THE RVJ - Cyclic Design Process

Think, plan, do, evaluate are the four main stages of any design process. Without incorporating these steps when developing any work your piece may not reach its full potential. Practice trying to think of all new possible ideas and try each of them out to see what works and what doesn’t, remembering always to note everything down; make sketches through your progress of anything you think of. Right-down to colours, themes, and styles! Constantly question your plan can it work? Or could it look better? Change the way you plan by the way you think, explore different techniques of recording your thoughts.

Thomas Edison once said ''I have not failed; I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work'' The idea is that even if you try and fail, it doesn't mean that you didn't learn something and no matter how many times you attempt something each next brainwave of thought will be a better one, never settle on your initial ideas.

At the beginning of my RVJ this lecture and principle came to be very useful in the way that it changed my approach to being able to think out of the box on ideas and that it was ok for me to not go for the initial idea but that I could develop them even further. I made plenty of notes during my research stages from other magazines and books that I thought would be helpful when not only developing my ideas but will help explain what I thought would work.

THE RVJ - Developing Visual Language

I took my influences for developing visual language from artists such as Georgia O’keeffe, her pictures are elegantly simple and although I don’t have my study surrounded in her works of art, I certainly can appreciate them and find meaning in her quote which is a particular favourite of mine ''I know I cannot paint a flower. I cannot paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning, but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower significant to me at the particular time.’’ It’s about finding significance within your work; it may not need to make sense, or be visually aesthetic to others but it speaks YOUR experience and tells a story for that time.





A piece of art/photograph can speak on so many levels for itself, it can communicate many emotions and although verbally it is not communicating with you, you can visualize its meaning and purpose instead. It’s a way to extract opinions and creativity with how you see it, and subconsciously you can get an immediate perception without a distraction of speech/text.

However visual thinking doesn’t just have to be limited to images but being creative and organising text opens up different elements when using written language.

Need to get in the habit of using visuals rather than textual to represent language, connections become visible when linking your thoughts and putting it down on paper. I researched Tony Buzan’s mind mapping and downloaded an IMindMap5 trial to put this into practice.

Overview: Principles of a Reflective Visual Journal (RVJ)

Basic overview of the five principles regarding the meaning of an RVJ and putting them into practice:

Drawing work by hand:
Working by hand in your RVJ is essential as it enables you to engage a physical connection between your hand, your eye and your creative right brain.

Utilise Your Creative Brain:
In your head, there are two brains. The two halves of your brain are essentially separate; they carry out different processing functions in different ways. You can improve creativity immeasurably by consciously utilising these functions.

Develop Visual Language:

Thinking and working visually is a completely different process than thinking and working with words and text. Visual language enables us to make complex ideas and associations comprehensible.

Cyclic Design Process:

Developing visual solutions is a cycle think, evaluate, plan & do. To find and develop answers, requires a repeating sequence of thought, action & evaluation.

Cultivate Reflective Practice:The reflective practitioner engages, questions, evaluates, challenges, compares, contrasts, organises, edit, connects, plays and takes risks. Always make brief notes to record your critical reflection at all stages of the process (visual and textual languages are very powerful working together). They can have advantages or disadvantages