A picture is worth a thousand words. Cliche as it might be, these infographics tell you it’s true. Communicating by pictures, illustrations and other styled data elements they can explain some of the most complex systems or events with great ease. As an added bonus, they allow you to ad an emotional layer to the data, or simply make it attractive and entertaining to look at! Read the rest of this article »
Cinema
Guy Kawasaki Explains the Art of Innovation in 10 Steps
Entrepreneur, Twitter star, and former Apple software evangelist Guy Kawasaki highlights 10 keypoints for the creation of meaning, innovation, and revenue at the Cisco Conference. Via the Cisco Blog.
BooksDan Roam
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
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.”
~ George Lois
Cinemadesign
Don Norman on the relation between happiness and creativity
In this talk from 2003 at the TED conference, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion. He looks at design that makes people happy, and the relationship between happiness and creativity.
ArticlesCreativity
Unleashing your Creativity
There’s always going to be a time where you work on a project that demands some creative thinking, and nothing happens. The magic seems temporarily gone and your brain seems unable to get you closer to a Great Idea, that one thought that will spark your creativity and be your muse.
It’s time like this I often remind myself of the following list. These are six simple techniques that will allow you to unleash your creative potential, and once more set inspiration free inside your mind. Read the rest of this article »
InspirationMusic
Ecltectic Method: Visual Mash Up artists
I am a HUGE fan of mash-ups artists such as GirlTalk and 2ManyDJ’s. The skill involved in mixing and mashing fragments of existing songs into new compositions just as much an artform as creating the original songs in my opinion. But the Eclectic Method group takes the art of mixing various video and audio fragments into a new song/video to a new level. Their remixes are creative and often carry a message (mostly anti-copyright) and a pretty good tune: Read the rest of this article »
CinemaFuturism
Is this the way we imagined it?
The Astounding World of the Future is a thought provoking piece of ‘comedy’, looking into the ‘future’ as it would have been imagined decades ago. An age where robots have made life easier, happier and have improved the quality of life. Or has it? Via Collapsing Geography
CinemaCreativity
F is for Fail
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 [...]
InspirationPhotography & Illustration
Experimenting with logos
An amazingly creative animation, introducing the sponsors of OFFF2009 ‘Fail with Grace’ International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture (Portugal) by the Dutch animation agency Onesize. The result is an 8 minute promo where the logo’s become the stars of the animation as they are being experimented on. The animation carries a great message (watch it through to the end), best explained by the director himself: Read the rest of this article »
