Robin Landa is a designer who has made a career out of spreading her wealth of knowledge and talent. She has written 21 books on branding, drawing, advertising, and creativity, including her latest, DRAW! The guided sketchbook that teaches you how to draw, and teaches at the School of Design at Kean University. She’s also the creative director of her own firm, robinlanda.com and has been recognized by The National Society of Arts and Letters, The National League of Pen Women, and Graphic Design USA. If you’re in Boston, check out Robin’s presentation at the HOW Design Live Conference on May 15, 2014.

We wanted to learn about Robin’s own creative process and inspirations. Pencils out — the professor is in!

ADC: How did you get your start as a creative professional? When did you first start drawing and how did that lead to becoming a teacher and creative director working on branding and design?

Robin Landa: Pencils and paper were my companions as a child. Along with sewing the fashions I designed for my Barbie doll and choreographing to pop music in the basement of our home, I drew a great deal of the time. I drew the trees and houses across the street. I drew my Grandma Minnie drinking tea. I drew faces and the human figure. Illustration, design and art were three neighboring streams that flowed from my young mind’s eye. I didn’t think of it as drawing per se — it was simply something I did that was tied to who I was as a kid entertaining myself and making sense of the world around me. I needed to pursue knowledge (and pleasure) through personal creative acts: through making and doing.

At the end of my senior year in college, a creative director of a publishing company in Manhattan hired me for a free-lance illustration project; I was very grateful. I recall looking across her desk at her stately face, with only my aspirations to keep me from bolting out of her door. I left her office that day feeling encouraged and energized and those feelings lasted. A first break can do that for someone.

When I was in graduate school, I received a teaching fellowship. That opportunity started my career in design education. Being a skillful teacher is very useful when working with clients, especially with marketing executives who don’t always understand how design can help their businesses. In fact, my teaching skills have worked so well with clients that I’ve been hired to teach marketing teams about design and creative thinking. I hope my fervor for the visual arts comes through to every student, reader and client.

At the end of graduate school, the Aaron Berman Gallery on 57^th Street in Manhattan started exhibiting my work. I was ecstatic. A few years later, I wrote the first of over twenty books about visual communication. Gratifying free-lance design, branding and illustration work fueled my teaching, writing and research. Again, neighboring streams were flowing from my imagination.

One can be like René Magritte by taking the familiar and making it strange or like Odilon Redon by taking the strange and making it familiar.

ADC: DRAW! is a comprehensive but totally approachable guide for beginners. How long did it take you to compile? How did you decide on the format, an engaging combination of academic principles and space for experimentation?

Robin: Drawing makes many people happy. When you draw, you are concentrating, allowing the rewarding neu­rotransmitter dopamine to flow. Some people report feelings of calm. Others say drawing allows them to keenly focus.

When you draw, you are using multiple brain regions. Your frontal lobe kicks into action providing reasoning, planning, movement, emotions, and problem solving. Your parietal lobe provides movement and ori­entation, recognition, perception of stimuli; your occipital lobe delivers visual processing; your temporal lobe, perception and memory; and your cerebellum, additional movement.

I conceived and wrote DRAW! to make the experience of learning to draw from a book, or from an instructor supported by a book, as organic and enjoyable as possible.  Offering (a full course of) instruction in the form of a sketchbook seemed like a natural solution.

“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

Drawing is a form of visual thinking. It’s a cognitive way to explore and understand ideas and experiences. I thought this approach would create a stress-free way to allow readers to explore and interpret what they see in the visible world while also providing a form of creative self-expression. What’s wonderful about drawing is that it not only fosters keen observation along with critical and creative thinking but it also can nurture the imagination. One can be like René Magritte by taking the familiar and making it strange or like Odilon Redon by taking the strange and making it familiar. Including drawing prompts and drawings by esteemed designers, illustrators and artists, such as Jennifer Sterling, Stefan G. Bucher, Mary Ann Smith, and Greg Leshé, DRAW! helps readers see how they can use drawing as a visual medium.

ADC: How does teaching students of design inform your own consulting work? 

Robin: In the design professions, a problem is given and you have to solve it. However, to solve a given problem well, a designer must learn to think like a scientist rather than a detective. My premise goes back to Einstein and Infeld in 1938:

“For the detective the crime is given, the problem formulated: Who killed Cock Robin? The scientist must, at least in part, commit his own crime as well as carry out the investigation.”

They continue,

“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

This holds true in design, too. To teach my design and advertising students to think like scientists, I teach problem finding (the discovery or formulation of a problem) in conjunction with an assigned creative directive or prompt. This methodology fosters the kind of nimble critical and creative thinking skills employers and clients are now demanding. I have found this methodology so valuable that I’m now writing about it for HOW Books.

Additionally, I employ active learning techniques (think/pair/share, simulations and scenarios, games, journaling, “What if…” and “If only…” questions, among others). By teaching my students to be meta-thinkers, thinkers who continually assess how they are conceiving an idea or executing a specific activity (designing creative brand content, a poster or branding program, etc.), to test their ideas, and importantly, how to reflect on their conclusions, I hope to provide a toolset for life-long learning as well as drive their understanding of the discipline. In doing this, I have been rewarded with the awareness that my own thinking and ability to strategize has grown in a didactic collaborative environment.

ADC: What do you think has been the biggest development or change in design, branding, or illustration since you began your career? 

Robin: In today’s digital age, employers and clients call upon designers and advertising creatives to quickly conceive and execute grand ideas that engage people across media channels. Some years ago the design discipline was print-based with each designer a specialist in editorial design, promotional design or identity design. Now, many graphic designers need to be interdisciplinary storytellers working across media. Designers need to fully understand what each specific media channel can do and how each channel can be utilized to deliver an engaging brand experience contributing an integral element of the story. Designers need to generate concepts that take various forms for a campaign or program related by strategy, voice and design across channels, ranging from print to social media to websites to mobile apps to web platforms. Any solution should be idea-driven rather than media-driven. Once you generate a concept for a brand, group or cause, you then determine the best media channel or mix of channels (mobile, print, broadcast, unconventional, social, etc.) for dissemination.

Advertising creatives face an even greater challenge; in addition to the aforementioned they are required to create relevant content for brands, causes and organizations to market online and in social media. They also must understand how people behave and how they use technology, mobile and social media. Advertising must give people a story to tell, one that engages them enough to talk about or share.

ADC: How have you adapted? 

Robin: I’ve adapted my thinking about a design or branding solution by thinking of it as content creation rather than as an artifact. I ask myself: is the idea flexible? Is it entertaining? Informational? Does it have value? Will it positively impact society? Does the idea inspire unique content that people will share? How will the idea manifest and function media — specifically for the capabilities of specific channels and platforms?

Rather than thinking about solving a problem, I approach the visual communication goals with an open experimental mindset. I do this by opening up the closed conventions of what graphic design or advertising is supposed to be and instead focus on striving to understand how to make a brand social and how to create content people will find engaging and relevant or beneficial. My motto is: Entertain, Inform, or Be Useful.

Novel experiences afford a fresh perspective mainly due to their newness and because you generally don’t know the conventions. Here’s one that’s fun to try: visit a museum to see an exhibit or a collection you’ve never been tempted to see before or one that is foreign to you. You may be very pleasantly surprised by what you gain from your experience.

ADC: What do you do when you get stuck or have “designer’s block”? What are your biggest sources of inspiration?

Robin: In The Mystery of Picasso (a 1956 documentary film by director Henri-Georges Clouzot and cinematographer Claude Renoir), Picasso is painting. As we watch him paint, we realize his process is spontaneous. Each form Picasso paints brings him to another. Nothing was preconceived. His free-form association continues. Five hours later, Picasso declares, “Now that I begin to see where I’m going with it, I’ll take a new canvas and start again.” Picasso used the process of painting to find inspiration and direction while painting; he didn’t pre-plan. Like Picasso, designers and illustrators can use the process of sketching or making for visual thinking, experimentation, and discovery during the visual-making process.

Additionally, if we approach our daily experiences as potential subject matter—an overheard conversation, an NPR broadcast, textures or shadows in the environment, how we play with an object on our desks, something read—we have a trove of content to draw upon. Any raw material can become creative content. If you were an observational comedian such as Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock, or Jerry Seinfeld, you’d have to be a constant observer gathering material to craft. It is a “How could I use that?” mindset. Everything turns into a self-assignment with an open-ended format. Rather than looking for inspiration when I have a problem to solve, I’m always “on the job” looking for material. This type of curious mindset along with problem finding helps one discover paths and prepares the mind for problem solving (as did the Bauhaus Preparatory course taught by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy). Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

My biggest sources of inspiration are delving into other disciplines (medicine, psychology, theater, film, literature, among others) to broaden and deepen my knowledge base and to try to make meaningful connections to what I know. For example, I utilized published research by Dr. Helen Fisher, Biological Anthropologist, and by my husband, Dr. Harry Gruenspan, Endocrinologist, Internist and Geneticist, about the human brain’s hard wiring and how it relates to branding for one of my presentations at the HOW Design Conference as well as for my branding practice.

New experiences and subjects, even ones that you anticipate not enjoying, might prove enlightening. For instance, I was about to change the channel on the radio when an interview with one of the world’s leading classical mandolinists came on, so I thought, let’s see if I find this interesting. Not too long into the broadcast, mandolinist Avi Avital’s recounting of how he learned music provided an insight into teaching.

Novel experiences afford a fresh perspective mainly due to their newness and because you generally don’t know the conventions. Here’s one that’s fun to try: visit a museum to see an exhibit or a collection you’ve never been tempted to see before or one that is foreign to you. You may be very pleasantly surprised by what you gain from your experience.

And, of course, for getting unstuck, I recommend drawing.