Step 3: Capturing the Idea

Your creative butterflies flutter around you in all their dazzling glory, but they could vanish at any moment. After the outpouring of ideas in Step 2: The Art of Brainstorming, it’s time to pick the best and brightest and pop them in your butterfly jar for a closer look. We cover a digital and analogue toolkit for capturing your idea’s essence, sharing it within the team and communicating it to others.

“Catch your dreams before they slip away”

The Rolling Stones

1] Capture the mood

Visual cues are a shortcut to our thinking centres. A moodboard is a visual collection of the influences, ideas and emotional triggers that define your idea. It can be physical, with magazine cutouts, printouts and screenshots on a wall or whiteboard, or virtual, using a shared Pinterest board or a social bookmarking tool such as Pearltrees. If you end up with a meeting-room wall full of Post-its that has to come down, try this Post-it app: it gives you more options than just photographing and transcribing them.

2] Step By Step

Agile started out in software development, but it’s just as useful for creative projects and project management. A movable visual board makes it easy to break your idea into manageable chunks, which you can judge individually and as part of the whole, and shows at a glance how the project is progressing. If you need to collaborate online, or don’t have room for a huge whiteboard of Post-its, Trello is free, simple and very useful. Set up a board, add members, name the columns to suit your project, then add cards and move them around to map your progress.

3] Present It

They say the best way to check you’ve fully understood an idea is to explain it to someone else. Set your ideas out in a short presentation, even if it’s only for reference. Steer clear of boring Office-style slides: hunt the web, grab some fonts, add interesting photos to illustrate your idea, and use a platform such as Prezi so people aren’t nodding off by slide three.

4] Come Together

Once upon a time, not so long ago, everyone had their own copy of a file on their hard drive and versioning was a nightmare. Now there’s a plethora of online collaboration tools. Google Docs is a free, easy way for several people to work on the same document from anywhere, and Dropbox is good for sharing larger files. For fuller project tracking, Basecamp and Asana are both popular, and Slack can be used free, with some limitations.

5] Map Your Collective Mind

Mind-mapping software can help you boil your idea down to its essence while showing how its parts connect. It puts the idea at the centre and radiates out to its parts, showing the connections, instead of the isolated list you get from typical note taking. As with many of these tasks, online tools let you do it together and in real time. Try Coggle to get started.

6] Bare The Bones

Challenge yourselves to sum up your idea in ten words, and make every one count. Put this at the top of your shared documents, brainstorming boards and mind maps. It’s like turning the telescope around to check everyone is still seeing the same thing. Or describe your idea or product in a single sentence of 140 characters or fewer, the length of an old-school tweet. It focuses you on the most important elements and weeds out the ones that cause confusion.

7] Remember Analogue

Ideas develop, and good ideas should develop quickly. Psychologists reckon we can hold only a handful of things in short-term memory at once (the classic figure is seven, give or take two). You know how it goes: your idea is teetering on the edge of oblivion, someone asks if you fancy a cup of tea, and it vanishes in a puff of smoke. With so many digital distractions, keep a notebook handy to scribble ideas down as they arrive. It’s portable, quick, works anywhere and, best of all, doesn’t need power! Getting ideas onto the page also makes room for the next brilliant ones. You can move them into your digital tool of choice at your leisure, and that gives you a two-step vetting process that separates the wheat from the chaff.

So, to wrap up: ideas are fleeting, ephemeral beings. Finding them isn’t enough. You have to capture them, then care for and nurture them so they develop, until one day you release them back into the wild.

This is part 3 of a 7-part series. Missed step 1? Read A Jargon Free Anatomy of a Creative Brief. Next up: Step 4: Harnessing the Power of Iteration.

If you need a hand writing a creative brief, or would like Developing Dreams to help bring your idea to life or run a brainstorm, get in touch.