Library Subject Guides
There are stages to making something using digital creativity tools and approaches, from planning out what you're communicating to making your output to sharing your creation with other people. Whether you're wondering how to get started with a digitally creative project or already working on something, we have guidance for all stages of the process.
Click on a stage to find out more.
Though we've put these in a linear order, you will probably find that you will return to previous stages as you develop and improve your project - don't be afraid to change your plan, work on new ideas, or have a go with a different tool.
The Digital Labs in the library provide access to support, learning and equipment for all the stages of digital creativity.
For the creation of physical items,YorCreate has a great selection of 3D printers, digital cutters and much more for creating artefacts as part of your project.
The Creativity Lab can help you to explore many kinds of digital Creative media, and provides access to digital creativity software (like Adobe Creative Cloud), equipment you can borrow and a podcast studio. There's also a wide range of workshops in many of the technologies mentioned on this practical guide.
Starting things can be hard! If you know you want to have a go with digital creativity, you might have an idea, or want to try out a particular digital technologies, or be generally curious about what you could make. Working out where to start can be overwhelming, so let's take a look at some ways you can start thinking about being digitally creative:
So, you want to have a go with some digital creativity - that's great! Do you have any ideas, thoughts, or material that might influence what you do?
Here are some examples of the kinds of things you might already have in mind:
Take a moment to reflect on where you are at. You might find it useful to write down a similar statement to those above to summarise your position.
Once you've worked out what you have so far and what you still need to think about, you can plan what might be the next step for your project.
The guidance on the rest of this page will help you to progress, but there are some prompts depending on where you are currently at:
Case Study: You've got some numerical dataYou have numerical data that is part of a research project. You'd like to use digital creativity in some way for this research project, but you don't feel like you have the "right" kind of material for it and it isn't something commonly discussed in your discipline. What could you do?
Digital creativity doesn't have to be for projects that are more traditionally seen as "creative". Data visualisation can be used with any kind of data and can be done in a variety of ways, from graphs and infographics to 3D models, videos, and interactive games. With numerical data, one approach can be to use sonification, which is the process of turning data into sound. If you use sonification with numerical data, you can allow other people (and yourself) to hear changes in values, for example if there are particular sections of the data when there are a lot of high or low values.
When starting a digital creativity project with a dataset like this, you might start by defining what you are trying to communicate. Are there particular trends in or analysis of the data that you're trying to communicate with others? Do you want other people to explore your dataset and make their own interpretations? Defining what you want to communicate will help you to decide what kind of output might be suitable for communicating that message.
Coming up with an initial idea (or several potential ideas) can be a helpful way to get started. Perhaps you have an area of research that you would like to visualise it in a new format, or would like create something to engage a specific group of people. At this point, it could just be a very brief idea, or you may already have a clear intention. Not having an idea at all is also fine; there are places, mentioned below, where you can get inspiration and use prompts to get you thinking. There's a range of digital tools can that can help you to expand on that idea and start to think about more specifics.
In this section, we'll explore some activities and tools you can use to get inspiration or spark an idea.
In order to be able to start some ideas, it's often helpful to first consider the context you're creating something for. This can help you to think about the key purpose, and why you want to spend time developing something. Here's a few prompts to consider:
Rather than starting from scratch, one method is to explore some materials, data or artefacts based around a topic. These might give you inspiration of a narrative you'd like to tell, or find something that interests and excites you. It can be anything, but here's a starting point of some resources you could explore:
Sometimes, finding a stimuli that has absolutely nothing to do with your discipline or topic area can actually be really useful. By playing around more widely with something else outside of your area of knowledge, it might spark a bit of a 'mash-up' idea.
Sometimes it can be helpful to do an activity that helps you to draw out some ideas, while doing something a bit playful or unusual. Here's a few activities you could try to get started:
Take Three Nouns - generates three random words. Could you create an idea that relates to those three words? Sometimes coming up with a completely separate, random idea can spark a thought related to your topic.
Mash-up - Write a range of ideas on bits of paper. Pick two at random, can you blend the two ideas together to make an usual hybrid idea?
Idea Lottery - A grid of words for you to try and connect together (see what narratives come out of it)
Cut up text - take a printed text (preferably a photocopy or print out!), cut it up, and rearrange. You can do it digitally using a free image editing tool like Pixlr and it can be a great way to rethink texts you know well.
Quickfire ideas - fold a piece of paper into eight, then give yourself a minute per section to doodle an idea.
Case Study: Using the ArchivesYou're looking to find stories from the past to help you tell the story of social change in a street in York. Where do you start?
You used a Padlet board to create a mind-map of some key words and areas you'd like to explore, including the types of narrative you'd like to find (different tradespeople living in Stonegate). Then, you enter some of those search terms into Borthwick Institute for Archives catalogue, where you can see if there's documents related to the street and people you want to explore. After arranging a visit to the archives and some of the material, you find some interesting documents (like some Wills), detailing some of the trades and information on what some buildings were used for. Afterwards, you post some pictures and notes from these discoveries on your Padlet board to help decide which narrative you'd like to tell.
Finally, you make use of the University's access to Digimap, where you can explore a range of historical and topographical maps. These maps help you to contextualize some of the stories you found in the archives, along with marking some of the significant changes that have happened to a particular street over time. You consider using some of the noted changes to help you tell the story of Stonegate.
Creating anything needs planning, but when you're working on a digital creativity project, it can be easy to focus on the technical and creative sides and not plan what needs to be done and when. If you're working with other people, this becomes even more important, to make sure that everyone knows what they are working on, when any deadlines are, and how their work fits into the larger project.
Let's take a look at some of the areas of planning that are most relevant for digital creativity projects:
You don't just need to use digital technology to make your outputs - there's lots of useful tools to help you plan and organise for digital projects as well. We cover these in more depth on our digital tools for planning and project management tools guides, but here's some of our recommendations specifically for digital creativity projects:
As part of planning a digital creativity project, you need to reflect on your own relevant skills (and also the skills of anyone else involved). This will help you to allocate time for learning new technologies or for exploring which technologies might work for your needs and suit your skills.
To do this, you'll need to return to your ideas for your project. Map out what needs to be created and if you already know which tool(s) and approaches you want to use to make those things. Now, you can match up the tools and things that need to be created with whether you can current do that with your own or your team's skills, or whether you will need to learn how to do it. You might then want to use the upcoming digital creativity training list to plan if there are any workshops to support with learning these skills or if you'll need to research further to find learning materials for these skills. You can always get in touch with lib-creativitylab@york.ac.uk to ask if there is training available on a particular technology or area.
When planning a digital creativity project, you will probably want to be ambitious with your plan, especially if you have an exciting idea that you'd like to try and make a reality. However, you will need to balance this with being realistic about the time, skills, and resources you have available. For example, if you're making a game, you might need to think about how complex the game can feasibly be, given that for many games, it takes hundreds of hours (and many people) to create them.
One way you can be realistic is by having your main plan, but also a backup plan for your output(s). This might be an alternative technology or tool you could use (such as having a more simple video editing option if you don't get the chance to learn how to use the more complex one), or a different creation you could make if your original plan doesn't work out as expected.
Another way you can have a backup plan is by backing up all of your digital work! You don't want to lose your creations or work in progress, so make sure that as part of your planning, you make a plan about how you will store and backup any files you create. Be aware that file sizes for creative media can be very large.
Case Study: Planning using a shared spreadsheetYour idea is to create a simple game to communicate common misconceptions in your academic subject alongside three other people. The game will need a range of elements, including the actual game levels, images, sounds, and text. How could you plan out the workload and what you need to create?
You decide that the easiest method would be to create a spreadsheet list of everything that needs to be created, and then you can have columns to assign who is going to create that thing and dates for when things need to be completed by. You use conditional formatting to mark the urgency of each task and a checkbox that can be ticked when something has been made. The spreadsheet is a Google Sheet that everyone can access and edit, so they can use a column for 'Progress' to add notes about how their work is going.
Experimenting and playing around with digital tools and software help you to understand the possibilities and limitations. Before embarking on your main task, it can be a useful process to just play, make a mess and explore the features and buttons that a tool has. It may uncover an option you didn't know it could do, or helps you to learn how to use the tool.
The best way to learn if a new tool is useful for your Digital Creativity Project is to play with it. Here's a few steps you could take:
The Creativity Lab in the library has a wide range of support on offer to help you with this process. We offer 1:1 appointments and wide range of workshops helping you to learn creative media and new tools.
There are both beginner and intermediate level workshops to help you get started. Here's some of the technologies we have workshops on, linking to our practical guide page about that technology and details of upcoming workshops:
Case Study: the power of PowerPointYou're creating a collage of images and animations to show some of your findings from a database. You try a few image editing tools but it's hard to find the tools you need to manipulate the images and animate some so they move.
You have created presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint before, so you have a go using that, as you are familiar with Microsoft tools. PowerPoint is actually a really useful graphics tool for other projects as it can handle images, video and sound. It allows you to change which order images show, so you can create 'layers' of images on top of each other. You edited the images, by removing the background and cropping the image. Using the built in animation tools, some movement was added so the images move around the collage, and you exported the final fine as a video.
You've worked out your idea, you've planned, you've learned how to use the digital tools and technologies... now you actually have to make it!
This can be daunting, but remember that you've hopefully prepared for this (and should have a backup plan too). Use any guidance and learning materials available to help you along the way, and remember you can still ask for help and get support if you get stuck. If you're working with other people, arrange regular check-ins so you can update each other with progress and talk through any issues. If you don't have anyone else to talk over issues with, you can always get in touch with us to get some support as you're working on your project. And if you're struggling with procrastination, we have a guide to avoiding procrastination that might be helpful.
Case Study: Making a podcastYou've had an idea to make a podcast to share some of the weirder sides of your academic field. You've planned out your content and tried out how to record a podcast, but you're struggling to get started actually making it.
You could reflect on if there is anything that is a barrier to recording your podcast. Maybe you're worried about the recording process, not sure how to edit it afterwards, or not confident with your content. If you haven't already been to any training, you could attend a podcasting workshop to help you know the process for making a podcast. You could book a 1:1 support appointment to resolve any specific issues or queries you have. Or you could talk it over with someone else to see if you just need some encouragement to actually get on and record your podcast!
You've made something, awesome! Now it's time to share your creations and allow people to interact with them. You may wish to ask people who engage with your work for feedback, to find out how you could improve or make the narrative clearer. You could use a Survey tool to collect it.
Where you put your work will depend on the type of media you've created. You should also think about accessibility; is there an alternative format or different way your work could be experienced?