If you want to produce special work, it’s worth collaborating with special people.
Too many creative people think they don’t need to specialize, that they can have lots of ideas in lots of different subjects all of which are going to be great.
It can be easy to settle on something that feels right. Something that seems to make sense of all the confusion.
You’ll feel relief when you get to this point. You’ll think you’ve cracked it. You’ll feel good.
But then you have to take a step back from what feels really good and ask:
But is it great?
To create great work you should be making up your own beliefs as you go along, changing them one day to the next, always pushing against the boundaries of current thinking, trying to escape the confines of conventional wisdom.
To be a successful creative person you have to be fascinated by the world and all its wonders, absurdities, failings, and mishaps.
Stay open to new ideas, new places, and new people will feed your creative soul.
Lack of inspiration may be just another way of saying lack of experience.
If it’s a race to get into minds and stay there, then it’s the artists who make their points faster, smarter, and more thought-provoking that will be the ones who succeed.
Rather than simply stating the facts most advertisers typically embed their message into creative contextual devices that evoke feelings and bypass rational resistance.
This is why advertisers use stories, poems, slogans, songs, jokes, pictures, symbols, characters, roles, and metaphors.
They are particularly ripe marketing tools, because they lead the imagination and evoke the feelings that strike at our heart not our head.
7 unconscious errors we make when buying brands by Douglas Van Praet
Break things.
All our life we’re told to make things. Breaking things is a process from which you can learn so much more if you decide to learn from somebody else whose done something great and break it and take it apart.
Loss Aversion: we hate losing what we’ve got.
When we copy, we justify it. When others copy, we villify it.
Most of us have no problem with copying – as long as we’re the ones doing it.
Creativity isn’t an objective pursuit. Its value can’t be measured the way other skills can be.
Eventually, of course, its value will be confirmed, but often long after it was created.
There’s no doubt creativity flourishes in adversity.
And while I’m not suggesting starving yourself is the best spur to great thinking, I do believe one discomfort is worthwhile.
A designer’s best asset is not the ability to be brand specialists, but their instinct to see the interconnectedness of the world in a humanistic way.
Brand Jam by Marc Gobé
Photography is not about how many lights you have. It is about spotting beauty.
Typography is important because it carries the message of a brand.
Very often you can tell what a brand is going to say to you just by looking at the typography before you even read the words.
The most valuable thing a brand can give anybody today is clarity and simplicity.
The blank page is one of the greatest challenges faced by the creative person.
When you’re creating something from nothing, the fear of failure is always there.
This will compromise your idea. You have to be supremely confident in your ability to achieve something outstanding.
Design is the glue between people and corporations.
But brands can sometimes give splintered messages and forgettable offerings that don’t excite people.
Between advertising, packaging, product design, public relations, Web communication, and the look and feel of their company’s workspaces, every message must fit together;
nothing can be left to interpretation.
Brand Jam by Marc Gobé
It’s important to understand the history of typography.
Not every graphic designer knows this, but it’s very important because typography evolves alongside technology, and the shape of typography is created by technology.
We now have millions of different types, but not all of them are good.
If you’re in an industry where customer expectation is low, then it doesn’t take much effort to stand out from your competition.