We can know more than we can tell.
Michael Polanyi
… the public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
Paul Rand, Design, Form, and Chaos
Competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. Their knowing is often implicit, it is within the action itself: knowing-in-action.
Donald Schön
‘Trust Process’ is a series of educational titles by Unseen Sketchbooks. Experimental in format and approach, these books look at the underlying principles of design and image making. This series is intentionally simple in format and presentation – in the form of a small journal entry book.
The series aims to explore the key principles of design from the perspectives of key designers and illustrators.
Trust Process 2: ‘PinBoards’ by Jim Sutherland
These prompts serve as an underpinning set of strategies you can employ as an illustrator, but are equally applicable to anyone working in the creative industries. The prompts challenge you to consider how you are working and to consider alternative, oblique strategies for design thinking and illustrating.
Presenting ideas to these spaces is part of a known design process. Ideas, references and ephemera make it to the pinboard for consideration. Over time which ones do we return to? which hold our attention time-after-time? In a form of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, some ideas don’t stand the test of time. Others await a time to return for consideration while a small few rise to the surface and survive – and indeed thrive.
Gavin Ambrose
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Trust Process 1: ‘Talking Illustration’ by John Vernon Lord
Talking Illustration by John Vernon Lord is an eclectic and personal set of strategies for creative thinking. Talking Illustration is a record of a time John visited the University of Brighton to talk to students about illustration. At the end of the lecture, John recited a list of prompts when asked to explain how to stay creative and active as an illustrator.
These prompts serve as an underpinning set of strategies you can employ as an illustrator, but are equally applicable to anyone working in the creative industries. The prompts challenge you to consider how you are working and to consider alternative, oblique strategies for design thinking and illustrating.
In a similar way to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, these sets of creative directions from John take away the struggle to think of what to do, and to simply practice without over-thinking or conceptualising — you simply act upon them, and lose yourself in the making of a drawing.
Roderick Mills
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