A Few Minutes of Design

Even concert pianists do warm-up exercises to limber up the fingers and clear the mind for the performance ahead. Designers are, or should be, no different. This delightful and colorful card deck presents fifty-two exercises or activities to jump-start your creative juices, free you from creative block, start a new project, or finish an existing one. Each exercise offers insight into the innumerable small decisions involved in design. How to join this part to that, how to establish a pattern or continue the series, how to say it without words, what fits, and what doesn't? These cards benefit established practicing designers or creatives in any field with activities that are sometimes playful, sometimes challenging, but always enlightening.

Creative Education Trust provides an integrated curriculum format for primary and secondary schools in England. Emily Campbell, Creative Education Trust's Director of Programmes, was formerly a graphic designer, a pattern maker in fashion, and design director at RSA and the British Council Arts Group. She lives in London, England.