Formstorming , is a term used to explain “the act of visual thinking”or practicing brainstorming in the physical world outside of your head. As discussed in Graphic Design: The New Basics this method is used to investigate an idea. To analyze and critique, reiterate and perform, this is what formstorming is when thinking creatively. This method of thinking and experimenting is meant to work around basic ways of thinking about design or style, and skip past designs that look like many others’ work. Formstorming gives an individual a way to experiment with original ideas and then rework them until it is complete and sound. An example of reiterating ideas creatively can be found on page 14 of New Basics… in which one artist gives the representation of an egg through one hundred different iterations. By doing this, you can see that dozens of images and text can be used to represent an egg (i.e a image of Benedict Arnold), and that by experimenting and exploring an idea quite far, that the results bring you many original and creative products.

Another type of formstorming is also seen throughout the pages of Lynda Barry’s graphic work titled What It Is… Within its first fifty pages, this book explores the idea of what makes an image and how it is empowered and remembered by us. Looking past technical terms for thinking, Barry explores the psyche of our minds to help explain why images are important to us. Written on her pages are many philosophical questions, “What happens when we put words together?”, “What happens when we keep words apart”, “How do we recognize something?”, “Are there images inside us?”and so on. These questions help to build the somewhat loose narrative of Barry’s work, though also are the pages’ illustrations and images Barry gives us to accompany her questions.

These pages including the featured image of this post (page 32 of What It Is…), shows us Barry’s own way of formstorming within her work. Though we see the final versions of each page, one could imagine the artist creating and recreating these pages until she was done. This page alone could represent an example of formstorming with the use of collage. A popular formstorming method, collage enables you to take cut out images, written text, original illustrations, and other materials to piece together and create an idea or vision. On Barry’s pages she uses collage to represent the images she refers to when addressing the text and questions on the page. The cutouts of Lincoln and stamps along with animals such as birds and rabbits giving an answer to how Barry herself recognizes something.

Page 32 of Lynda Barry’s work titled “What It Is…”