My Creative Process

Since I’m a New Media student, whenever I start a project I usually start by looking at my requirements and what the project ultimately needs to be. Since it’s school projects need to be done within a certain time frame, it’s hard to really have a moment of “inspiration.” To keep things fresh, I try to do something new on every project I work on so that even if it’s just another website or just another banner, I learned at least one new thing. I’ve never really broken down this process before and what each step really is for me, so this should be somewhat eye opening.

Inspiration
I define inspiration as something that usually sparks an idea in my head or gives me a flash of the final product I’m going to make. Whenever I’m working on something for school, time is usually a concern so I don’t usually get a spark of inspiration. I usually think of what it is I need to create and from there I create my own inspiration to help me get going on my project. But when it comes to making something for myself, which lately hasn’t been very often, I usually get inspired by the work of others or sometimes the patterns on fabrics, papers, books etc.

Idea
I define idea as something that is the result of my inspiration or analyzing the product. It’s kind of like the “big picture” of what it is I’d like to create. I’d almost say that idea and inspiration is the same thing. Inspiration is the spark that leads to idea.

Concept
I define concept as the game plan on how I am going to create this product. I may create a wireframe, a couple rough drafts or comps… just create a some drawings on paper to get the most out of the idea. Basically, this is all the pre-planning before I actually start working on the product.

Trial & Refine
I define trial as my first attempt at creating the product. Most of the time, the first attempt is not successful and so I will try again having learned from my errors, which would be refining. These steps may repeat a few times until I have a successful product.

Product
I define product as something that has reached all the goals that I have set forth and has come as close to my idea as possible. I’ve never created anything that has been exactly my idea. I usually come pretty darn close or I may create something better than what I had originally thought up.

Here is what I created:

I found my inspiration from my roots. When I first started using Photoshop, I used to do a lot of collages like the picture above. That was how I would learn about the different filters and figure things out on my own in Photoshop. I haven't made one of these in a very, very long time and thought that maybe I should make one again for the fun of it... the target audience being me. All the images I used are pictures I've taken myself. I used three pictures and one gradient map set to overlay. It was fun and refreshing to make something for myself and not have a specific target audience in mind.

Here are the pictures I used: