I believe brainstorming is a brilliant and essential way to work on projects, especially big projects or projects that involve more than a sole person. I think that there will be instances where someone is working on a solo project, perhaps a small solo project like a poster where it may be better to just flow and create and try things in the moment as opposed to plan them out through brainstorming. Though I think for a larger project or a project with multiple people, it’s important to try and gain some direction so the final work that is produced is cohesive, not fragmented from multiple designers doing their own take on a project.
Brainstorming can sometimes be counterproductive, for example if the limitations or rules that are established before the brainstorm are too restrictive. A way to solve this issue would be to remove limitations and rules, think freely and creatively and then reintroduce the rules later once you’ve got a solid bunch of ideas down. Another issue would be if there are too many people in the brainstorming session, the magazine said that they like to limit the number of people to around 8, any more than that can be depreciating returns as great ideas are harder to sift through the other ideas.
The magazine spoke about using ‘hats’ to figure out different points of view such as emotional, informational, creativity. I think this is a great idea but I think the hats should be tailor-made to the individual client. A new hat to be brought in for a technology client could be essential to that process, but could be utterly useless for a food-based client for example.
Dan Rawlinson | Graphic Designer 