Complex ideas explained and simplified through the power of visuals. That is the essence of ‘The back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam.

In this book Roam takes you through various steps on how to illustrate complex ideas understandably.  Using techniques such as getting a complete picture (the overview), a string of events (the scenario) and many more to sell your idea more effecively, and get abstract thoughts out on paper in a way everyone can understand. And understanding is the first step to selling ideas.

Liked:

• Practical: Learning a new thinking framework (visual thinking) in just a matter of hours
• Illustrated (of course)  and putting his theory into practice by giving comprehensive illustrations of the theory
• Dan Roam addresses specific business cases he helped solve through visual thinking

Disliked:

• At 300 pages the book is quite lengthy – even though most pages are filled with illustrations it might make you want to skip a few paragraphs here and there because the picture already explained it, or because the paragraph feels a little redundant.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

F is for Fail is a short film about the creative process, and the failure we always encounter, but usually overcome. Told using the alphabet, each letter informs us of the state of the protagonist’s creativity/state of mind. Each letter has two words associated with it (except A and Z); sometimes the positive word overpowers the negative word, and vice-versa. Typographic footage was converted and exported one frame at a time. No filters or plug-ins!

Official site: Veer.com – F is for Fail

Great Ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Juicing the Orange is at its most basic level a book about applying creativity in marketing by ad agency Fallon Worldwide. Though the book starts out somewhat self-congratulatory on their successful campaigns, the book soon picks up phase and focuses more on the element they feel made these campaigns successes – creativity.

What makes Juicing the Orange worth reading is that apart from entertaining and proven case studies, the books explains how how to get clients and management to recognize the value of creative risks above safe but nearly ubiquitous campaigns (“The door to most business people’s right brain is through their left brain”).

Loved it because:

• Though marketing themed, Juicing the Orange is mostly about the value and application in creativity in business on any level.
• Real cases and often brilliant concepts explained in detail
• It provided me with a pitch for rationalizing the use of risky but creative ideas versus safe but unremarkable ideas.

You might not like it because:

• The book starts out somewhat like an Advertising Agency manifesto – telling you how they did things right and why they are so good. I think this is to establish some sort of credibility for the authors but it distracted me from the valid points they are making in the first few chapters. Beyond the introduction, the authors focus more on the issue at hand- justifying the value of creativity and support their arguments with remarkable and proven case-studies.

This video explains the Creative Commons movement, and using work licensed under Creative Commons licenses. How the world get more creative, our culture will be richer, if we will just allow the new technology to set creative work free. Creative Commons aims to make these works more accessible, usable and sharable so that creativity itself can more easily fuel another persons creativity – like a global, cultural brainstorm for creative improvement.

Director: Jesse Dylan
Producers: Michelle Meier and Priscilla Cohen
Editor: Justin Giugno
Cinematographer: Francis Kenny

Ideas come in various degrees. Ideas that seem relevant, ideas that seem original, ideas that are both relevant and original. After a phase of creating ideas, we can start to evaluate them. The most common type of evaluation is seeing how well the ideas do at solving the problem at hand.

Eventually there will be ideas that are neither original nor relevant (relevant meaning the idea is an effective solution to the problem), relevant and original, or just one of either. In general this divides the pile of ideas into good, bad and Great Ideas.
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