Page 32 from the graphic novel “What It Is” by Lynda Barry

Formstorming is the process of thinking visually to come up with original new ideas on how to present something. In Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips formstorming is described as “a tool for designers to unlock and deepen solutions to basic design problems (13.)” When a designer goes through this process, they tend to do different exercises that involve repetition, patterns, and originality which helps brainstorm several nuanced ideas. Within Graphic Design: The New Basics, some example projects of formstorming include “A Plus” where the designer created one hundred different images representing the letter A, and “Record a Day” in which the designer creates a new album cover every day based on his music collection.

What It Is by Lynda Barry consists of questions like “what is an image?” and struggles with the issue of having little imagination as an artist. Each question has a collage of different images and different forms of texts that expand on what she is asking. One question that caught my attention the most was “how do we recognize something?” on page 32. It made me really think about how we use our minds to recognize something. After the main question was asked, there are different texts asking more questions that expand on how we recognize something like ” Where does it come from?”, “How do we know?”, etc. Also on this page, there is a small picture of Abe Lincoln with text saying ” Do you know if this is him?” We would all say “yes of course” because we recognize him by seeing pictures and learned about him in a United States history class. Barry was able to formstorm the question “how do we recognize something?” by restating the question through different ways and texts and through familiar images asking how do we recognize that. Basically she made different representations of her question by using her imagination, which helped to see different ways a formstorming process can go whether they be abstract, direct text, or images.