Best Ways For Effective Creative Brainstorming

Many people think brainstorming can only be done one way: an open discussion in a meeting room with everyone involved. This method is not necessarily wrong, but it can lead to some largely unrecognized social drawbacks that might contribute to an unproductive session. In this post, we will show you more solutions and we make sure that will give you more fresh ideas than a structured brainstorming session.

1. Look outside for inspiration

Inspiration is everywhere – from the words of your favorite writer to the blooms and leaves on your morning walk. When you hang out with your friends, you can easily find ideas from advertisements, colors, layout or typos in the wall of the coffee shops or everywhere on the roads. Or you can collect opinions from your friends while chatting with them and figure out their demands to have your own ideas for future projects.

2. Get the timing right

People who are successful at work know that the key is to be intentional about timing. They don’t just think about what and how to do something, but also when to do it.

Everyone usually has the different timing, for instance, some people are usually able to do better “brain work” in the morning, in the afternoon or before sleeping. Why should you have right timing?

The right timing will give you the good to do list. The successful always have their to-do list for having perfect everything. So what does the role of to do list? If you are too busy, it helps you remember all your works and you won’t miss out anything, you will have no mistake. By inference, don’t let your diary run your life, you run your diary. You should build in and protect personal thinking time – time for you to think about important issues.

3. Question the brief

As Albert Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” It means that analyzing is very essential. You can look at everything and always ask yourself why. Why is this done likes this? Why does this produce have this color?

For example, when you go to the supermarket, you can look at the produce and guess by yourself what is this without reading the label before. Which helps you improve your analyzing and you may easily recognize what is the trend color or you will sensitively know more about the graphic industry in the future. Analyzing will be only significant whenever you find out the answers to all your questions.

4. Break and build ideas by debate

You can turn a few ideas into many by not only breaking them down but also building them up. It can be easily done by conclusion with your co-worker, co-operator or your customer.

A real case study is how to build the idea for designing a Browser icon from one of our customer: Their demand is the animal symbol that looks simple, safe and speed. Firstly, we think about leopard, bird, rabbit and eagle. After that, we had a small discuss what animal should be chosen.

There are some people chose eagle and others chose leopard. Both of them gave the reason for their choice and we asked the choice from our customer. Finally, all of us agreed that leopard is the fastest animal on the ground. The achievements for our debating is the great icon meets fully the customer’s need.

Yo Browser app icon by Junoteam.

5. Create a mood board

A mood board is just a random collection of images, words, and textures focused on one topic, theme, or idea. It can help surface emotions and feelings will spark fresh, new ideas, and it’s also been proven to significantly improve information recall in comparison to more conventional methods of learning.

We always find all the things about the icon which we are demanded by customers to have more ideas. With the Browse icon that we mentioned above, after choosing the leopard, we noted all the leopard designs so we easily designed the icon that is suitable for our customer’s request.

We make sure that create a mood board is the main step that every designer should do before sketching. This step helps you save as much time as possible for great products. But one thing that designers must be attention is just found out ideas, not copying even a small image.

6. Doodle

Doodling helps people break out of the traditional mindset and think about familiar things in a different way, perhaps leading to unexpected connections.
What should you doodle?

• Take an object and visually break it down into its tiniest parts. So if you start with the word “dog,” you might draw paws, a tail, and a collar. Thinking about all the elements of that object and the environment it is found in will allow you to view an object in a new way.
• “Take two unrelated things, like elephants and ice cream, and draw them in their atomized parts,” writes Jennifer Miller for Fast Company. “Then create drawings that randomly fuse these parts together. Like trunk-cones or melting ears. Brown has used this technique to help journalists think up unique story angles.”

Theasianpreneur logo sketches by Junoteam.

When we designed the logo for Asianpreneur which is the entrepreneur logo, we had figured out all the features of this business person and doodle everything relative to their features. First of all, we knew that the special things of this entrepreneur are the newscast recording so we thought about tape-recorder. After that, we thought about the symbol of Asia, the development, etc. So we draw all its. Although the final product didn’t have all the features, why did we doodle all the elements? The answer is we save our time, find out the most sensible and strange idea. Furthermore, the doodle is the step which gives us the progressive mindset.

7. Online channel/ social network

While there are a million ways to spark your creativity, did you know that online channels, online websites, social networks can also be great ways to get the ideas flowing? They are creative fuel! You can learn a lot from the other clients, agencies, freelancers or you can find some great ideas for your future projects. Some of the creative and famous social networks are Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, website…

In conclusion, there are many ways for you have creative ideas, it depends on how and what you use the ways that we wrote above. We hope that these suggestions are the ideal ways for you to have innovative ideas.