Welcome to the Modern Medium Podcast! We talk about the tools, strategies, tactics, and possibilities in modern medium design. In our first episode, we’re exploring ideas: how they form, how they change, and how we might incorporate those ideas into graphic design.

The creative process and coming up with ideas

When you’re stuck in a creative rut, it’s difficult to know where to begin with an idea. Even when you do have an idea, it’s easy to get caught up in what you think something is supposed to be or what it’s supposed to look like. So it’s an important part of the process to learn how to let go.

Ideas can come from anywhere. You can think of anything as a base point and go from there with it. Think about what you knew before, think about what you know now, and think about how things have changed. This doesn’t have to go anywhere tangible; you can use this as a brainstorming exercise or mind map and take off from it.

The Willamette River

The Willamette River was brought up in class and it was interesting for Paris to think about the things she knew about the river, the things she didn’t know, its past, and its future. She shares her train of thought from there: how the river has served generations, the way it bisects each side of the city, what it has meant to the people living in Oregon, and how things are going to change.

It’s interesting to think about the lifetime of the river, how that can form ideas, and how those ideas will change. It’s not simply continual movement of water, but how you react to it. Paris shares the story of going down to the river, hoping to be inspired by nature, but being blocked by a barrier when she arrived. The idea that sparked was how trashed it’s been — and the group put up an art exhibition on trash the following week.

There’s so much going on around the river every day and we can have no idea what’s happening, and to Paris, she thinks of it as a continual cycle of change. 

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