What is jolt thinking?
BY CHUCK GREEN When you travel a road over and over it develops a rut—a well-worn path of least resistance. Such is true with design. Once you've created a few brochures, newsletters or certificates, it's easy to forget their true purpose and why and how they work. It's easier to simply repeat the formula.
That may work for someone else, but not for you and me. Good designers avoid the ruts—they carve new roads to different places. You do it with “jolt thinking.”
What is jolt thinking? It is thinking that questions the basic premise—the what, why, and how of doing something. Even though design is a creative exercise, it is fraught with formula thinking—a newsletter is 8 1/2 by 11 inches, a brochure has a headline on the cover, text in the middle and a logo on the back, and certificates have frilly type and a seal.
Jolt thinking is the opposite of formula thinking. It challenges you to examine your mission, strategy, and execution of a project. How? By answering three basic questions. What is the purpose? Why is it done the way it's done? And how can I do it most effectively?
