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7:34 PM, Monday November 25th 2024

The act itself of design is one of problem solving, and so unfortunately there's no formulaic, consistent set of steps. With every new problem, a new solution is required, and each solution is some combination of the tools you have at your disposal. That said, there are strategies that can help you think about the problem, to explore it and break it down into smaller problems. Design problems are most challenging when they're big and impenetrable - and so, strategies for getting in there and getting your brain working through it can be quite valuable.

One I use very frequently is asking myself questions about the problem, or about the context in which the problem is meant to be solved. Our designs don't exist in a vacuum - they are implemented by characters, in a world, and those characters have access to certain technologies, or have certain cultural drivers, and the world - the physical location, the time period, etc. impact all of these things. Asking yourself questions is a good way to crack open a problem and flesh it out, and every answer leads either to new problems, or gives you something to include in your design.

Something as simple as a question of "hey do these people have access to glue" can lead to a ton of simple details, like rivets, nails, brackets, belts, etc. that you may never have considered.

This is a video I made for Proko's Channel a few years back - it's pretty short, but it goes into this in more detail.

3:40 PM, Thursday November 28th 2024

Thanks it helped a lots

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The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Printer Paper

Printer Paper

Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.

As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.

Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).

Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.

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