Harnessing your creativity is essential to becoming a successful designer, but being consistently creative isn’t always easy. A tricky brief from a client, a tight deadline, or a challenging project can trip up both new and experienced designers. Luckily, the instructors in Full Sail’s Graphic Design degree program integrate strategies for being creative on demand into their classes.

Finding a structured process for idea generation and refinement can help you avoid or overcome creative roadblocks. For Suzy Johnson, the course director for Packaging & Prototypes, there are five distinct phases of the creative process: research, synthesis (understanding the information from your research), concepting (sketching or idea mapping), prototyping (testing your design), and executing (creating final deliverables).

“[I spend a lot of time] pushing my students to think about the depth of those parts of the process,” Suzy says. “When they’re researching and they see a logo they like, I’ll ask them, ‘What do you do when you identify that you like it? Do you find out who the designer or [which brand’s] logo it is? Do you go to the designer or agency’s website? How are you figuring why you like it?’ And a lot of the time they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I just like the way it looks.’ If they don’t understand the logo, it won’t help them. So a lot of what I do is pushing them to think more deeply about the creative process.”

Fellow course director Carson Wampler, who teaches the program’s Project & Portfolio V course, also stresses the importance of having a clear process and taking actionable steps for creativity. He’s implementing tools and models for design thinking to help his students come up with ideas that work.

“I think toolbox-based methods and process-based methods are going to be more helpful for students in the long run, because things like ‘Hey, make a mind map. Hey, do some brainstorming,’ I think they're too generalized, and students have probably heard them before. They may be getting bored of those models. Plus, [toolbox-based methods] give them some experience using models that teams are using in the industry.”

One of the newer models he’s using in class is called SCAMPER, which stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and rearrange.

“If you find yourself stuck, you can go down this list and ask yourself, ‘Can I substitute anything? Is there anything I can combine? Is there anything I can adapt for a different purpose?’ and so on and so forth.”

Another method that Carson uses in his class is called Worst Idea, where he encourages students to come up with the worst ideas they can think of.

“Instead of putting Post-it notes on the board of everything you think would be great, everyone has a good time coming up with just really awful ideas. It's this reverse snowball effect, where, after a while, you can't come up with any horrible ideas anymore and all that's left are ideas that actually start to sound reasonable,” he explains.

In addition to focusing on actionable steps for coming up with initial ideas, Graphic Design instructors also help students figure out how to refine their existing projects. Visual Realization course director Maya Mendelewicz helps her students elevate projects they worked on earlier in the degree program so they can include them in their professional portfolios.

“[One thing I tell students when they’re refining their projects] is to step away from your work, just take a break. Because if you're working on it for too long, you're going to kind of drain yourself,” Maya says. “Another tip I love to give is to start [your design] in just black and white, to home in on the design itself before adding other elements to it.

“Another piece of advice is to simplify, because often I find that people are trying to put way too many ideas into one little box, but that box can only contain so much,” she continues. “A lot of times, the student’s work is really great. They need to just take a step back, simplify, [figure out] what's the main idea here? Then go forward from there.”

Regardless of the specific strategies that each course director uses, the result is the same: Full Sail’s Graphic Design instructors are committed to teaching their students ways to bring consistent, creative ideas to their design work, both in the classroom and beyond.