How to come up with the right design for a project?

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

In last few months a lot of people asked me a very hard question to answer:

How do I do to come up with such a variety of designs?

This is how I approach every design challenge:

1. I write down the keywords of all the things that have to be shown through the design. These words represent the product or subject of the design in every aspect: physical, emotional, vibe, energy, etc.
2. Then, from all those words, I choose 1 or 2 that describe best each aspect of the product and what the spot gotta say through the design and take out the rest.
3. Then I narrow them down to Ia total of 5 or 6 words that are very important to the message and convey the most important aspects.
4. And then I narrow them even more: to just one word. -Yeah! It’s really hard! but you can do it!-
   And that one word, it’s the most important feeling that design will give your audience. That’s the word that when someone sees that design they will think of. That word is very important because it’s the word that you are using to communicate to your audience and it will determine how much success you have with that design in communicating to your audience, so you have to choose carefully.

Here is real life example on how the one word design system works:

This image below, is the original ending of the 7UP commercial ( this is not the final commercial that’s on the air). I’m using it here for this example because it represents perfectly the one word I originally chose to base the look of the motion graphics of this commercial. This image, is the director’s original cut, and it looks pretty much exact to the original storyboard of the spot. And I worked on my works from that original storyboard, imagining this last frame.

My words for this 7up commercial started with:

7UP, natural, natural world, 7UP world, refreshing, fizz, lime, lemon, wonderful flavor, animated, get into my 7up world, flavor, musical, Denise Gonzales, family, for everybody, everyone enjoys it, joy, joyful, colorful, full of life, full of energy, new, it transforms your world, it comes into your world, it’s beautiful, mesmerizing, awe, nature/animal mixture, bubbles, delicious fizz.

Narrow to: magic, natural, animated world, refreshing, wonderful flavor, joy
Final word: magical

This spot -and the music video I just finished- transport you into the magical animated world of the refreshing wonderful lemon lime flavor of 7UP. Looking at the spot you can pretty much literally ‘see’ all those words on the screen.

Because each project/product/subject has a very different message, the words I use to design are very different from each other. So, the result is that in my portfolio you find a big variety of spots.

See below the commercial where this animation appeared:

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

And even more clear is the concept in the music video:

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

If you have questions or suggestions write a comment, so I can answer here and more people can get more out of it.
Aleloop. Art & Design Strategist