A little room to play
By Ameen Abdul RahmanMarketer & creative developer
A line of type, a change in scale, a different reading order. Sometimes a small experiment is enough to start a bigger thought.
The small studies in this notebook leave room for that kind of exploration. Set a constraint, make a few versions and compare what becomes clearer.
Give the idea a little space
Not every experiment needs to begin with a deliverable. Sometimes the useful first step is to work with a line of text, a change in scale or a different order of information and see what becomes clearer.
A small study is easier to learn from when there is a question behind it. What happens if the headline carries the whole composition? What can be removed before the meaning starts to disappear?
Make one decision visible
Limiting the ingredients can make the thinking easier to see. Keep the type consistent, reduce the colour choices and let spacing or hierarchy do more of the work.
That does not make the result automatic. It makes the differences between versions easier to compare, which is often where the useful lesson appears.
Bring the lesson back
A playground matters because it gives curiosity somewhere to go. The result does not need to become a client project to improve the next piece of work.
Keep the versions that taught you something. Write down the decision, not just the final look. Those notes are often more useful than another folder of unexplained references.
A useful question to take away
What is the one decision that would make your next piece of work clearer for the person it is meant to reach?
