What is a systematic creative process?

- [Instructor] What is a systematic creative process? In general, the creative process is approaching a design project and utilizing your creativity to solve a design problem. To help you refine and improve your workflow, we're going to go through a six stage systematic creative process you can use on any design project you face. It's made up of six specific stages. The client. Knowing your client and what they need you to do. Discovery. Gathering critical information to define expectations. Three, strategy. Using design thinking skills to improve your creative ideas. Four, creative work. Craftsmanship tactics and creative methods to improve design. Five, creative support. Delivering final art and pitching new ideas. And six, finishing a project. Organize and establish a system for project file standards. The reason why we're taking a systematic approach is we'll use the same stages of development for any type of project. This will allow us to improve our creative focus. So regardless of what type of project you're working on, we can take the framework of this systematic process and apply it to that. It might not be as intensive as one project compared to another project, but that's where the flexibility comes in in terms of your workflow. So you might use this for an event logo, a brochure design, a label design, an icon design, packaging, maybe it's a hand lettering project, a t-shirt design, a trade show booth, an illustration, animated video, ad design, poster design, character design, and of course, brand design. Now brand design is one of the most complex forms of a design project, and if you want to see this creative process leveraged for that specific genre, then I encourage you to watch my learning logo design course and you'll see it in action. So we're going to go over each stage a little more in depth here so you fully understand why we're going to focus on a step by step process. The first stage, the client. You're contacted by a potential client who wants you to work on a creative project. What are the first steps? Establish the scope of work. What exactly do they want me to do for them? Provide a quote for the creative project. Determine how much you need to charge for your work. Is this a project you want to work on? Will you enjoy working on this project with this client? That's a really important question to ask yourself. The second stage, discovery. Discovery is the research phase and you want to get to know the client and their audience. So gathering critical information is important. Understanding the who, what, where, when and how of the creative project. Defining client expectations. What are their aesthetic tolerances? Are they rigid, or can they trust you, et cetera? Graphic investigation, doing your own independent of client thinking and learning related to a project. Stage three, strategy. Strategy is all about applying the information you discovered in the previous stage and leveraging it. Slow boiling ideas. Letting all the information you've taken in steep to improve concepts. Deductive ideation. We'll leverage design thinking tactics to help us develop visual ideas. Capturing ideas. As ideas come to mind, capture them via simple thumbnail drawings. Now yes, drawing is a part of this course and we'll specifically focus with two movies, one on thumbnail drawing and why you want to do that, and another on refined drawing. But this is a skill anybody can do. Stage four, creative work. In this stage, we'll focus on determining our creative directions and building our vector art precisely. Choosing style, type, color, and art directing yourself. Picking the best aesthetic for a design and improving it as you create. Drawing to improve design. Ideation using simple thumbnail drawing and refined drawing to assist us in vector building. Design craftsmanship skills. Using shapes, strokes, and symmetry to create precise vector-based artwork. Stage five, creative support. Delivering final creative assets to a client and helping them market themselves more effectively. Creating a brand standards guide. Providing a simple way for a client to manage and use your design work. Social media images. Helping your clients showcase the work you created and promote with it. Proactive creativity. Showing your client additional ideas of what they could do. And the sixth and final stage, finishing a project. The project is finished, so this final stage has focused on you, and how you manage your own work files. Organizing your project files, best practices on file management in naming standards, et cetera. For this course, we'll utilize the systematic creative process to focus on the needs of two specific client projects. Align a patriotic designs, creating a set of theme designs that can be used on retail merchandise and other graphic applications. And, a company core value graphic, creating a design to represent a company's core values regarding environmental issues. The creative process can be systematic, but that doesn't mean it has to be clean, easy, or avoid challenges along the way. It just needs to produce precise results. In my opinion, if you don't struggle a little with the creative process, you're not trying hard enough, and it's time to rethink how you work. Think of the creative process as a thoroughly enjoyable struggle.