7 Steps that will highly boost your design creativity and brainstorming capability

Are you a Graphic Designer? Are you stuck on a design? Want to do something new & creative? Having hard times to make a creative design? Here is a small guide for you to brainstorm creative graphic design ideas in no time!

Graphic designing is a field of artists and can be joined by creative people only. In graphic designing, you design different things and make them look attractive and eye-catching so that the viewer could get impressed. Designing something is complex, and thinking about a perfect design is difficult, especially when you go out of ideas. So, how can you enhance your designs creatively and grab more attention?

Here are the 8 steps you need to follow, but before that, let's see why it is important to brainstorm ideas to create great designs:

The Importance of Brainstorming in Graphic Design

Brainstorming is a way of generating new ideas by observing and thinking about something. It helps you find creative solutions to complex problems. It can be done individually or within a team. While brainstorming, you think about multiple ideas and their impacts and choose the one that you think is the best. It allows you to think freely without being judged. It also helps you and your team gather lots of ideas in less time and refine them to find the best solution. It introduces a different perspective and lets you think out of the box.

So, how to brainstorm the best ideas?

Step 1: Problem Identification

The first step to developing beautiful and meaningful designs is identifying the problem and understanding user needs completely. Think about the problem from a user's perspective rather than a graphic designer's. This will give you more insights into what users or customers might expect from your design. Ask your client to answer some specific questions while providing you with the design brief:

• What is needed?
• Why it is needed?
• Who needs it?

Knowing these things makes it easier for you to think about the design and brainstorm different ideas.

Step 2: Research and Gather Information

When you have understood the problem, research what others are doing to solve that problem and check the consumer response to existing projects, market trends, and competition. Gather all this data and analyze it. See the designs created by other graphic designers to identify what new could be done. Observe your surroundings and take time to grasp the details. Collect all the data in a notebook or somewhere else.

Step 3: Collaborate with Others

Once you have collected all the information regarding the design you want to create, analyze the data. Study what you have collected and look for useful ideas while discarding the rest. Think about designs with your team or individually. Share your ideas with others and listen to what they have to say.

Step 4: Develop Demo Designs

Now that you have plenty of design ideas, you need to turn them into reality. There are many options for you to choose a way of demonstration:

1. Mind Mapping

Mind mapping boosts your brain power by graphically representing the tasks, keywords, items, or ideas regarding a particular concept. While mind mapping, you depict the ideas in a non-traditional manner. Our brain is used to grasping information randomly. When we do mind mapping, our memory becomes better, and our brain collects more information in less time. So, mind mapping can greatly help you generate and develop wonderful graphic design ideas.

2. Design Inspiration from Pinterest, Behance and Dribble

After finding the ideas or keywords from mind mapping, Pinterest, Behance and Dribble are three great platforms to get design inspiration. You can search for any topic on these platforms and take ideas from others' work. Don’t steal, rather invent something new by employing existing ideas. Dribble lets you explore the world's best design portfolios. Take screenshots or download photos of relevant ideas that will help you in the next process.

3. Inspiration from Google Image Search

Once more, use the ideas or keywords from your mind map to search for images in Google to expand your collection of design ideas. Pinterest, Behance, Dribble or other social platforms have a lot of amazing design ideas to explore but google is the boss. To make your design more unique than all other design on the internet, you have to collect all the ideas and make something different. Isn’t it?

4. Create Moodboards

A moodboard is used to communicate ideas and concepts with other people. This visual technique creates planned and well-thought arrangements of text, images, materials, and other visual elements.

So, in this step, assemble all the photographs you captured or downloaded from Google and other social media. Using Adobe Illustrator or another software of your choice, arrange and align all of the images on the Artboard in a proper ratio. Lastly, make a moodboard with all of the images and ideas you've found so far, and get ready for the next step.

5. Design & Sketching

Once the moodboard is ready, decide how will you initiate the design. You can create the design by Sketching or just make it by tweaking the moodboard ideas. If you want to create unique visuals, sketching is the method that is most commonly used, especially for the creation of logos, icons, vector graphics, or illustrations. If you don't want to sketch, you can merely design and build your final product.

6. Import the sketch in Adobe Illustrator or Figma

If you create your design by sketching, import the final drawing into Adobe Illustrator or Figma to edit it and add colors.

7. Refine the design & apply colors

The finished sketch should have its edges cleaned up before it is finalized any further. If additional shapes are required, create and add them. Then, you can apply colors that fit with the design. If you've been advised to use a specific brand color before, be sure to do so.

8. Create multiple copies of the refined design and test them differently

Instead of making a single copy of your existing design, create multiple copies and experiment with different concepts. What if you put them in an odd position, change their color, and alter their font? You'll get a whole different design that you couldn't have imagined.

9. Select the final design after eliminating other ideas

After you've made several designs, you can eliminate them one by one based on what your clients or company wants, leaving you with the best one.

10. Export the design in SVG or other formats for mockups

Finally, export your design in several forms, such as SVG, JPG, PNG, and others, to test it on various mockups and present it to your company or clients.

Step 5: Creating Mockups

Mockup means giving a physical demonstration to your design ideas that help you showcase your designs to the customer so that they can let you know if they want to make any changes or whether they like your designs or not. By showing the mockup to your company or clients, you can get their feedback and suggestions, which you can then use to improve the design further.

Step 6: Adjustments and Improvements

After testing the mockups and getting feedback from the clients, make changes to your design based on what the clients want and then start working on the final design. Once all the changes have been done, you should ask your client if there is anything else you can do to make the design better. If yes, it should be done in this step; otherwise, move to the final step.

Step 7: Delivery

After you have gone through all the above steps and are fully satisfied with your designs, you can deliver them to your client or present it with your team and other people. You may also offer your designs orally, utilizing visual aids or manuals with the appropriate graphic representation to your company.

Final Words

Brainstorming might sound a little frustrating thing to do, but it is the best technique for generating ideas. It lets you work on all the ideas you got and think about them thoroughly. While brainstorming, you focus on a single problem and try to find the most creative yet simple and easy way to solve it. Brainstorming plays a vital role in graphic design as well.

As a graphic designer, you have to think about different ideas to create beautiful, attractive and meaningful designs to make your boss or client happy. Good designs are a key to conquering the market, as a picture speaks a thousand words. So, whenever you get out of ideas, give a read to this article. We hope that our 8 steps to brainstorm the graphic design ideas in 2022 will help you. Thank you for reading!