Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity

Packaging as Content

The title to this post is the tag line to an interesting blog called box vox. Box vox is dedicated to the meaning and art of the packages that contain the things we consume. The perfect package makes what's inside it more desirable. Lets face it, some things we buy just because the package is so amazing we can't help it.

What if, for your next creative project, you created the packaging for it before you created the content? Imagine how easy it would be if you already knew the size and shape of what you were going to create. You'd know the name and maybe even the list of ingredients.

If you don't want to create your own, use another package and fill it. What's inside will be uniquely yours! If you want to write a book or story, find a book cover that's evocative to you and write what would go inside. The same goes for old movie posters, advertisements and album covers.

For me personally, the best thing is to find an awesome package with a bad product. That way, you can create something that finally lives up to the promise of its packaging.

Less disappointment in the world is a good thing!

Strategies for Overcoming a Creative Block

I wanted to point out this great post that has the opinion of 25 creative people on how to overcome a block. My favorite comes from Erik Spiekermann:

There are 6 strategies for this situation:

1. Avoid
Do something else, wash the car, back-up your data, do errands…
2. Think
Sit back and think about the issue, just let your mind go…
3. Research
Look up stuff, go through your old projects, but avoid Google — it takes too long to find anything useful…
4. Collect
We all have lots of stuff; there must be something in there that is waiting to be used…
5. Sketch
Drawing is great, even if you have no talent. Just visualising the simplest things makes them come alive…
6. Deconstruct
Take the problem apart, look at the parts and then put them back together…

Don't forget to check out the comments, I found some interesting stuff there as well. 

Read it here

Paint Your Own Bullseye

Great interview with Brian Eno on the Guardian today. Lots of interesting stuff, but I just want to pull two quotes. The first is a good reminder about succeeding on your own terms.

Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bullseye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

The second quote is about the death of the recording industry, but it's really about much more than that.

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.

Be sure and check out the quote on Frank Zappa as well.

Read the rest here

Tim Burton on Creativity

 One thing you can say for sure about Tim Burton, you can tell one of his films immediately. From Pee-wee's Big Adventure to Big Fish to Sweeney Todd , very few directors today can put their creative stamp on material as clearly as Tim Burton.

His background as an animator explains some of the amazing imagery in his movies, which carry his personal style as if he'd drawn them. Frustrated with being labeled childlike or stunted, he rightfully points out that his movies deal with adult themes like alienation, relationships and death. They are fairy tales for adults and children, with themes we all deal with blown up to operatic proportions.

Hopefully, the quotes below give some insight into his development as an artist and his creative process.

I remember, I was at Cal Arts and I wasn`t a good life-drawer; I struggled with that realistic style of drawing. And one day I was sitting in Farmer`s Market sketching, and it was this weird, mind-blowing experience. I said, `Goddammit, I don`t care if I can`t draw, I`m just gonna draw how I feel about it.` All of a sudden I had my own personal breakthrough, and then I could draw, and satisfied myself. I`ve had very few experiences like that, and I`ll never forget it. 

You always have to feel like it's going to be the greatest, even if you know it's going to be a piece of crap.

One person`s craziness is another person`s reality.

Children are not perverted in a way. It has more to do with the culture. When children are drawing, everybody draws the same. Nobody draws better than everybody else. There's a certain amount of strength, there's a certain amount of passion, there's a certain amount of clarity. And then what happens is it gets beaten out of you. You're put into a cultural framework, which gets beaten into you. To punch through that framework, you have to maintain a certain kind of strength and simplicity.

Why not, if something is going to be flawed, why not have it be interestingly flawed, as opposed to boringly flawed?

All monster movies are basically one story. It's Beauty and the Beast. Monster movies are my form of myth, of fairy tale. The purpose of folk tales for me is a kind of extreme, symbolic version of life, of what you're going through. In America, in suburbia, there is no sense of culture, no sense of passion. So those served that very specific purpose for me. And I linked those monsters and those Edgar Allan Poe things to direct feelings. I didn't read fairy tales, I watched them.

I think the atmosphere that I grew up in, yes, there was a subtext of normalcy. I don`t even know what the word means, but it`s stuck in my brain. It`s weird. I don`t know if it`s specifically American, or American in the time I grew up, but there`s a very strong sense of categorization and conformity. I remember being forced to go to Sunday school for a number of years, even though my parents were not religious. No one was really religious; it was just the framework. There was no passion for it. No passion for anything. Just a quiet, kind of floaty, kind of semi-oppressive, blank palette that you`re living in.

Why do I like clowns so much? Why are they so powerful to children? Probably because they are dangerous. That kind of danger is really what it's all about. It's that kind of stuff that I think gets you through life. Those are the only things worth expressing, in some ways: danger and presenting subversive subject matter in a fun way.

Picture Via

Reintroduction

I wanted to take a moment to reintroduce myself. My name is David Wahl and I work for amazing stuff maker and seller Archie McPhee. I have recently been focussing my attention on establishing a new literary magazine/blog Monkey Goggles. I have written lots of articles for it. The most popular was my experience with Mick Jagger when I worked at a toy store.

I have a Tumblr blog I use to track interesting images, ideas and links. If you don't know Tumblr, it's a great micro-blogging service that is very simple to use.

I'd love for you to introduce yourself in comments and if you have any web presence, please link to it!

Addition Inspiration

Here's a great method for coming up with new ideas. First, make a list of at least 10 things that you think are awesome. If you can't do that, I feel sorry for you and you might as well not read the rest of this. Seriously, if you can't make a list of 10 things that you love, you should be out looking for things to love.

Now, take your list of 10 and start combining things on the list together. For instance, you might have robots and werewolves on your list, I do, so jumble them up in your head and see what comes out.

Let's say you decide to use those two. The most obvious would be an animatronic robot werewolf that someone might build for a haunted house or for some kind of Scooby Doo-esque trap for a van full of nosy teenagers. But, we can go deeper than that. Werewolves are based on magic, not science. So, when a werewolf bites something it becomes a werewolf not through some biological process but magic connected with the moon.

What if a werewolf bit a robot and that robot became a robo-wolf on nights of the full moon? What if it was all machines? What if it was a toaster or waffle iron with added wolfiness? What if it was only machines shaped like a human? It's magic, so it doesn't have to make sense.

See, all interesting thoughts. 

Now take the items on your list and start combining them and see how they fit together. They are all things you love, so I'm going to assume you know something about them. If nothing works, try a set of three.

Remember, if you don't like the first thought you have, try fitting them together in a different way.

I'm off to write a story about half-toaster, half-wolves combing the countryside looking for human flesh to eat and bread to toast. 

Creativity in Bad Times - Think Like Water

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.

- Bruce Lee

In good times, people have the illusion that coming up with a single good idea is enough. A single good idea will make you rich for life or solve a problem permanently. People think of problems as walls and ideas as battering rams to break through them. It's not true, but it's easy to believe it.

Problems do not stand still. They grow and shrink, sometimes they fade away on their own and new problems appear where there were none before.

In bad times, people get frustrated because what worked before is no longer possible. The shifting landscape of the world puts up barrier after barrier and things that have worked for years become impossible, illegal or just plain stop working.

This is when it's easy to fail, because to succeed means having to constantly change and, even more painfully, having to admit that you were wrong.

That's why I think it's important to think about your creativity as if it were water. Instead of charging forward and battering things down, although it is capable of that, water can slowly wear down mountains and is constantly searching for a way to flow forward. It can break through a problem, but can also go under, around or through it. 

Water is patient and seemingly undemanding. It fits perfectly into any situation it's put in. Water changes with the landscape as it changes everything it touches. It isn't upset to have to change its path. 

Creativity is survival. Water survives difficult situations by setting its own conditions for victory. 

If you feel like you're beating your head against a wall, try being water for a while. You might find a crack in the wall and get through, but even if you don't, at least your head won't hurt while you work your way through. 

That's all you do - Unimpressive Creativity

I was talking to a reporter today about some of the products we make at my work. I named Bacon Mints and the Yodelling Pickle as examples of popular items.

She then said, rather dismissively, "So, all you guys do is find things that have never been put together before and join them up, right? Pick two things and figure out how they go together."

And, a bit insulted to have my work so belittled, I thought to myself, that's what all creativity is at its most basic level. Don't we all strive to find new connections between things in an attempt to come up with something new?

So yes, like every artist, inventor and philosopher that has ever lived, that's all we do.

In another sense, I think maybe this is a useful way of looking at it. It's not hard, you can do it yourself. Just pick two things and find the connection between them. There is no mystery, difficulty or speed bumps, it really is that simple. All the books that have been written are pretty much making a big deal out of nothing.

All of us creative people, that's all we do.

Cult of Done Manifesto

I know this has been posted all over the place, but it deserves to be posted even more. Bre Pettis and Kio Stark have written this manifesto for getting things done. They did it in 20 minutes! If you go to the actual post, you can find a fancy jpg version of it to print out and hang in a spot where you have to read it every day.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more

From Bre Pettis's blog

David Byrne on How and When to Handle Criticism

David Byrne posted in his blog today that one of his friends warned him not to read a review of his current tour in the New York Times. It was less than flattering and was written by someone who had not liked his work in the past. He passed on this advice.

While taking criticism on board can be constructive, it can also be detrimental to the creative process if it’s considered while that process is still under way. It undermines one’s enthusiasm and will — which is OK, beneficial even, but only after a tour (for example) is over. This review, by all reports, wasn’t helpful criticism anyway — it seemed to be one of those reviews that comes from some psychological issues the writer has — and therefore even a belated reading is not going to help us refine what we do.

David Byrne