Hundley, who explains how to plan your ideas to make them more interesting and to make it easier to generate them. Here is his list to follow:

Begin with the text
Research
Reference
Simplify the text, break it down into key words
Create word associations in a work stack
Create simple icons (drawings) next to the text
Form bridges between the words
Develop your ideas from you words
Use values to explain shape
Draw a box to define your composition
Define your drawings into a final solution to the text.

The main thing that was emphasized in the lesson was using reference. If you want to know what things like, you need to reference them! I'm going to really try in future to gather some reference and make some inspiration maps, as I think this will really help me to come up with more ideas. Another tip was that when you're stuck, start thinking of the opposite of what the city is meant to look at, and think abstractly.

As well as learning some methods of idea creation, Jordan also showed us some more effective ways to make thumbnails in Photoshop. Originally, I used the method of drawing lineart digitally to make a thumbnail, but I found this really messy and I didn't like it at all. I was amazed to see all of the different kinds of methods there are when it comes to making small compositions. First of all, you can paint, filling in the shapes to help read the space. Make sure to use values: bright and sharp is closer up, neutral and fuzzy is far away. You can also use the lasso tool, which is like digital tape! You can draw out different shapes using the tool, and then paint into the shapes you've made. It seems like a very interesting way to create texture very quickly and effectively, and I can't wait to try it! The last method is quite similar, which is to the use polygon lasso tool. This makes the edges a bit sharper, different from just using the normal lasso. One more interesting point is that you can use layer settings to put designs on top of each other, to make a completely different thumbnail out of existing designs.

I'd like to try all of these methods and can't wait to put them into practice. I'll be making a post with my outcomes soon!