We all want to be the first to come up with great tasty and delicious design ideas, but seldom does it happen. When I’m speaking about “GREAT IDEAS” I’m not talking about special cases where one saw a dream perhaps, or was sitting in the beach house one evening and suddenly as if by lightning something hit and knocked ‘em over, and he produced a masterpiece. I’m thinking more ordinary practical way you can use to come up and produce good or great design ideas. Usually you can tell when your design idea is a great one. It doesn’t necessarily mean that if it is great to you, it must be great to others. As designers we know when we don’t like our results. We may scratch our head and think our design idea is too dry, boring, missing something, overwhelming, or plain dumb. Nevertheless we sometimes settle with our poor imagination because after spending hours, we produced little inspiration.

You might ask yourself, “How can I come up with great looking designs almost every time?” I don’t necessarily know what works for you, but I will share with you some methods that help me.

I call them

TWO CARDINAL METHODS

1. Don’t settle with your first, second, third ideas. Why? because the first few design ideas that are spinning in your head come not from your creativity but rather from your relativity or association with other ideas. That is why it is necessary to dispose them from your head. Don’t expect to be creative on a first or second set of logos you created, because all they are, are reflections of works you’ve probably saw from somewhere else. Once you exhaust all your relative ideas, your brain becomes free from clutter, and you start designing ORIGINAL (OEM) stuff that is coming from your own well.

2. Try designing from 12am to 3am. I’m absolutely serious about that. This is the time frame when your logic becomes slouchy and your creative side continues to process. This is an important stage because all your attention is then focused on creativity. When your creative mind takes over the steering wheel, (which by the way is always steered by logic) then instead of always progressing in a straight pattern(as logic usually does) it begins to wonder in every direction it possibly can. What you will notice is the wealth of ideas that start pouring out. The only problem is keeping up with all of them. If you easily fall asleep, drink some tea instead of coffee, because tea keeps you calm but alert much longer than coffee.

If you use other effective methods please share them buy commenting on this post.