It's all about vision

It might sound a bit obvious to say that all the best designs come from the mind, but you’d be surprised how many designers start creating something on screen without having a clue what they’re going to do first.

It truly is about vision.

A case in point is a poster I recently created for The Open Theatre Group’s upcoming production of Macbeth. Having seen the route that directors Caz Tricks and Sally Luff were going down with the witches, an image immediately sprung to mind that I felt perfectly melded the connotations of death and sex inherent in the production. In actual fact, the only sketch I did was on a post-it note, but it was enough to get the idea across to Caz and Sally.

One photo shoot later (in which the witches were fully clothed) and it was time to put the finished poster together in Photoshop. The witches were stripped digitally (thanks to assembled images from the internet) and the atmospheric mist and moon added.

In the end, it worked out exactly as I’d imagined. But in my opinion, the only reason it did was because I had the idea firmly implanted in my head from the beginning.

Not limited to just this medium, having vision is an intrinsic part of anything creative. If you don’t know what you’re going to create before you take the mouse in your palm, you’ve already lost the battle.