Kwame Busia

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.

The world is filled with many different types of people who all see things in different way. Additionally we have people around us who understand us and the things we do as well as people who don’t get us. We also have people who trust our judgement and support us, then there are people who don’t support us. Unfortunately there are also people you just can’t trust and who will deliberately give you bad advice, discourage you, sabotage your efforts or set you up to fail. Sadly, sometimes even the people who are on our side can inadvertently cause us problems further down the line by not being fully honest and open with their opinions or by trying to spare our feelings or by trying to be good friends.

What we have to understand is that humans are very complex in terms of relationships. Sometimes if you try and reach for the stars, you’ll alienate those people around you who are giving you support today. Sadly todays friend can be tomorrows enemy.

Similarly sometimes you’ll find yourself disliking someone or something simply because it’s in a different realm to yours. Maybe they’re in the same field but at a higher status than you so you have all these reasons why you don’t like them, but then when your status elevates to their level, you realize they were exactly the same as you all along.

The kinds of people that support you and are happy for you, whether you’re rich or poor, for better for worse, are few and far between. These are the people who might insult your work, but at the end of the day you know they know what they’re talking about, and they’re doing it for your benefit. These are people you would give your last dollar to because you know they would do the same for you.

Which brings me to my point.

When I’m about to undertake a new personal project, something that has worked for me is not telling anyone anything about what I’m doing unless it’s absolutely necessary or unavoidable.

When I have a new idea and I’m tingling with excitement about it, I find I can get a lot more mileage out of my initial motivation if I don’t tell anyone about it. I just don’t like hearing all the ways it won’t work, and I don’t like explaining an unfinished idea over and over again. I prefer it to be done, or as close to completion as possible, then I let people know about it.

The only exception is perhaps telling the kind of people I outlined above, the ones that have got your back- and even then, I’d only tell them when I’m around the 80% complete mark.

Having a support structure is great, and with many endeavours it really is necessary to know there are people looking out for you when your back is against the wall. But sometimes it can be like riding a bike with stabilizers, it’s a little too safe. You can project can quickly become about what other people think and their reaction to your endeavour rather than staying true to your original vision.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but sometimes signing a non-disclosure agreement with yourself is the best thing you can do.

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.

There are no excuses for spec work, period. I’m tired of hearing these excuses about how it’s a good way to build up work for your portfolio, it isn’t. Spec Work isn’t a good way to build experience, because it’s not a real world experience. When you deal with a client, you take in their needs and give them a result suited to them.

It’s like designing and making for them a finely tailored suit, you take their exact measurements, choose the fabrics that are appropriate and give them something that fits perfectly for them.

On most of these spec sites, you’re really working without that essential designer-client dialogue. You’re given a list of instructions which quite often is incomplete and then left to battle it out against other people who won’t hesitate to steal your ideas if they see a client show any kind of positive reaction.

What we’re left with is a mish-mash of free fonts, poor clip-art, irrelevant logos on non-sequitur branding where none of the elements tie together. And this is what hurts me.

It makes me sad that because of money, clients are willing to accept work that quite often sabotages whatever endeavour they are trying to pursue.

It saddens me that clients aren’t advised and guided and taught the process or working with a designer, what they should expect and how to develop the eye for quality work. To me, it just isn’t right that a client walks away happy with a piece of terrible work blissfully unaware that they’re making a fool of themselves.

Why does it bother me so much?

Simple. Because I CARE.

I CARE that a clients needs are taken care of fully. It’s important to me that the client understands and appreciates the thought that has gone into their branding and the reasons why it is of a BENEFIT to their activities.

I don’t mind talking with a client for hours explaining good typography vs. bad typography, helping them to see what a poor quality logo looks like in comparison to a professional logo.

It’s a real shame that for the sake of a few pennies, everybody loses out. Trained designers and designers who actually care about what they’re doing have to deal with the degradation of their artform.

This post is running on way longer than I meant it too and I’m rambling so I’ll leave it for now but guaranteed I have a lot more hot air on this subject. Watch out.

For some reason, I find it really difficult to come up with any sort of good ideas whilst I am wearing a suit. I mean, I’m really very handsome when I’m in a suit but I can’t come up with any ideas anymore, so I’d rather wear my casual stuff.

Well, I did a bit of research and the finding blew my hair back (what little of it there is). I am most creative when I am wearing my gray limited edition GAP 1969 T-Shirt, loose-fit jeans and Converse All-Stars Chuck Taylors (the low kind, not the boot kind). I found idea generation round about 85% without the Chucks and between a whopping 91 and 93% with them on!

What’s your creativity uniform? Do you wearing certain things makes you more creative?

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.

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.

This is something I reverse engineered from my boss at a job I worked at once.
You don’t necsessarily need to know how to do whatever it is you are trying to do.

There is ALWAYS someone out there who knows how to do it for you.

All you have to do is be clear enough about what it is you are trying to do,
and connect yourself with those that know how to do it well.
Oh and sometimes, give them money.