Dear Future Cross-Maker

I’m glad to hear that you’ll be joining the journey!

Let’s explore the exercise regimen of cross-training as a means to make.

As you read on, you’ll be invited to try out the roles of kinesthetic and visual learners: an Athlete and a Graphic Designer. You can recombine and reconfigure their approaches in ways that contribute to your own creative processes, and by the end of this journey, you’ll unleash another facet of the maker that you already are: the Cross-Maker!

I’ll be your Cross-Maker-in-Training Buddy, and I’ll walk you through what to expect and accompany you along the way. Together we’ll find out if cross-training can be applied as a method for learning through making by graphic designers.

In the days to come, you’ll receive parts of the training that will come in the form of letters. First, we’ll begin with warm-up and stretching sessions to unpack this metaphor of cross-training from the sports domain and apply it to a creative one. We’ll familiarize ourselves with the key terms, then read stories about how an athlete and a graphic designer deal with plateaus and in their training routines.

Then it’s the kick-off of the Cross-Making sessions! Each day, you’ll receive a suggestion for an exercise to try, along with entries from my DIYry/DIWOry––just like a diary, but for logging Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-With-Others adventures. From there, I’ll be sharing my findings related to each exercise, in case you need some inspiration or moral support.

In the meantime, here’s the program overview:

Cross-Making: Program Overview

Session	Program	Role
1	Warm-Up	Athlete
2	Stretching	Graphic Designer
3	Cross-Making: Orientation	Cross-Maker-in-Training
4-9	Exercises #1-6
10	Cool Down	Cross-Maker

Don’t forget, this program is created for makers like us, so feel free to customize, modify, or hack it so that it not only matches your pace, needs, learning and making styles, but also sparks your curiosities!

See you at warm-up!

Your Cross-Maker-in-Training Buddy