Creative Something

How to not lose your creative passion.

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:01:12 -0600

This is dangerous. You can be doing a lot of work as a creative and still feel as though you’re not doing much of anything you love.

A long-time friend of mine who experienced this feeling early on in his career described it as: “having an apartment with a lot of things in it, and yet still feeling as though it were completely empty.”

It’s the feeling of losing your creative passion. Extinguitur ignis. The fire of doing what you love extinguished to a small ember. It’s a dangerous place to be for a creative: artist, photographer, dancer, sculpture, writer, or otherwise.

It is, however, natural. A loss of passion in creativity is regularly a result of stress, or a lack of focus, or a fear of risk, or the feeling of doing work that is under appreciated. It’s the photographer who doesn’t feel as though her photos receive any recognition, or the painter who doesn’t know what medium is right for him. Creative passion can go missing, it happens. The dangerous part comes from giving up when you do lose passion; from calling it quits and accepting the fact that you just don’t have it in you.

As Tony Luna so elegantly explains in this article on Photo.net: “One thing we have to embrace is the knowledge that once we have claimed our passion it will not leave us. It may lay dormant while we retool our skills, or we take a break to refresh our abilities so we can recognize the possibilities around us, but our passion never really, totally, abandons us.”

Knowing these things, there are a few ways to hold tight to your passion for creating.

The first way to not lose that passion is to make sure you’re not overly stressed. Find plenty of time to take breaks and get some rest throughout your works ay.

Another way is to consistently ask yourself if what you’re working on is a part of your larger goal. Avoid doing any creative work that doesn’t help you move towards your larger life goal (or goals), though recognize that sometimes the smaller goals are merely stepping stones to that bigger stones on your path.

You should also regularly evaluate your creative focus. Ask yourself: “is this the type of creative work I want to be known for?” If not, start making small changes right now to get your focus back on track.

Lastly, embrace the idea that you might fail, and that failure is not the end but merely an experience for growth.

If you’ve recently felt as though you’re losing your passion to create, first ask yourself what might be causing the feeling (is it stress? Feeling unappreciated? A lack of focus? Fear of failure?), then give yourself time to resolve the issue on your own terms.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt.

Read this and get closer to creative success.

Mon, 21 May 2012 07:38:44 -0600

Earlier over the weekend I was reading some fantastic writing from Merlin Mann when I stumbled across an article of his titled “The problem with ‘feeling creative’” and immediately I fell in love with what I discovered.

You saw my article some weeks ago about how difficult creating can be, right? It’s not just that creating is hard, it’s that creativity is work in itself.

To quote Merlin’s aforementioned article: “Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.”

The creative genius wasn’t born with some remarkable, innate ability to see the world differently, he or she was simply primed for creative thinking all his or her life. The same can go for you as well: if you practice being creative enough, and if you do the hard work to question the world around you and if you make efforts to shake things up once in a while, you’ll be a creative pro.

There’s no real trick, and any amount of advice or wisdom you seek out won’t help you be more creative if you’re not willing to put in the work and exercise your creative muscles.

Get out there and do something creative today, even if it’s something really damn small and only takes you five minutes. Then do something similar tomorrow, and the next day. Work at being more creative and – surprise – you will be.

The perks of venturing into an unknown art.

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:37:59 -0600

A painter can learn a lot about shapes by exploring the art of sculpture.

The painter who learns to sculpt can play with shapes and textures in the 3D world without having to start a new canvas to see how changes affect those shapes. The different creative medium allows the painter to see their art from a new perspective, using new techniques and abilities he or she may have not fully explored before.

Similarly, a writer can discover insights from cinematography, an entrepreneur can learn much from farming, and a digital designer can explore new ideas by mastering traditional art.

Becoming well‒known for one type of creation is good, especially when you really excel at that one form. But if you only stick to one method of creating and don’t explore the countless other ways to create that are out there, you’ll be missing an opportunity to really explore and grow as a creative individual.

We can’t know what is possible if we only stick to what we know. Author and probability expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us of the value we can see as creatives by exploring in his book The Black Swan. Taleb suggestions: “The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.”

Today, what can you do to create something using a different method than you’re used to? What types of tools and techniques can you use to spur on your creativity right now?

Photo by Zach Dischner.

To find creative bliss, just focus.

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:44:04 -0600

When you grab a camera and take a picture that is out of focus, the result isn’t very pleasing.

A photo that is out of focus requires a lot of unnecessary work on part of the viewer in order to see exactly what the picture is of. Your creative life is a lot like that photograph: if there’s nothing clearly in focus, you’re creating unnecessary work that could have been prevented.

You have to learn what to focus on if you want to succeed as a creative and be happy.

Successul people aren’t always necessarily more intelligent or creative than anyone else, they just know how to focus their efforts. Author Seth Godin recently blogged about this topic, he writes: “…those that manage to capture the imagination…and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.”

But how do you know what matters right now – what you should be focusing on – and what doesn’t?

As a creative, you likely have a lot of areas to focus on right now. There’s work to be done, there’s responsibilities and bills to see to, there’s friends and family and possibly an entire other category of work that you enjoy. So which area do you focus most of your efforts on? There’s no easy answer, but one way to tell what you should be focusing on is to evaluate how happy and challenging the work is.

Exciting work that makes you feel happy and accomplished, work that is somewhat challenging and that makes you feel as though you’re learning and growing, may be the right work to focus on. Ultimately you’ll have to explore different areas of focus, but with any sort of focus you’re working on the photo that is your creative life, and that’s better than an out of focus picture.

Keep going with a solid focus when you find it, rather than taking the side road to somewhere else. Doing so will help you create a clear picture and enable you to be more successful.

So go now, find something worth focusing on, and give it all you’ve got.

Photo by Magdalena.

Share where you discover creative inspiration.

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:11:13 -0600

I’ve written before about how inspiration is all around us, but I wanted to try something different with your help.

When asked the question: where do you find creative inspiration, what first comes to mind? Now take that idea and find a way to present it, in a photo, a drawing or painting, in a poem, in a short story, or any other way you like to present your ideas.

Got it? Now email your answer to information AT creativesomething.net. I’m going to gather and collect responses from Creative Something readers like you and put them into an inspiration gallery here on the site!

Your inspiration could be featured in the new gallery, so be sure to send your name and blog or website URL to be given proper credit.

I’ll accept entries into the inspiration gallery until Friday, May 18th.

Illustration by John Borowicz.

Be uncertain of your ideas, but not your purpose.

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:16:45 -0600

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

Feeling certain can be a large burden for creative endeavors.

The inventor who goes out in search of what he is confident to be an ideal, perfect machine, is doomed for failure. By being married to his vision of what his invention should be, he doesn’t see the better solution just around the edges.

We can see this problem almost every day. We all settle into ideas because we’re so sure they’ll work, and when they don’t work we keep pushing on them, spending countless hours to try and fit our square peg of an idea into the round hole of a goal.

Instead, our creative process should be the opposite. We shouldn’t be married to ideas, we should instead be married to goals, visions, and purposes.

If your purpose is to create artwork that inspires, creating art using only crayons may not be the best way to go about it. If your vision is to be the best improv actor this side of the globe, you can’t be married to the idea that opening your own theater is the way to get there. This is important because wasting your time on an idea that isn’t working is just that: a waste of time. Pursuing ideas that aren’t right means you’re wasting time that you could otherwise be devoting to the right efforts.

Being married to an idea is an efficient way to waste energy and resources.

It’s natural to pursue certainty, but it’s unnatural to align that certainty to mere ideas. Instead, be open to the fact that your ideas may not be the best, that there may be a better solution waiting for you to discover it. Instead of defining yourself by your ideas, define yourself by your goals and vision.

Creative insights often hide here, just outside where we’re so certain they are.

Illustration copyright Jean Giraud via But does it float.

Creativity as a process of discovering solutions.

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:32 -0600

“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?” – Isaac Asimov

Have you thought about this before? It’s a simple idea ‒ certainly an obvious one ‒ but many of us tend to forget it as easily as we hear it.

Particularly for creative individuals, the obvious solutions that escape us are typically the ones we are trying the hardest to find. But, for whatever reason, we often place barriers between ourselves and the very solutions we seek.

Why?

Too often we go out trying to create a solution for a problem. We gather the resources and make the time and settle ourselves down to pursue the creation of a solution. In reality: solutions exist, it’s your job to bring them to light. Sometimes that means simply presenting the problem in the right perspective.

To quote this great article from Creativity Post: “…The most creative people are actually the ones who point out where the problems are in the first place”

So, if solutions are waiting for us to simply discover them, why is it common to struggle in search of them? Sometimes you might be letting fear get in the way of the perfect, obvious solution. You’ll say “But it can’t be that easy!” Though it certainly is. Or other times you might find yourself getting entirely too “zoomed up” on the problem you’re looking at. Your focus is so tight that you fail to see the solution just a tiny bit outside of your scope. Other times you might be too concentrated to really focus clearly, or maybe you’re coming up with excuses, or perhaps you don’t understand the problem as well as you thought.

Whatever reasons you may be getting stuck, one very feasible solution is to first make sure you understand what it is you’re trying to do or address, then surround yourself with all of the inspiration and information about that problem, then take a break and relax. Let the solutions make themselves clear to you.

It doesn’t always turn out that way, but it’s always worth trying if you’re feeling stuck.

Photo by Vincent.

How constraints can build creative inspiration.

Thu, 03 May 2012 07:19:55 -0600

In the 1920s a vibrant Dutch painter set out his tools in front of him.

Because he was a painter, his tools were limited to canvases, paint, brushes, and a few various painting items. His constraints – these painting tools – were the same constraints that other painters of the time had to deal with. There were, of course, ways to create different types of artwork at the time, but those methods took away from the original purpose of painting.

To be creative, the painter would have to do something completely different. But how?

This painters name was Piet Mondrian, and his work has become widely popular since the early 1920s. How did Piet use creativity to improve his paintings and set a place in history for himself? He gave himself even more constraints.

Constraints are often viewed as negative aspects of problem solving. When you are placed into boundaries the first instinct is to kick and scream and say “how can I be creative if I can’t explore outside the rules?”

Interestingly, constraints can help spur creativity by forcing you to work on just a single focus, a solid goal. When you pile on constraints in exploration, you block out anything else that may take away from your focus. You allow yourself to really focus your area of inspiration, often discovering insights in the small crevices of your work that you otherwise wouldn’t have looked.

Piet Mondrian did just that with painting. He looked at his constraints – canvases and paints – and gave himself even more: only working with straight lines, 90-degree angles, and primary colors. The result: Piet helped to spur on a modernist approach to art and fuel the creation of Neo-Plasticism. His paintings are recognized around the world, even today.

If you’re feeling creatively stuck, try giving yourself more constraints. Limit yourself to only using verbs, draw out your ideas using only basic shapes, restrict yourself to painting only on a sliver of canvas, do anything that forces you to focus on the creation.

Constraints can feel overpowering, but it’s in the small area of space you have to work with that new insights can form.

For creatives, happiness is all in creating.

Tue, 01 May 2012 07:22:50 -0600

A few days ago I had the opportunity to hear YouTube videographer Devin Graham speak about his creative success.

While Devin mentioned how a number of his videos have received more than 5 million views, what really mattered to him wasn’t the level of success he had reached.

What mattered to Devin the most was the fact that he was able to work on his projects day-in and day-out. It wasn’t even the pursuit of success that made him enjoy his work, it was the fact that he’s able to do it at all. To quote Devin: “The tools don’t matter, the ideas do.”

This struck a chord with me, because Devin made it so obvious that success isn’t really what makes creative individuals happy. While creative success matters, what’s really important for true creative individuals is the ability to simply create. The act of creating every day, of focusing in on a project or problem, is what drives true happiness for people like us.

Think of the ecstatic artist who abandoned a traditional career in exchange for a run-down studio and oversized canvases. Or the gleeful writer who had to spent every day for three years sitting down to write in a small studio apartment. If you were to ask any one of these types of creatives whether they would trade in their situation for a shot at fame, they’ll likely turn down the offer. For them: it’s never been about success or money or fame, it’s always been simply about creating.

Imagine being unable to write or draw or design or explore your creative passions. For some of us, a day job stands in the way 90% of the time. For others, disability or a lack of opportunity hinders our ability to create. But there are no excuses good enough! To be a happy creative you have to create.

So, if you find yourself feeling down, or if you have recently lost the motivation to be creative, or if you feel burdened by other aspects of your life, try finding time every single day to create something. Let it be anything, there are no limits: create something handmade, or a poem, a unique photograph, a new ebook, a drawing of people you see everyday, anything you can do to create something every day and replenish your creative reserves.

Not only will you have something to show for your efforts at the end of each day, but you’re likely to feel happier and more fulfilled as well.

The value of making the wrong marks.

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:01:07 -0600

Recently on Times.com there was an article about the benefits of struggling.

In a world where struggling – and, more importantly, failing – is looked down on, it’s important to remind yourself that the only real way to become successful in anything you do is to flounder.

If you want to become a master of anything, whether it’s painting or writing or photography or being a leader, you have to struggle in the beginning. It’s through those struggles and failings that you often discover what works and, to the point, why it works.

So get out there today and make some wrong moves, struggle, and embrace the idea that you might fail in the things you’re passionate about. But by doing so, you’re building an understanding of everything it takes to succeed.

An absurd idea to create wonder.

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:00:59 -0600

When conceptual artist Anna Schuleit was invited to create a work of art for the closing of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in 2003, she was almost immediately struck with a remarkable and truly creative idea.

Anna and a team of 80 volunteers spent a matter of weeks gathering, sorting, and caring for nearly 28,000 potted flowers to fill the then cold and abandoned mental center. The hospital was opened to the public for four days, where old workers, patients, and friends and family all shuffled through the suddenly vibrant and soft hallways.

The result, called Bloom can be seen in these spectacular photos.

“I was hoping to create a work that would bring aspects of play into the seriousness of the institution, an element of the absurd,” Anna states. “It would have been infinitely easier to work with just a few hundred flowers, or a few thousand even, but I wanted to reach my goal of twenty-eight thousand, because it had occurred to me at the beginning of the project that that was the minimum number that was missing here. ”

What Anna did was take a missing element from her topic (that of color and warm, welcome feelings) and turn it into a project which spurred many mixed emotions. She didn’t stop with just a couple hundred or even thousand flowers either, she went all out with 28,000 flowers, all potted and in need of care.

In your own work and life, what are the elements missing that should be there? What scale would you have to work with to create your own Bloom-like project? What absurd ideas can bring wonder and beauty into your own work?

Be sure to view more of the inspirational photos, and read the exclusive interview with Anna, over on Colossal.

(Hat tip to Mind Hacks.)

Creating isn't easy, try not to forget.

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:29:19 -0600

To be a successful creative you have to make the time and do the hard work first.

The artist who works long hours in the day just to pay the bills still comes home at night and paints until she can’t keep her eyes open. The writer who has a family to look after does the work required to help them be happy and healthy and then writes from 1 am until 3 am each day in pursuit of his passion.

It’s the same story for entrepreneurs, designers, illustrators, film makers, photographers, craftspeople, and anyone else who creates.

You can come up with all of the excuses in the world for why you don’t have time to do creative work, but then you’ll be just like everyone else: unsuccessful at pursuing your creative endeavors. If you really want to be successful, you’ll do what it takes to reach that point.

Think about it. We’re all given roughly the same opportunity to work for our success. Sure, some people are given the tools and money and time to pursue their creative passions without much effort, but that’s only a small minority. Even then, those who don’t have to work tirelessly for years to achieve creative success seem to never have the same quality of work as those who do.

So let’s get on the right trail and set the sail straight here: if you really want to succeed, it’s not going to be easy. It takes countless nights of tirelessly hammering the stone to create a statue worth mention. For some of us, the hard work will last for many years.

Myself included. I’m now approaching the five year mark of relentlessly pursuing creativity to become an expert in understanding what it is and how we can use it. But I know that the work pays off because I’ve seen how it has for hundreds of artists and craftspeople and inventors and writers before me.

Creating is not easy, it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time. That’s just the way it is. Take it or leave it.

Photo of Pollock working in his New York Studio via, and copyright by, Time Life

You don't know if you don't try.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:30:42 -0600

What would happen if you experimented with something new today?

If you’re used to working on the computer all day, what if you tried working on paper instead? If you typically work with pencils and pens, what if you used just crayons? Instead of taking charge of projects what if you passed them off to a complete stranger? What if you listened to 40’s jazz instead of the latest pop hits when doing your work today?

The thing about experimentation is we can’t accurately predict the outcome. You might think you know how trying something new will turn out, but the reality is that you just won’t know until you try it.

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes the issue we have succinctly: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

Fortunately for you, experimenting to explore the creative ideas you didn’t even know existed is easy. You just have to do something new.

You don’t have to wait for permission to try something new either, and you won’t know whether the new thing will be worthwhile until you really try it. So what’s stopping you today?

Try experimenting with something new today. Big or small, discover at least one thing you don’t know.

Photo by Rob Dunlavey.

Creativity takes no excuses.

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:00:09 -0600

Creativity means you are actively creating. No excuse – how tired you are, or how you feel stuck, or the fact that you don’t know where to start – will do if you want to succeed.

Click for a larger version. Be sure to share with your friends, family, and co-workers.

Creating on an extreme sense of scale.

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:27:04 -0600

A tiny tomato, a fraction of size compared to a penny, sits inside of a salad bowl. Beside it are a few onions and leaves of lettuce, all much smaller than the tip of your finger.

When you look at even one of Shay Aaron’s remarkable pieces of work, you start to really understand that Shay is an artist that works in an extreme sense of scale.

Case and point? 1:12 scale food created entirely from clay.

These miniature food pieces are so remarkably detailed that it’s incredible just to imagine how many hours of work went into each piece. The details of a banana split, a teeny-tiny lunch with sandwich, cookie, and watermelon, all small enough to hold on the edge of your littlest finger.

I’m reminded of something Ze Frank once spoke of in regards to how his creative process sometimes works:

“Generally, when I have an idea I start with a sense of scale…If I’m trying to generate ideas around it, the first thing I’d do is take a general imagination run into scale…I flip back and forth between the extremes until something interesting comes out of it…It’s a super-cool exercise only in that it forces you to explore the outside boundaries of things.”

What if you worked on a radical sense of scale today? What if your work was tiny? What if it was the largest? What would you do with more, and what would you do if you completely ran out?

Let Shay’s work inspire you and see what comes as a result.

Hat tip to Booooooom.

Surprise! Analytical thinkers are creative too.

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:13:55 -0600

I once sat down with a remarkably talented team of web professionals to discuss the importance of innovation in their market.

After going over several points specifically about how the internet makes it easier than ever to be creative and move technology and sales-points forward, I concluded that each of the team needed to step up their game and pursue creative possibilities if they wanted to succeed.

Their response? “But we’re not creative.”

Of course, everyone is creative. It’s just a matter of how creative an individual wants to be that affects situations like the one I was in with this team. They were intuitively creative, but no more than that, and they weren’t interested in being any more creative than they had to be.

When I pressed further the team spoke of “being analytical,” and relying on data and technical information to make their decisions.

So I nodded my head in understanding and then said this: creative decisions based on analytical data are great examples of what creativity can be.

When you look at statistical information, at the technical side of anything, and really evaluate the trends and data that you’re seeing, you’re essentially marking definitive lines in possibilities. You’re propelling yourself towards creative ideas by evaluating information.

If you see a bit of information that clearly says something about what you’ve been doing in the past, you’re guaranteed to get insights into what to try moving forward. That’s creativity. When you start looking at what’s historically worked for you and your projects, you’re going to undoubtedly start asking questions about that data, such as “What if we tried this?” and “How can we improve this?” and “What is the best way to do this?”

The artist that scores and evaluates her artwork will be inspired by the data and know what to work on next. The writer that regularly seeks feedback from readers will have a multitude of ways to improve his work. The teacher that solicits feedback about assignments from students will gain a creative understanding of new things to try the next time around.

Just because someone is a straight–forward analytical thinker doesn’t mean that they can’t be creative too. In-fact: looking through analytical data is one of the best ways to come up with new, creative ideas.

Illustration via Ivan Walsh.

What to do when the ideas stop coming.

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:41:23 -0600

What do you do when you lose the motivation to create? When the ideas seemingly stop coming and any task feels like a burden?

You can give up, call it quits, and put off creating another day. But that will only make the situation worse, as a creative individual you need to create. And putting off anything only makes you fall behind.

So, what do you do?

You should relax, because your cognitive load may be overwhelmed from trying to think so hard. Take a short (timed) break from whatever it is you’re doing, five or ten or fifteen minutes should be enough. After your break, talk with another creator. See if they can’t help you with your task or if they can help point you to some positive inspiration. If you’re still not motivated and the ideas still aren’t flowing at this point, look for new motivation. The web is great for this. Sites like Behance, Thought Catalog, and Vimeo, all have incredible work that is sure to motivate you.

If, after each of the above steps, the ideas still aren’t coming, you may just need to dive in, to overcome any excuse you can give yourself.

The ideas are all there in your mind, sometimes you just have to let them flow freely without worrying.

Photo by Pete Birkinshaw.

You have to take action if you want to succeed.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:53:34 -0600

When Chuck Anderson was just 18 years old, he set out to become a creative powerhouse all on his own.

Chuck had just finished high school and knew that he wanted to be a part of the creative design process that set businesses like Nike and Burton apart from the rest.

But there was a problem with his dream. Chuck wasn’t an experienced designer. So he spent a lot of his time doing design work for himself, envisioning what his work would look like for bigger things. Then, with only a small amount of experience under his belt and a passion for creativity that was nearly uncontrollable, Chuck spent countless late nights browsing around the web and tracking down email addresses for creative publishers and major companies.

Day after day he would email anyone he could, occasionally having to guess what someone’s email address could be in hopes of getting in touch with them.

Eventually, it worked. Studios began to respond to Chuck and, once they saw his creative approach to design, they wanted more from him. Within a very small amount of time, Chuck became a go-to creative designer for companies like Target, ESPN, Google, Nike, Reebok, and hundreds more.

While most of the kids Chuck’s age had some of the drive to pursue their passions, none were as driven as he was. The biggest difference between Chuck’s success and his former peer’s drudgery? Chuck was willing to take action, do the work, and spend countless hours pursuing his success. He didn’t ask for permission from anyone, or wait until he had built a large portfolio of work. Chuck didn’t sit around and daydream about how great it would be to get a job with one of the largest design firms in the world. He jumped at the opportunity to do what he loved. He waited for no one and nothing, he simply took action.

Action is a crucial step to creative success. Anyone can have ideas, only those who actually do something with their ideas are the ones who will make it.

“Success comes from taking the initiative and following up… persisting… eloquently expressing the depth of your love. What simple action could you take today to produce a new momentum toward success in your life?” – Tony Robbins

What pursuing your creative passion looks like.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:25:52 -0600

Ian Ruhter fell in love with photography when he was younger.

But as he grew older he began to tire of the same old cameras, the same old photography techniques, and the same old photos that everyone was taking. So he did something truly creative: he took his life savings and converted an old delivery truck into a giant, mobile camera.

Ian’s creation isn’t just a huge camera on wheels, it’s a modern take on a classic photo process called “wet plate collodion.”

The process requires a single plate, covered in silver nitrate, to be sensitized and then exposed and developed before the plate dries.

What makes Ian’s project even more incredible is that it costs him an average of $500 to make a single print, and he had to give up everything else he had to make the truck a reality. But Ian says it’s all worth it, because nobody else is doing what he’s doing and there isn’t anyone else who can do it like he has.

Ian saw something he was truly passionate about and came up with a creative idea to make it happen. The truck is one of the best examples of using creativity to pursue your life passion. While you don’t have to give up your life savings to do something as monumental as Ian has, his example makes you wonder about what you would do for your own creative passion.

To quote Ian: “If you had been searching your whole life for something you love, and you found it, what would you be willing to sacrifice?”

Watch Ian’s SILVER & LIGHT video to hear more about his project. And follow Ian’s progress on Facebook.

Hat tip to Jeff Hamada.

The inspiration around us.

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:57:25 -0600

“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.” – Leonardo da Vinci.

There’s a favorite story of mine that belonged to a friend I knew while growing up.

At the time of this story, my friend’s father had just started a small advertising design studio out of Provo, Utah. With the help of a business partner, the studio began to swell and grow almost immediately.

But there was a problem with the studio, they had no name and, more importantly for a design studio, no logo.

For weeks the partners of the company ran through drawings of potential logos. They stayed up late at night trying to come up with a logo that would represent their company perfectly, but none of the ideas they came up with were good enough.

Until one day while getting out of his car, my friend’s father accidentally spilled a drink onto the warm concrete outside of the office.

When he looked down at the spill it immediately struck him. The spill had somehow splashed in a way that resembled the appearance of a wise old man, with his hands placed against his forehead as if in deep thought.

“Aha!” the father thought to himself. The spill resembled everything that the design agency wanted to portray, of knowledge and wisdom and the effort it takes to creatively work on great design. The logo that the design studio uses to this day is that of a wise old man with hands placed against his forehead as if in deep thought.

Leonardo da Vinci was right when he said that all of our knowledge (and inspiration, for that matter) begin with our perceptions. “Almost with apology, since it seemed so obvious to him, [Leonardo] advised people to contemplate the walls, clouds, pavements, etc., with the idea of looking for patterns and images to conceptually blend with your thoughts.” writes Michael Michalko on da Vinci.

Everything we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear, has the ability to inspire us. Everything from the walls around us, to the clouds in the sky, to an accidental drink spilled onto the ground, everything has the ability to inspire us, if we only make an effort to look.

Today, try seeking out inspiration in everything around you. Make an active effort to touch, smell, taste, see, and hear, at least one or two new things today. See what’s around you that you perhaps haven’t taken the time to see before, because that’s where you’ll undoubtedly find new inspiration.

Illustration by Andres Ramos.