Customize Your Mac Like A Genius With These Creative Brainstorming Tips

That classic white Mac laptop surface is a clean and sleek look, but the artist in many of us sees that white expanse as a canvas for our creativity. Instead of leaving our laptops looking like every other mac users’, we see an opportunity to be unique, express our ideas, and customize our technology to match our personality and interests. Thankfully vinyl graphics make it easy to customize our macs, but it can be difficult to decide on the image you want to display on your canvas. If you’re stuck in indecision or without inspiration, here are some brainstorming tips to get your creative juices flowing.

Set Goals and a Time Limit

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with brainstorming is to begin with no end in mind. If you don’t have a goal, you also won’t have a place to start. And without a time limit, you’ll find that you will delay, whereas a time limit will help you settle down to work. To pick a goal, think about what it is you want your customized mac to say about you. Do you want the image to be professional? Do you want it to promote yourself or your business? Do you want the image to express your interests or do you want it to express your opinions on an issue? Begin by listing words that will describe your desired image: this will give you a place to start, and it will provide criteria to measure your ideas against after you’ve brainstormed some. When setting a time limit, there are many factors to consider, and the correct time will vary depending on the project. One effective way to create ideas is to break up your brainstorming into multiple sessions. Set a short time limit for the first day, then stop and come back to it a few days later. The first short session will get your brain working on the issue, and by the time you sit down to think it over again, you’ll have plenty of ideas rolling through your head.

Write or Sketch Everything

When brainstorming, it’s important to get your ideas onto paper. This helps you remember your ideas, but it can also lead to further inspiration. As you review your image, it may stimulate new ideas and refinements that will help you find new directions. As you draw or write, make rough sketches: don’t aim for perfection. A perfectly drawn image or written slogan may distract from the quality of the concept or its conformity with your goals. One excellent way to generate more ideas is to find others and ask them to sketch your idea. With your description of your idea, they most likely won’t produce the exact image you were looking for, but their perceptions will provide you with new offshoots to pursue.

Embrace the Ridiculous

Brainstorming is not about producing quality; rather, it’s about producing a quantity of ideas to choose from. And the more original you want your image to be, the more you will need to come up with ideas that are outside of the box. The best way to get those unique ideas is aim for the most outlandish and impossible ones. This will free up your mind from the norms of images you have seen and while you may never use one of those crazy ideas, it may provide the inspiration for a more reasonable, but still original version. One great way to find crazy and different ideas is to look at areas of art that are completely unrelated with laptop skins. Check out comic books, music videos, or math books for interesting visual concepts that would be eye-catching as your laptop skin.

Find Your Inspiration

Your laptop skin is your piece of art, and just like the famous artists of the past, you need to find what most inspires you. Some artists chose to convert images in the world into art like Leonardo Da Vinci, Georgia O’Keefe, and Stuart Davis, but others took their ideas from more abstract concepts. Vincent Van Gogh tried to capture emotions in his art, while Botticelli used mythology and folk tales as the source of his artistic ideas. Some artists use the issues they see in society or in history and try to depict them in images. Keith Haring painted social issues, and Pablo Picasso often depicted historic scenes in abstraction. Claude Monet was even more abstract in his art and tried to depict the passage of time in his images. With these artists as examples, let anything that makes you passionate be your muse. Maybe it’s the rhythms of the sea, the chemical reaction between molecules, or the harmony of your favorite musicians. Take a look around you and at your life and try to capture yourself in your art. Once you find that image, everyday you see in it on your Mac, you’ll be reminded of the ideas that inspire you most.