Expansion

The premise of this post is simple:
Expand Your Skills, Expand Your Mind, Expand Your Creativity

A friend of mine has been in the graphic design/journalism industry for more than twenty years. He has formal art and graphics training and is possibly one of the best illustrators I have ever met. You know, one of those guys who can work magic with a pencil andget the same effect in Illustrator.

My friend currently works for a local liberal newspaper, and though his job has its perks, he laments the decline of the elitist recognition once attributed to artists such as him. To his mind, the glory days of graphic design are long gone. After all, how often do you read “cartoonist wanted”  in the job ads these days?

I read a great article in the December 2008 issue of Dwell Magazinetonight that very eloquently summed up the current state of affairs:

“Long ago, to be a graphic designer was to distinguish yourself by defining your territory as fundamentally two-dimensional. Unlike artists, graphic designers had clients. Unlike architects, they delivered printed messages. Today, with the meteoric rise of desktop computing, social networking, and mobile technologies, graphic design is the ultimate DIY activity. Or is it? Albert Einstein once said that the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. So don’t ask us to explain how kerning works: Just trust us.”¹

 A graphic designer’s best source in cultivating creative ideas that lead to innovation is a mastery of the tools of his or her trade. Today, that means knowing the Adobe Creative Suite inside and out, understanding print versus web design, and being able to deliver a piece in print media and digital formats with exceptional quality and little variance.

If you don’t know a program, download a free trial and get to know it. Look up some tutorials on YouTube, or pick up a book from Lynda. Mastering the tools will automatically open your mind to new ways of approaching creative problem solving.

Expand your mind, expand your creativity. It really is that easy.

1 Helfand, J. and Drenttel, W. ( 2008). An Introduction to Graphic Design. Dwell Magazine. Issue: December 2008, p. 143.

Why Creativity Matters

So why have a blog about creativity?

The buzzwords are everywhere, but what is innovation, exactly? And how can it help my company? Why is it important to foster creativity in the workplace? We’ve found ourselves smack in the middle of an economic crisis, and we’re all focused on business strategies and sound economic practices. In this economy, innovation seems like a luxury. Why would we devote any part of the budget to it? Why does creativity matter, anyway?

“Powering the great ongoing changes of our time is the rise of human creativity as the defining feature of economic life.”¹ In the last fifty years, there has been a major economic class shift from industrial jobs to jobs in the services and creative sectors. Approximately 38 million Americans, or 30 percent of all employed people, belong to the new Creative Class, which is compromised of “people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.”²

Here’s reality. The way the world works has evolved beyond what it was thirty years ago, and we are never going back. The solutions and techniques we used then won’t work for us now. The skills that put as at the top ten years ago won’t cut it now.

The good news is that creativity and problem-solving go hand in hand. My belief is that in times of economic crisis, creative opportunities abound, more so than in times of abundance. For example, according to Seth Godin, there were more than a thousand car companies ninety years ago, and now in the US, we’re down to the Big Three.³ The Detroit Crisis is really just an open door for new innovators, engineers, and designers to step up and design smart American cars. Smarter than the competition. That’s what innovation is about.

My hope and chief aim in publishing this blog each day is that it will inspire you and give you some practical tools to increase your own ability to be creative and to produce innovation that will solve problems for you, for your organization, or for a cause you about which you are passionate. And that is why creativity matters. 

End Notes:
1,2 Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books.
3 Godin, Seth. (2008). What to do about Detroit. Retrieved November 28, 2008, from http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/what-to-do-abou.html

Capturing Your Best Ideas

Many of us seem to have our best ideas while we’re doing semi-unconscious tasks and our minds are allowed to wander. You know, in the shower, or in the bathroom, or when we have our  hands in a sink full of dishes, or while we’re mowing, or when they wake up in the middle of the night. Rarely ever do our bursts of genius occur while we’re diligently sitting in front of our computers or in front of a blank canvas or an open sketchpad, mentally chewing over challenges, waiting for brilliant ideas to flow out onto the screen/canvas/page.

Innovation Tools has published a great article on their website that is packed with ideas for capturing your creative best. In brief, they recommend utilizing and combining a variety of tools – like journals, notepads, voice recorders, PDAs, and mind-mapping – to capture ideas wherever and whenever they may burst upon the scene.

The challenge with this method is taking those notes and data files and pulling them into one cohesive idea resource. I recommend keeping paper notes in a file or box for later reference (I like having a physical piece of paper for tactical referral), but also converting paper notes to a digital format. You can scan note papers to PDF or image files, or you can covert notes to a text document, which can be indexed for easy retrieval.

How do you capture your best ideas? Post your best tips in the comments.

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