Pg. 30 in What It Is by Lynda Barry

While reading What It Is? By Lynda Barry, I discovered that Lynda Barry is directing the reader’s attention to the human’s ability to dismiss a thought or an image of creativity. As people we doubt ourselves and in the reading, the character presents the difficulty of discovering more creativity. Throughout the reading, Lynda Barry forces you to think about these things and asks a lot of questions. For example, on Page 30, she asks “How and why are there images inside of us?” This is one of the many pages that directly correlates to the idea of Formstorming. On this page, there is a collage of images and words that could be examples of images in our minds. This page could be seen as a form of formstorming just in the way it presents each of the pictures in different ways. In the image, she presents her expression of imagery by placing a variety of images on this page.

This expression of thought is Formstorming because it presents an act of visual thinking on how images come to our minds. In the book, Graphic Design: The New Basics, the authors Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Philips explain Formstorming as an act of visual representation. The deeper the research involved the better and more creative the thoughts. Many exercises such as One Hundred Iterations, which is a formstorming exercise that takes one idea and displays it in 100 different ways, can be seen on multiple pages of What It Is? This is a great way to open your mind and discover creativity. The definition correlates in the presentation of formstorming, through the collages of images on every page being a visual representation of an idea giving the reader the opportunity to question and find answers.