Mysterious Flame

Not enough to qualify for me to use to write complete posts (although one or two have the potential for me to expand upon at some future date), here are some links I’ve come across recently that you might find useful in your creative efforts.

• 19 Online Destinations for Boosting Creativity | LifeDev
  What the title says. Not all of these are favorites of mine, but they may help you.
• TED Talks: Do schools kill creativity?
  Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
• Designing Through the Storm | A List Apart
  “We’ve all experienced low points, and whether they’re caused by tight timelines, hostile clients, infighting, personal disasters, or something else entirely, we have to find a way to work through them.”
• 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity
  Lifehack.org talks about some tips to get your creativity rolling.
• 12 Ways to Tap Into an Endless Well of Creativity
  Photoshop-centric tutorial site PSDTuts runs a list that is very similar to my Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity
• On Creativity | A List Apart
  Andy Rutlege talks about the benefits of constraints on design projects. “Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant.”

Looking for a good online source of inspiration for your images? Enter FFFFOUND!, a website that lets you bookmark images (as opposed to pages like del.icio.us using a bookmarklet to install in your browser. I recently discovered it and for now it’s invitation only. (I managed to get an invite from someone on Twitter.)

Once you have added images to your bookmarks, other users on the FFFFOUND! site can add your images to their profiles as well, thus making them one of your followers. Your images are then recommended to them in a big pool. It’s a little confusing at first since it’s pretty organic and doesn’t have a whole lot of immediate structure, but looking at the cool images is addictive. It’s like the early days of the internet, only with beautiful and bizarre images. I don’t like that I can’t search for anything, and tagging isn’t available. Maybe we’ll be able to do that when it gets out of beta?

At any rate, it’s a good source for ideas and inspiration, with what seems to be an emphasis in advertisements and commercial photography, the kind of stuff that might turn up in Communication Arts if it were less conservative.

Naturally, I bookmarked some really cool images of bridges and Modernist typography.

Seth Godin produces some really nice gems on his blog. I’ve never read his books, but I always appreciate what he has to say on his blog. Today he mentioned how someone recently asked if posting to his blog every day is a big chore or not, in his post Have to vs. Get to. Here’s what he has to say about it:

I view it as something I get to do. I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.

The best work, at least for me, is the stuff you get to do. If you are really good at that, you’re lucky enough to have very little of the have to stuff left.

This is totally true if you’re practicing art, and it goes hand in hand with the idea of “turning pro.” Don’t view what you do as what you “have” to do, but look at it as what you have the privilege of doing.

A few months ago I picked up the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance. It’s an excellent book that deals with getting yourself off your rear end and doing whatever it is you were meant to do, whether it’s writing The Great American Novel or starting a business.

Summary

Pressfield begins by taking a good, hard look at what he calls “Resistance,” that thing that keeps us from doing anything difficult or end up with a good long-term result. Book One, “Defining the Enemy” talks about the many forms Resistance takes, many of which you will recognize right away. In Book Two, he quickly moves on to the idea of “Turning Pro” — resisting Resistance by not procrastinating and treating your art as a job. Just plug away at it, even if it’s crap. It’s the old “quantity over quality” idea that says if you work hard enough and long enough and make enough, the quality will happen on it’s own. Finally, he conludes this short book with third section about his fervent belief in angels and muses, who inspire him. He even cites Homer’s Invocation of the Muse (it’s his prayer before he begins writing) and touches on Jungian psychology.

My take: no nonsense (or very little, anyway)

I really appreciate Pressfield’s no-nonsense, tell-it-straight writing style that mixes in humor and an uplifting moment or two along with the career successes and failures he shares. The former Marine has an in-the-trenches attitude that says: “Cut the crap and get the art done.” I will say that the last section of the book, “Beyond Resistance: Higher Realm” gets a bit weird with all the talk about angels and muses. Then it takes a weird turn where he starts swearing at the first novel he ever finished. Nonetheless it’s a great book, and I enjoyed the tidbits of Greek history and philosophy.

It’s written in an almost devotional sort of format, with each “chapter” rarely going more than one or two pages. The chapters had a bite-sized “blog post” feel. One could read a page a day at random as they get fired up to go to their studio and do their art. I loved the lack of New-Agey fluff that’s so common to art/self-help books like The Artist’s Way. It’s a great book that will inspire you to get off your butt and get moving. There are great tidbits of advice and pep-talk without any sugar-coating at all. I highly recommend it to any creative person, whether they’re stuck or not.

On the wall of our copywriter’s office, I saw something on her whiteboard that made me take notice. “Nice spider-web,” I said. She explained to me what it was: a sort of modified mind-map called UNO, short for UNiversal Organizer, developed by Paul Borzo, a teacher and writing tutor at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul. My co-worker found out about it from a writing newsletter she recieves.

The idea is to start off with a primary concept and break it down into finer concepts and more granular points or supporting ideas. It’s a nice twist on a classic idea.