When Nature Sparks Creativity
By focusing your attention on the tiniest details, you can find your way through the thickest forests — and the toughest projects.
MY GRANDPA WAS A NAVY SAILOR DURING WWII. He spent much of his time in the service visiting far-off places like Alaska, Japan, and Guam, exploring new climates, cultures, and landscapes. I like to think exploration is in my blood, too, so I’m always trying to get a little better at it. One of my favorite pastimes is getting lost on purpose, then trying to find my way back.
So I was immediately intrigued by Tristan Gooley’s book, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals and Other Forgotten Skills. In it, Gooley explains how the direction of flying birds, the growth patterns of moss, and the natural flow of landscapes can help you orient yourself and decipher your surroundings. Reading the book and practicing his methods was wonderful, but the most surprising thing I took away from Gooley was completely unintentional and entirely unexpected: Reading Nature’s Signs helped me become a more intuitive graphic designer. Typefaces, colors, and website wireframes are available to everyone, but to use those tools in the right ways — to truly help clients achieve their goals — you’ve got to explore the territory at a deeper level, and let the smallest details guide you to a solution.
Reading Nature’s Signs is all about gathering clues and applying deduction to “read” your surroundings — using nature and your own intuition to navigate rather than relying on electronic gadgets or GPS. Gooley dubs his approach the SORTED method: Shapes, Overall character, Routes, Tracks, Edges, and Detail. The first three are about understanding your surroundings and the last three are about investigating the details. For example, when you’re lost in the woods and you notice the trees have more branches on one side, odds are you’re looking at the south side of the tree, which gets more sun and warmth than the north side.
The more I practiced the SORTED method in nature, the more I recognized similarities with the design process. How understanding your surroundings (the client’s organization, their primary audience, the organization’s history, the challenge being addressed, and the ideal outcome) and investigating the details (the most inviting tone, the ideal way to engage the audience, and the best way to direct that audience to take action) are crucial to any project.
This new spin on my old approach has changed the way I think: Instead of feeling overwhelmed with information, struggling to begin, and quickly forgetting what’s most important, I break things into pieces. I take the time to understand what’s been given to me (the shape, the overall character, the client’s previous work) and investigate the possibilities from multiple angles, balancing the expected with the unexpected.
Once I’ve started creating the work, I quickly realize that I’m no longer the one doing the navigating — I’m helping others navigate by leading them where the client would like them to go: Color, shape, texture, and typefaces are the breadcrumbs that provide subtle and not-so-subtle clues guiding the audience to the ultimate destination.
For instance, last winter, Friday had the opportunity to create a new brand identity for Words in the Wild, a small Bay-Area nonprofit that’s helping children read with more confidence. The organization uses science and exploration to make reading an adventure; by dissecting words into their component parts and investigating them in the same way a child might inspect the parts of a leaf or a flower, children can grasp a word’s form and function, rather than just learning the sounds. By using warm earth tones, a friendly organic typeface and the figure of a child leaping over words, the designs immediately express the idea of adventure.
And like those kids who discovered that reading opens a world that they once found intimidating, Reading Nature’s Signs has opened up that same sense of discovery for me — someone who never much cared for science growing up. Like math, science seemed filled with definites and fancy terms, whereas I was always more drawn to magical elements — imagination, mystery, and all those things that seemed totally un-understandable. Of course, that distinction sounds silly now that I see how science and imagination and wonder are all intertwined. And by combining them in the right proportions, I’ve learned to discover unexpected solutions — finding my way, even when I feel lost in the middle of nowhere.
For more of Tristan Gooley’s work, visit naturalnavigator.com.
