As a designer, every day I am forced to solve visual problems, via pictures, type, and shapes. I feel like most non-creative people don't recognize the significance of this task. We are making something, literally out of nothing. Designers can take an idea/thought and make it tangible, and to actually think about that happening is unbelievable.
About a year and a half ago I bought a gridded Moleskine with no intention other than writing notes and doodling in it, but it became much much more to me. I was sitting in Target waiting for my pictures to get developed and I started drawing three lines (Horizontal, Vertical, or Diagonal) in every box. I filled up the first two pages and started to wonder if there was a way to do it all? A way to ever run out of ideas.
From then on I started to draw three lines in every single box in an attempt to prove that there are ENDLESS ways to go about arranging three lines, and how you can make those three lines interact from box to box. What happened afterward was insane, patterns started to form and new ways of thinking "outside the box" started to happen. It was eye opening. I found that after you do all of the basics with the three lines you then start to think about so many different ways of how you can arrange something. Creatively, your mind jumps to the next level. You no longer rely on what you already know and you start to experiment with completely new options. For me this started happening when I introduced the dotted/dashed line. This led the way to more visually pleasing patterns and a new technique for filling space.
So this will be a tumblr of all the "solutions" that I made over the past year or so. I left in the messed up pages to show that sometimes I just could not finish because of time, my pen running out of ink, or the fact that it may have just hurt my brain too much to continue. But I hope you enjoy these and I hope it makes you realize that there is not only one solution to your "problem," whether you're solving it in visual space or in life.
You are never wrong for anything you do, if someone doesn't get it, you just might be ahead of the generic patterns.
