There have been a number of times where I have developed an idea and then set out to make it a reality. Quite often it takes a lot of time and effort but developing a well laid out strategy can speed up the process and make it easier.
My most recent example is a website I just created called Punksters.net. The website features a comic strip that has some punk rock characters. The idea first came to me when I was playing around in a 3D program called Daz Studio. I use that program for a lot of my 3D artwork.
I was playing around and I came up with a cool looking character. I took a good look at him and decided to give him a few friends and before you know it, I had a four man punk rock band like the ones displayed to the left. After I saw what I created, I thought it would be a cool idea to do a comic strip featuring the characters that I had just created.
I knew that they had to have their own website of course and that meant that I needed to find a domain name to use. I thought that Punksters would be a good name for them. Unfortunately, punksters.com was taken so I had to settle for Punksters.net. That's almost as good anyway.
Now that I had a name for the strip and the domain name reserved, I had to build a website. But what was I going to put on the website? After all, the only idea I really had was just to do the comic strip. Well, I decided to put up some free downloadable desktop wallpapers. I figured that it would be a nice feature to add in order to drive people to the site and help to popularize the characters and the comic strip.
I thought another good idea might be to have a page that introduces the main characters. So I added that. Then I thought that it might be a good idea to create a blog for them. Since I was only going to do a weekly comic strip to be released every Sunday, I thought that it might be nice to do a blog about them and release a new blog post every Wednesday on the Punksters.net Blog. I also put an RSS feed for the blog on the main page of the punksters.net website.
Another idea I had for the purpose of popularizing the characters was to take suggestions from people as to what I can do with the characters. That was one of the main reasons behind creating the blog for it. So I created a suggestion box on the website. It's a simple form people can fill out and send their suggestions in with. People can look over the page that introduces characters with a brief description of each one and try to get some ideas as to what they would like to see me have them do in future comic strips.
Then I decided to create some merchandise that featured the characters. I created posters, mugs, hats, wall clocks and T-shirts. So now everything was pretty much set up and created except for one thing. Guess what that was. It was the comic strip.
You see, I knew that before I even did the first comic strip that I had to set things up in a way to help make it more likely that the strip would become popular and that required some of the various features and things that are found on the site and the blog. So making that idea become a reality involved a lot of things and a lot of work.
I have since begun doing some of the comic strips and I actually am somewhat ahead on them. In other words, I have more made than have been released. That's just an extra precautionary measure.
So this is what it took for me to make an idea into a reality: I had the initial idea of the comic strip. Then I outlined what I think it would take to popularize it or to market it. Then I decided what features to include in a website. I designed the website and created a blog. So there is obviously much more to creating a comic strip than just doing a strip. There are other things to think about and how to promote, market it and popularize it are among those things.
The point of this article is pretty simple. In order to make an idea become a reality, you need to work out the details before you even set out to do anything. Lay things out on paper or in a document on your computer. Think of all the details you need to work out. Then decide what order you want to do things in. That's what I did and now my idea is a reality. Good luck with your ideas.
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