The Art of Spontaneous Creativity
Visual sketching habits.

Walking down the city while listening to good music and suddenly getting hit by a great idea because of a quote. Watching a tutorial on Youtube and formulating on my head how am I going to recreate these new techniques. Talking with people about life giving me as a result a co-creative environment full of ideas with different type of approaches.
I don’t think people realize how many opportunities we loose everyday. This is a serious problem, those ideas are there because in your heart you really feel like doing them. The main reason we don’t act about it, is fear. Fear of “what if it doesn’t work”, fear of “what would they say if it goes wrong”, “I don’t have the money or time to do it”, “I need to learn a lot of stuff”. Because of fear we automatically build a wall of resistance around the new ideas in our head, making them forgettable.
Not going to lie, I was one hundred percent that person. However, I recently had a huge change of attitude… mostly because I was tired of feeling weak every time an idea appeared in my head.
One day I saw a friend working online with a little notebook next to him, it was a Moleskine. He uses it on the daily basis to write up meetings, reminders, phone calls and much more. I loved that the sheets were plain white in the interior so I was able to write, draw or even stick or clip things in it and it would look great. These notebooks are the type of things that gives you the impression that is crazy disorganized, but if you pay attention it’s actually clean, in order and you can find everything you need very quickly. Just like Casey Neistat studio.
So I bought one and started writing everything down. The habit of being able to see all your thoughts together gives you the confidence and ambition to create great projects, or maybe failing projects.. but at least you get to test and know what works and what doesn’t.
When I started the Ironhack UX Design Pre-Course they introduced me to Visual Sketching. I’m not an illustrator or anything related to it, but I actually like doing it because it brings a spontaneous unknown creativity to connect ideas into drawings and words. It’s a great exercise to improve your interpretation skills.
Visual sketching is like every ability, you need to practice to get better. I watched the 6 Ted Talks every UX professional should watch post and made sketches to the first 3 videos. This is the first time I do it. If you’re an illustrator or artist in general… I’m sorry, this will hurt your eyes, but I promise I’ll improve! :)
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- Sheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier.

2. David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization.

3. Margaret Gould Stewart: How Giant Websites Design For You.

From the first video to the third one I think I improved a little bit on spacing and showing more connection with what the person was talking about.
Not only your creativity will get confortable with getting out more frequently but also you won’t be afraid to put ideas represented in words or drawings into a piece of paper.
Every human being is capable of incredible things.
Don’t kill your ideas. They matter.
