Coming up with cool designs

sziada

Hi, i was wondering if people who do concepting and designing could possibly share a bit of how they think when they come up with designs or if there are any rules that they like to follow or guidelines that they have learned over the years.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

Maybe you should make this thread about the design process.

throttlekitty

There's a whole world/internet full of ideas, I don't know what you're hoping to accomplish with this thread, everyone is kind of doing their own thing. Maybe browse around design and concept blogs, they're filled with all sorts of new ideas.

As per the usual 'burnt out feeling' threads that pop up often, try sketching something different, go for a walk, watch a movie.

passerby

Get a pencil and paper and start tumbnailing ideas as they come to you. Its rare to just will a good idea into existence it is done via quick iteration times and building off other ideas.

When coming up with ideas do quick thumbnails spend no more than a minute or 2 per idea, than later come back to them and decide which ones to flesh out.

Eric Chadwick

Good advice above.

Also what helps me is to visit concept art sites and save off images that speak to me in some way... whether it's the subject, or the lighting, or the colours, or the shapes. That folder of images becomes my go-to during the design process.

It also helps to put the most relevant images together on one page, as an inspiration page or ref sheet, and put it up on a 2nd monitor, or your desktop background, so you can refer to it often.

We put some links here for finding cool images.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Reference

Yesterday I spent some time going thru FuckYeahConceptArt, some great stuff on there, lots of things to inspire new ideas. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
http://fuckyeahconceptart.tumblr.com/

passerby

Also their is a free app called pureRef I find good for creating idea boards of images

sziada

Thanks guys but I really wanted to discuss in this thread the theory of design and how you have used it in your work. Thanks for the great sites by the way.

Travis C

if you've got spare time, you can follow streams of someone concepting. here's an example of someone at DE live concepting and explaining his thinking process at the same time. might have to skip to later in the video to skip the beginning stuff.

http://youtu.be/xRx6ANi_c9s?list=UUBIdHvSAyoud-CNZOVKW2-w