Page 20 from Lynda Barry’s “What It Is”.

In Lynda Barry’s novel called, “What It Is” she seems to use a method of formstorming in many of her pages and her pages combined in general. Formstorming is a tool for designers to unlock and deepen solutions to basic design problems, so Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips say in their book called “Graphic Design: The New Basics”. A basic example of formstorming would be taking a word and reiterating it in many different forms so one achieves many outcomes but in a slightly different style every time.

Lynda Barry has a more complex example of formstorming. The pages in the book can be combined to created a sort of formstorming theme. Almost all her pages include animals, or creepy figures, or words that form a sentence that turn it into a question. All her pages combined can be considered formstorming, however even just a single page can be considered formstorming. Such as in page 20 of the book. You can see that she has drawn three birds, however they are different in their own way. She has also drawn two creepy shadow like figures however they are not the same. Also she has questions and ominous quotes that have the same central theme, but don’t say the same thing.

The benefits of formstorming would be that it forces one to be creative with the subject matter. It makes one question, “What can I do to this subject to make it more interesting in many different ways?” Another benefit would be that after formstorming the producer could find something that he/she likes that they never would of thought that they would like unless they did formstorming. It adds new inventory to the producer’s skill-base and teaches more about the person itself.