“How to Have Great Ideas – A guide to creative thinking” by John Ingledew offers exactly what it says on the cover, a handy guide that will ensure you’ll never be stuck for a great idea.

An ideas man with Dublin based agency Boys and Girls, Mike Fleming reviewed this weeks Laurence King book, How To Have Great Ideas: A Guide to Creative Thinking.

Each section offers a different approach to generating ideas or (and) tackling projects, and each approach includes examples of how it has been achieved in the past. Working in creative advertising for the last 5 years on project after project, occasionally (just occasionally), you get stuck or struggle to find your way towards a new and interesting solution to a brief, It’s often easy to forget that there’s more than one way to get started. That’s why this book comes as a welcome addition to my mini office-library, It isn’t something you’ll read just once or even read in one sitting, but rather something you’ll refer back to at the start of each new project.

This book is perfect for design and communication students or young professionals, as each section features a project for you to implement and put these strategies into practice. Something the younger, eager “intern” version of me would have relished in possessing.

Some of the projects are as straight-forward as finding and documenting faces and letterforms in the world around you but then others are as bizarre as asking What would Terry Richardson do, and doing just that.

Overall “How to Have Great Ideas” understands its target audience, designers and art directors have notoriously short attention spans and the book is easily digestible. It’s clear and concise with the perfect ratio of text to images… in my opinion. Other essential additions to every mini office-library I’d recommend are “Advertising for People Who Don’t Like Advertising” and “How to Make It as an Advertising Creative”.

 

Words by Mike Fleming
Photos by Lauren Pritchard