Overview of the creative process

- [Instructor] What is the creative process? If we're talking about creativity itself, then it's a very difficult thing to pin down, and you're going to find there are probably as many theories about creativity as there are people who create. Essentially, it's the ability to go beyond traditional concepts, patterns, rules, interpretations, and relationships to create or synthesize something new and meaningful as a result. Simply put, creativity is a way of thinking.

There's no magic formula that can be used for every circumstance or recipe for guaranteed success. Part of your journey as a designer will indeed involve failures if you're doing it right. It's owning and learning from them that will help you to improve, but the process for our purposes here as graphic designers and communication artists begins with a creative brief, and after that, the process I work to is distilled down into three phases, which are research, where you gather all of your background information, ideation, where you work things out and employ your creativity and iterate with different ideas, and finally production, where the final artwork is prepared for delivery.

In this chapter we'll take a look at the topics of research and ideation in a little more detail. Towards the end of this title, you're going to get to do some common production tasks in the industry standard tools of Adobe's Creative Cloud. So let's dig in and find out more about the creative brief.