Understanding Your Brain for Better Design: Left vs. Right (P.3Final)

Saturday 27 August 2011 § 0

Benefit Your Work

Let’s now look into some further ideas of how we can specifically better our work by understanding our own psychology.
After taking the tests above, you may have found out that we are not either 100% right brained, or 100% left brained. We are a mix of them both, while some traits may lean far to the opposite side, and other may not.
Also, in certain traits, we may only be a certain percentage right/left brained, while the remainder of the percentage leads the opposite way.
We each have such unique characteristics, and an in-depth analysis of each (second test listed above) can help. Let’s now look over a few strategies that can help anyone with any combination of traits:

Understand Your Style

As shown above in this article, right brained people tend more towards abstraction while left-brained people tend more towards realism. If we have mixed characteristics, we may tend towards mixes in these forms of art as well.
Find your style, and your preferred mix of abstraction and realism. Adding more form may be for those with stronger left sides, but with hints of right-brained thinking.
Abstraction with a hint of form may be for those who lean right, but have a bit of left-brained thinking. It’s really a gentle balance, with an associated art/design style to go with that balance.
Mixed
View a number of different types of art, and make note of which interest you the best. Save them in a collection, and review them later to find out their similarities, to test for their amount of abstraction, and to analyze how they relate to your own way of thinking. Then, reflect on that in your own work.

Abide by Your Brain

If you like organization, then use it in your art. Don’t feel the need to be more creative by being more quirky, different, or strange.
One can be just as original by using measurements, form, pattern, and rules. For left-brained people try this trick: create one rule to abide by for an entire design, and then come up with varying ways of altering that rule throughout the design to bring more variety.
For example, use only one shape and turn it into a large picture, use only one color in different shades, or try isometric artwork (below).
Isometric
If you don’t like form, and would rather try out extreme abstraction, then go for it.
Don’t hold yourself to limits because you feel that artwork needs organization — it doesn’t. It can, but doesn’t have to. Right brained people should try experimenting with different colors, patterns, textures, and whatever else, all while keeping the big picture in mind.
Because right dominance means seeing the big picture and then the details, imagine the outcome first, and then detail along the way. (For right-brained web designers, this is one more reason as to why wireframing is so important.)

Work Around Your Faults

Because we can now better understand our positive traits, we can also better understand our faults. Identify them, and think of ways to build upon them.
Instead of fighting disorganization everyday (both in artwork and business/life), use tools and resources to make it easier, and try to make certain organization habitual.
If one has trouble finding creativity because they are overly analytical, like above, don’t fight your natural instinct of order. Instead explore new methods for harnessing creativity and practice new techniques.
Remember, nobody’s graphic design or artistic talents are perfect at first — no matter what their natural traits may be. Both sides must work at it, and must be better able to accept their faults and work on them to better themselves.

Wrapping Up

Understanding the right and left sides of the brain is a great way to better your work, and to obtain a better understanding of who you are as an individual. Often times, the path to better creativity lies in science and logic — in this case, psychology.
As we can better understand ourselves at this deeper level, we can better understand what we are naturally good at and what we should put our focus on.
In contrast, we can also better identify where we’re lacking, and think of smarter solutions for combating our faults.

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