Kwame Busia

I’ve decided that I need a redesign. I’m going to give myself the task of rebranding and redesigning my whole operation. New logo, new website, new business cards everything.

The problem I have with the setup I’ve got, is that I don’t feel my site or my logo or any of my current branding give a good idea of who I am, what I do and where I’m coming from. At the moment my site, by my own admission is a mishmash of photos, logos, graphics, cgi etc.

The thing is I created everything on my page, but I don’t feel it’s clear that if someone came to my page, that I’m a multidisciplinary designer and that I work across several types of creative fields.

Similarly it’s different from working in mixed media. I don’t have finished pieces which are a mixture of say illustration and photography and graphics. Sometimes I do photography, sometimes I do graphics. They are very different fields visually and making a cohesive place to show them all off in a way that I’m happy is proving trickier than I thought.

I’ve got some ideas rattling around in my Moleskine, the only thing is that working for yourself, designing for yourself can be tougher than designing for a client, you’re your own worst enemy, especially if you’re a perfectionist.

So to tackle this I’m going to start by doing two things.
Clarifying my process and beliefs and approach to design and creation, and find the simplest most concise way of expressing this to others.

Next I’ll create a framework, a brand and identity for myself which revolves around that, perhaps even keeping some kind of easily identifiable underlying unity between all the things I create from here on in.

It’ll be tough, but I like a challenge.
I’ll see how this one plays out.

I’m off to enjoy some more Alan Wake on my new ‘Stealthbox’!

Isn’t it funny how sometimes when you’re under pressure, thoughts and ideas of all the cool stuff you could do come a mile a minute, then when you have all the time in the world…

(cue tumbleweed)

Nothing…?

Maybe something to do with being under pressure or percieving yourself to be under pressure stimulates a need for ideas and thoughts to synthesize in creative ways, as opposed to when you’re at rest (or have lots of time) when the brain doesn’t (or doesn’t have to) make connections that fast.

Perhaps that’s why giving yourself deadlines and sticking to them seems to work quite well, rather than leaving a project with an open ended completion date. Also giving yourself less time that than would comfortably required seems to be what is necessary to perform creative miracles.

Also with less time, making a decision becomes more important. With more time to consider something you can succomb to consideration paralysis where you end up not making much progress at all.

So in summary the equation appears to be:

less time + more pressure + important decisions made quickly and decisively = more ideas.

As for the quality of ideas, its hard to say if they are better or worse, but there are definately more, which might be useful for you.

Check out the next post ‘Becoming Mr. Scott – Why Giving Yourself Less Time Helps You Work Miracles’.

If you often find it difficult to concentrate whilst you’re at work because you’re having so many exciting ideas, creative thoughts and possibilities running through your head, then you either need to change your line of work or find a way to make it so that those ideas go somewhere.

You have to take the leap and make a change that will allow you to express yourself and make and impact.

Do what YOU want to be doing.

Imagine what it would be like spending your days making exciting things happen? Turning thoughts in your head and sketches on napkins into a reality and the whole while you’re having the best time of your life doing it.

Now stop imagining and make it happen.

I don’t know who came up with the idea that thinking doesn’t take energy and being creative is easy, because it absolutely one hundred and ten percent is the opposite.

Real hard thinking consumes alot of energy. You’ll be left with your stomach rumbling and feeling totally drained of energy. That’s how it works. Keeping yourself well rested and well fed will win you half the battle when it comes to keeping the ideas flowing.

People hear the word ‘creative’ and think it’s playing with crayons and such. We need to re-educate the world about exactly what we do and how we do it.

Ideas can come at any moment. Depending on how you choose to express yourself creatively, they can come in any form also. My advice in situations like this is to have as many ways to capture your ideas as close to hand as possible. Primarily I think and create visually, but I sometimes make music also. If I have an idea for a song, I have a voice memo app close to hand that I can hum into.

If it’s a poem or song lyrics or an idea for a movie or TV show, then I have a sketchbook or a notetaking app on my iPad ready to go.

The reason I say have them close at hand is because some ideas decay fast. They longer and idea has to linger before its captured the more it gets diluted and corrupted by other thoughts after which it is not as pure and ‘Eureka’ as when you first thought of it.

If you happen to know any single ideas floating around your head, what you could do is hold an idea dinner party (in your head of course).
You know that silly idea in the corner of the room over there? Introduce it the the ultra-sensible idea you’ve been talking to for the last five minutes, she’ll have some fun and thank you for it. Maybe in a year or two you’ll be asked to be god-parent to their half-silly, half-sensible but very well adjusted offspring idea, which just might set the world alight.

Just a thought.

In a previous post I was talking about quality versus quantity in regards to coming up with ideas and stuff like that.

This time I’ll talk about something a bit weird which I do in my head which seems to work for me which maybe will work for you too.

It’s something I call, ‘Letting it bake’.

Whenever I come across an idea that I like or a find interesting, I think of all of it’s components as ingredients, and I envision it as a cake mixture in my mind. It doesn’t have to be cake, I just happen to like cake. You can envision it as a pie or soufflé if that’s more comfortable for you.

Anyway, I envision a massive oven, and I throw that cake / pie / soufflé mix in there. Then I let it bake. That means you step away from the oven, leave the idea alone. When it’s ready to come to fruition, you’ll be able to smell it, and then you can take it out of the oven and share slices with whoever wants a piece.

Never underestimate the power of the subconscious mind.

Silly things like this, really work. When I say leave the idea, I don’t mean hours or minutes (although sometimes it can be that fast) I’m talking about days, weeks, months even.

You’ll find miraculously that ideas you ‘bake’ are never forgotten, they linger until you discover that last piece of the puzzle, that tiny element that was preventing you from going all the way with the idea in the first place.

Try it.

P.s, the reason I don’t usually recommend envisioning a soufflé is because soufflés tend to be notoriously difficult to get right, they are full of air and also because cake is sweet.

Thankyou for listening.

If Ffffound, NOTCOT, DesignYouTrust, SwissMiss, Designboom and Behance are the design blog ‘A-List’, the main streets, then Tumblr blogs are the backstreets. Actually sometimes I call it Jumblr rather than Tumblr because its like a jumble sale in there. Also the smaller designblogs that are hosted on Blogger and WordPress.com – those are like the underground, the streets. They seem a bit seedier because they’re not as polished, not as slick, but the content can be purer, more raw. You find all kinds of little things that get buried by the bigger boys.

Simplicity is simply asking, how simple can I make simple?

Let your mind chew on that.