Book review: Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers

Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers by Curt Cloninger is one of my “lateral reading” books.

According to the author, this book is not a graphic design primer but rather a “sourcebook for creative approaches” using the design principles. This means that its interest goes beyond the boundaries of the designers’ community.






As you can expect from a designer, the book presentation is engaging and the layout makes reading it a pleasure. The style is good and easy to read and the text completed with inspiring quotes. There are also plenty of visual examples to illustrate the different points discussed and some interviews with designers talking about their approach.

The first three chapters (“A Process Primer”; “Basic Creative Wisdom” and “Four ways to bypass inertia”) give some detailed and practical way to get your creativity in motion. I liked the part on “exploratory sketching” as a way to come-up with new ideas.

For me, the most interesting chapter was chapter 4 on “Mining art and design history”. I can’t agree more with the general advice the author gives: “Fall in love with a master: Find someone whose work resonates with you and learn about his history and practice.”

The author goes on to explain that you have two basic ways of mining art and design history:

• First, you can mine the visual forms (the surface, style and mechanical methods



• Secondly, you can mine the conceptual approach (conceptual theories and principles).

Your goal is to internalize these influences and make them part of your visual vocabulary. And if you are worried about not being totally original, meditate on this humorous way Cloninger debunks what he calls “the Myth of Scratch”:

“The truth is, no human ever created anything from scratch. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth”, Genesis tells us – and we’ve been remixing His work ever since.”

The book also contains a good analysis of the formal elements used by the Bahaus, in particular Paul Klee and Kandinsky.


Favourite quotations

Apart from the quotations above, I liked some of the quotations selected by the author. There is the one from Paul Klee on the dialogue between artists and nature already published on the blog.

Another one is a saying by the craftsmen of Bali that reads: “We have no art. We do everything as well as possible.”

Overall, this is a very good and instructive book.


Additional information


Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process: Strategies for Print and New Media Designers by Curt Cloninger
Publisher: New Riders

Year of publication: 2006

Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process Curt Cloninger Design book Art book Creative process Creativity