Recently, a printer called my office with a dream project. In order to showcase their capabilities at a tradeshow, they needed some new artwork for labels, a bag, and a t-shirt—all for made-up brands!—that would show off their printing prowess.

The guidelines were simple: include UV spot coating, metallic ink, and make ‘em colorful.

Let me get this straight … I pick the product, name, design style, and color palette; there’s no chain of command that has to approve each step of the process, and I have free reign to design anything I want as long as I incorporate UV coating, metallic inks and make the designs colorful? Pinch me! I have landed a dream project with virtually no inhibitors to my creative efforts.

Before I could finish skipping freely through the fields of my creativity, 3 hours had passed and I found myself with a whole lot of nothing.

With a lack of restrictions, I found myself wallowing in too many ideas without anything coming together. As frustration set in, I heard the voice of Stefan Mumaw and his advice on how to become an idea witch doctor (from his presentation at HOW 2014):

• Change the rules so you can see something else.
• Add Restrictions: when you make the problem more difficult, you become more creative.
• Alter the problem.
• Change the answers: get to absurdity as quickly as possible, then pull it back to relevance. 

Since not enough restrictions existed on my project, I created more. I started by imposing a tight, detailed deadline and budget upon my project. I gave myself 30 minutes to brainstorm wordlists on each unknown and select a direction before moving on to the next. For my label design, I focused on the colorful palette. After some timed-research, my colorful brainstorm led me to Brazil, then to coffee, then to the word for Brazilian-style coffee, cafezinhos. And here is the Cafezinhos coffee label I created: 

Cafezinhos Coffee Label designed by Kristin Murphy

Brand Identity design of Cafezinhos Coffee, designed by Kristin Murphy

With restrictions in place, the ability to take action and create ideas flowed far more freely.

Do you ever get asked to “come up with a concept” with very few details or specifics? Try this technique of imposing restrictions, and let me know if it works for you.

If you need help turning a pie-in-the-sky request into a specific, stand-out idea, we’d love to help.