Unlock Your Creativity

A block-breaking exercise, not a technique class

"Unlock Your Creativity" is built around a single assignment: pick one simple object and illustrate it 100 different ways, using any medium at all. Faye Brown, a UK-based designer and animator with a background in motion graphics and branding, frames the whole 35-minute course as scaffolding around that one brief. She deliberately picks the sun as her working example because of its plain, forgiving shape, and encourages students to choose something similarly simple rather than a fussy subject like a castle that limits how many variations are realistically possible.

The strongest material comes early, in the "top tips for idea generation" lesson. The spider-web brainstorm is demonstrated in real time on the word "sun," branching outward into the solar system, then stars, then celebrities and Hollywood, showing concretely how one association can lead somewhere the original subject never suggested. This is paired with three companion habits worth adopting on their own: quick subject research even for objects you think you already understand, a self-questioning technique (asking how the sun makes you feel, where you've seen it look most striking), and mood-boarding through Pinterest or physical materials like fabric and magazine clippings.

Where the value tapers off

The "10 quick ways to be more creative" lesson is where the course starts to thin out. Several tips (drink water, listen to music, dance for three minutes) are common sense dressed up as instruction, and the graphic-design specificity of the earlier lessons briefly gives way to generic wellness advice. The mark-making lesson recovers some of that ground by walking through genuinely varied physical media: potato prints, food (flour, rice, clementine segments), photography of found shapes, collage, drawing with the non-dominant hand or eyes closed, and modeling in Play-Doh or Lego. None of these are explained in technical depth, but as a menu of directions to try when stuck, the range is genuinely useful.

The project brief itself is the course's real backbone, and it's well-judged for its purpose. Framing the middle stretch of the challenge as an inevitable "dip" where ideas seem to dry up, illustrated with a simple graph of the creative process, gives students a realistic expectation rather than a false promise that ideas will flow constantly. The closing update lesson, added after the class had been running for a while, offers a handful of concrete next steps for finished work: Print on Demand sites like Society6 or Spoonflower for patterns, greeting cards, or a mocked-up logo brief for a portfolio.

What the course does not offer is any software instruction, any critique of finished work, or much depth on any single technique. It's explicitly a warm-up exercise, not a skills class, and the "all levels" billing is accurate mainly because the entry bar is so low. Anyone hoping for the technical instruction found in Brown's other classes on typography or branding should look there instead. As a fast, structured nudge out of a creative rut, though, it delivers exactly what it promises.

What you will learn

• ·How to set and scope a personal '100 variations' creative challenge to break designer's block
• ·A repeatable idea-generation process: spider-web brainstorming, quick research, self-questioning, and mood boards
• ·Ten fast, low-effort creativity resets (doodling, music, movement, changing environment, list-writing)
• ·Non-digital mark-making techniques across food, photography, paper, drawing, modeling, painting, and typography
• ·How to push through the discouraging mid-project 'dip' where ideas seem to dry up
• ·A few concrete next steps for turning finished sketches into products, patterns, or portfolio pieces