I’ve been coaching improv teams for a little while now, and I found myself in need of a quick way to give my team a suggestion to get them started. So I made this improv suggestion generator a little while back.
In improv shows, the improvisers get a suggestion from the audience to use as inspiration. When running practices, sometimes I’ve found myself wanting a way to quickly come up with suggestions, especially when the exercise is “rapid fire” style.
My players must have been getting tired of me looking around the room for a suggestions — chair, brick, cement, warehouse. At one point I wrote down a bunch of suggestions in my notebook and used that, but I found myself burning through those pretty quickly.
I’ve had a few design ideas kicking around in my head, and this project was the perfect opportunity to try them out: simple interfaces, bold colors, and heavy black lines & typefaces. Here is the mobile view, where the user has selected the “La Ronde” theme:
I designed it for mobile because that’s how I needed to use it, but it works on desktop as well.
When you tap the gear icon it rotates and pulls up the settings menu, which you can use to select your theme and suggestion type. The themes are all named after improv things.
The user has the option to select multiple categories and themes, in which case the generator cycles among the user’s choices.
Special thanks to my friend Brian Sutorius for alerting me to some buggy behavior in Safari.
Please leave a comment below if you see any issues with it. I read the comments here, and I’ve made needed updates to my work based them. A long time ago I wrote an Adwords script for limiting monthly spend. I don’t work in Adwords anymore, but thanks to the comments, I realized my script needed to be updated to work with the new API.