If people are a company’s most important asset, the most successful firms will be those that are able to generate the largest possible returns from those resources. Increasing productivity is one way to do that but an even more valuable method is to mine team members for ideas. Tap into your team’s thoughts and you might well find that your firm, however small, already has what it takes to zoom ahead of the competition. The trick though is to extract that creativity. Here are five ways to squeeze big ideas out of your team members.

1. Understand the Value of the Team in Fostering Creativity

Great ideas rarely come out of one person fully-formed and waiting for the rest of the team to pick up and start building. As leadership theorist John Eric Adair points out in his book Leadership for Innovation: How to Organize Creativity and Harvest Ideas, new ideas are more likely to be half-formed, full of mistakes and problems, and need plenty of tweaking before they’re ready to roll.

An individual might have the germ of an idea but it’s the team’s job to find the positive aspects of that idea and to build on its framework with creative contributions of their own. It’s that participation that turns a creative concept into an innovative team  — and a successful company.

The first step to fostering team creativity then is to make sure that the attitude is right: to reward creative individuals but encourage the rest of the team to co-operate with that creativity and not just compete with it.

2. Brainstorm Effectively with Pattern-Breaking

The usual way to generate ideas in teams is to gather everyone in one place, have them throw out their thoughts and write them down for everyone else to see and judge. It’s rarely effective, usually resulting in a full whiteboard, a list of unworkable ideas and a lot of confusion. Brainstorming doesn’t usually work, and it doesn’t work for a couple of reasons.

The first is that when ideas are being shot down as soon as they’re born, team members learn to keep quiet to avoid criticism. Brainstorming sessions tend to be negative rather than productive. The second reason though is that brainstorming keeps people thinking within their usual patterns. As Dr. Charles Prather, author of The Manager’s Guide to Fostering Innovation writes:

“Brainstorming as usually practiced just empties our mental box of all the usual ideas. It is not engineered to break our patterns of thought.”

The solution, he argues, is to create a standard brainstorming session that uses a structure first proposed by Alex Osborn, founder of advertising form BBDO, in Applied Imagination: generate lots of ideas; avoid judgment; build on ideas that others have contributed: and stack the deck with wild cards who know little about the project or what’s usually considered possible. (IBM’s Smarter Planet Initiative is said to have been proposed at one of the company’s “jams,” brainstorming sessions at which even employees’ relatives can take part.)

Once the brainstorming session has ended though, and the expected ideas presented, the team members can start looking for the truly innovative, out-of-the-box concepts. One way to do that, Dr. Prather argues, is to reverse assumptions. A taxi firm, for example, assumes that passengers know where they want to go. If the reverse were true and only the driver knew the destination, the cab firm would have created the idea of adding a tour service to its range.

3. Create Five Building Blocks for Virtual Teams

Generating creativity from a team in one location is hard enough. Squeezing out ideas from virtual teams is a challenge on a whole different scale. Jill Nemiro, a researcher at California State Polytechnic University, has identified five building blocks which she says are necessary for creative virtual teams: design; climate; resources; norms; and continual assessment.

Some of those blocks are more obvious than others. While ideas always seem to require resources to become real, and continual assessment is necessary to ensure the team is on the right track, “design” refers to the process by which a creative idea is developed. That might be modular, in which each team member is given a specific task; or it could be iterative in which team members are in regular contact and report constantly on progress and problems. To successfully encourage creativity in virtual teams, Nemiro argues, team members have to choose the right creative process design for them and their task.

4. Be a Creative Leader

Kimberly Douglas’s book The Firefly Effect: Build Teams that Capture Creativity and Catapult Results compares hunting down an idea to chasing fireflies. Although the book emphasizes the team aspect of a firefly hunt — a group of children working together for a specific goal, inspired and yet still in competition — many of the chapters are really about leadership. Creative firms, she says, need a new kind of leader, one who will:

“create a fertile environment that will allow creativity to be unleashed.”

That mostly comes down to building an atmosphere in which ideas can be shared instead of stored, and knowing what to do with a good idea when you see one.

5. Reward Creative Thinkers

Perhaps the best way to encourage creative thinking though is to make clear that people who have good ideas are rewarded for sharing them. That doesn’t have to take the form of cash compensation. Glory can be a good reward too. Make the person who had the idea responsible for seeing it through, and they’ll get all the kudos when it all comes together.

Except that sometimes it doesn’t work. The idea for Twitter came from employee Jack Dorsey during a brainstorming session at Odeo. Dorsey was given the position of Twitter CEO but soon made way in a reportedly acrimonious move in favor of former Odeo CEO Evan Williams. Part of smart creative team leadership is knowing how to give out the prizes for a good idea — and who is the best person to build the concept.

Picasso wasn’t just one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. He wasn’t just a celebrity with a personal life to put a rock star to shame. And he wasn’t just a multi-millionaire who owned his own castle. He was also a model for creative types looking to build their own successful careers. This is what the Spanish master can teach us all about creativity:

1. Make the Right Friends

Picasso was lucky enough to be born into an artistic family. His father was a painter, a professor of art and the curator of a local museum. He might not have picked his Dad, but his friends he chose himself. They included the surrealist writer André Breton, the journalist and poet Max Jacob, with whom he shared an apartment in Paris, and the painter Henri Matisse.

We tend to think of creativity as happening alone, the result of unexpected and uncontrollable inspiration. Often though, that inspiration comes from rubbing shoulders and sharing conversations with other creative types who explain what they’re working on and describe how they see the world. There was a reason that Paris was a magnet for creative types at the beginning of the twentieth century. Working alongside other creatives, perhaps in coworking spaces, and networking online with designers, artists, illustrators and writers might not be the same as sipping absinthe in Montmartre but it might just provide a similar burst of original thoughts and a sense of heightened competition.

2. Build a Clear Brand

Picasso’s development is usually divided into distinct periods, with his earliest Blue Period running from 1901 to 1904. Said to be inspired by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas (although there’s some dispute about that), Picasso turned to melancholic subjects and a blue-grey palette.

The period didn’t last long but it did help to give Picasso a clear brand. His work was distinctive, in contrast to the more modernist works that he had produced earlier, allowing buyers and dealers to know what to expect and where to sell it. By the time the Blue Period ended — and Picasso had moved on to a brighter Rose Period — he was already the favorite of collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein who became his patrons.

Creativity can come in many forms, and creative types can express themselves in many ways. But focusing on one theme — at least for a while — can help to clarify who you are, how you work and what you offer. Designer Chuck Anderson, for example, might be versatile but companies approach him for his psychedelic colors  and light patterns.

3. Reinvent Yourself

After the dourness of Picasso’s Blue Period, his Rose Period, with its lighter colors and harlequin symbols, should have been something of a surprise. It was over by 1906 but covered the time when the artist was conducting an affair with his young model, Fernande Olivier.

It also marked a significant change in his style. It’s unlikely that Picasso was thinking about branding or that he realized he was creating a career pattern that would be copied by the likes of David Bowie, Madonna and Lady Gaga, but in reversing the style he had already used and for which he had become known, he showed that he was more than a one-trick pony and demonstrated that his creative ideas and skills were worth watching — even by people whose favorite color isn’t blue. Branding yourself with a single idea can be helpful, but don’t be afraid to break out with a completely new identity and look before it gets old.

4. Find Unusual Sources of Inspiration

Picasso is best known as the founder of Cubism, with his Les Demoiselles D’Avignon regarded as the first Cubist work. Picasso himself described his shift in style not as inspiration but a “revelation” that struck him while looking at African art at a museum of ethnography.

That source of inspiration didn’t come out of nowhere. As the French were expanding into Africa, the country was experiencing an interest in the continent and its culture, but the idea that works that would then have been considered primitive had something to say to Europe’s creative classes was still novel.

Today, cultures are more connected and there’s little that isn’t available with a mouseclick. But it is still possible to look towards the unfamiliar, the neglected and the forgotten in an attempt to breathe new life into your styles. If the nineteenth century can turn Goths into steampunks, what could other historical periods do for your look?

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Try Something New

In 1949, Picasso took part in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 3^rd Sculpture International. For an artist best known for his painting, Picasso’s willingness to branch into sculpture (and he even extended his range to pottery) could have been something of a risk. It certainly demanded plenty of confidence. But it also allowed him to reach new markets, to take on new challenges and see what else he can do.

He might have failed, and bold experimentation is easier to do when your name is established and you’re keen to keep it fresh, but there is something to be said for website designers being willing to turn to print, and illustrators picking up a camera. The result might not always be great successes but the attempts could spark a whole bunch of new ideas.

6. Create a Catchy Name

Picasso was a great artist with plenty of talent. He had an ability to create distinctive works, a willingness to change  his styles, an eye for surprising sources of inspiration, and the courage to try new things. All of those habits and qualities are worth emulating for any creative worker.

But he also had a catchy one-word moniker. If he had kept to his original birth name of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, he might not have got so far or been so easy to remember if he had. It was a lesson learned by graffiti artist Banksy, and while you might not want to chop yourself down to a single name, you should have an easily identifiable brand.

The most interesting ideas are always our own, and we have them all the time. It’s unlikely that there’s a single iPhone owner who hasn’t come up with at least half a dozen ideas for apps that they’re certain would make them a mint. Creative types will come up with more; entrepreneurial types will do something about them.

But how can a successful creative entrepreneur sort through all of the ideas that pass through his head every week, ensuring that he only invests time, effort and money in those most likely to succeed? How can he filter out the bad ideas?

Addressing the Web 2.0 Expo in New York a couple of years ago, Clay Shirky, a new-media professor, writer, and consultant, pointed out that information overload, the abundance of ideas and data available on the Web, was nothing new. When Gutenburg created the printing press, he noted, he put the literate public in a unique position. For the first time, readers had more books than they were able to consume in a lifetime. If they weren’t going to waste their candle light, they would need a way to filter out the bad ideas coming off the presses from the ones that were worth reading and thinking about. Fortunately, the solution came built in to the economics of the new publishing industry. Presses cost money and so did the printing process. Publishers could only make their investment back if enough people bought their books. Owners of printing presses then became not just mechanical engineers and book marketers but filters sorting out interesting ideas from those that would be ignored, a role they still hold today.

Clay Shirky went on to explain how those filters have now broken down. When anyone can publish online, there are no risks to publishing an article and readers have to apply their own garbage filters as they surf the Web for interesting ideas. As anyone who has ever searched for specific information on Google has discovered, it’s not easy sorting the good stuff from the dross.

Filters for Companies

But that lack of an online filter is only a problem when you’re sorting through the ideas of others, and the cost in wasted time when you click to a site filled with more AdSense units than useful content is small. A bigger worry is for corporations. Writing on Cloud Ave, Hutch Carpenter, VP of product at Spigit.com, has proposed an ideas filter for the business world. A company may have thousands of workers, many of whom will be buzzing with bright ideas, he explains, and some of those ideas could be useful to the company. Usually, the difficulties involved in pulling those ideas out and assessing them means that they tend to be ignored. Employees implement the ideas that are passed down from senior management while their own insights are overlooked.

That was a waste of thought that Google tried to capture through Innovation Time Off. Giving employees one day a week to work on their own ideas is said to have produced Google News, Gmail, Orkut and even the cash cow AdSense. But it also presumably produced plenty of half-built prototypes and failed concepts.

Hutch Carpenter’s suggestion might produce a more efficient corporate ideas filter. He proposes that the employees don’t just function as the source of ideas, they also assess them, voting for proposals they like. The ideas are shared by email and tagged by keyword, categories and individual (ideas from experts may be more powerful than those with only a vague knowledge of the subject.) In addition, experts will look through the ideas that company is generating, hoping to spot half-formed concepts that have been missed.

It’s a mixture of crowdsourced filtering and expert oversight that retains the problems of both. In any reasonably large company, the experts are going to be overloaded with potentially good ideas and crowds aren’t always as wise as they’re made out. That’s especially true when the only cost to approving an idea is paid by shareholders, and not by the employee himself.

The Entrepreneur’s Overlapping Ideas Filters

That’s not the case though for small entrepreneurs. They will have to pay when they pick a bad idea to work on and the losses in terms of time and finance can be painful. Getting Things Done, David Allen’s productivity system, will be of limited help here. His system organizes lists; it doesn’t help to determine the value of different items on different lists. In practice, entrepreneurs apply a series of overlapping filters that take into account a number of factors.

Ease of execution will be one of them. Ideas that are difficult to implement, that require a great deal of research or complex equipment are more likely to run into catastrophic problems. Riskier ideas need higher rewards to keep flowing

Cost will certainly be another. Few ideas worth enacting can be developed without a budget. While that sort of practical constraint might not be a good reason to stop a valuable idea from taking off, it’s probably the most common reason ideas aren’t implemented — together with time, a factor that includes both development time and the amount of free time available to work on the plan.

But the most important filter of all is passion. Without a genuine desire to see the idea implemented, a desire that goes beyond the dream of selling up and retiring to Hawaii, development tends to fail.

Those filters aren’t methodical. They can’t be gradated, and no points system is going to accurately measure the difficulty of turning an idea for an iPhone app or a new kind of social media site into a working model. When Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams began working on Twitter, they didn’t stop to count up the scores for each of those qualities. They did it because it was more interesting than the work they were supposed to be doing and because they had limited the amount of time they were willing to spend on it. They had a passion for it and the costs and time seemed negligible.

When your ideas pass through those filters, they’re worth working on. The ones that get left behind probably deserve to stay there, at least until the size of the holes in the filters change — or the economics of the development process.

Designers have a tricky job to perform. On the one hand, the products they create have to be efficient and ergonomic. They have to allow the consumer easy access to all of its functions and make use as intuitive as possible. On the other hand, they also  have to make the object look as attractive, as cool and as desirable as possible. Get it right and you might just end up with an iPod, a whole new genre of gadgets, a megajob with Apple and all the free iPhones you can eat. Get it wrong, and… well, you could find yourself included on a list of the worst design disasters.

The Wobbly Bridge

It cost £18.2m, was £2.2m over budget and when it opened on June 10, 2000, the Millennium Bridge over the Thames in London was two months behind schedule. That happens. Big construction projects often run late and cost more than expected, and the footbridge, with its low profile and unimpeded view of St. Paul’s Cathedral was pretty enough for people to overlook the cost. Created by architectural firm Arup, Foster and Partners and sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, the bridge was dubbed the “blade of light.”

Within two days of its opening though, the bridge had acquired a new name: The Wobbly Bridge.

On its first day, more than 90,000 people crossed the river, including many taking part in a charity walk. With as many as 2,000 people walking across at any one time, the suspension bridge began to sway. As it swayed, the walkers adjusted their steps, increasing the movement even more until it felt like walking along a rope. Two days later, the bridge was shut down.

Engineers later fixed the problem by retrofitting 89 dampers at an additional cost of £5m. The bridge re-opened in February 2002 — and was destroyed by Death Eaters in the opening sequence of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Microsoft Gets No Help from Clippit

Back in 1995, Microsoft had a killer idea. The company would create an interface that, for once, owed nothing to anything that Apple had done. The “social interface” program for Windows 3.1 would allow anyone to use a computer, even people who didn’t know how to use computers. By double-clicking on “Bob,” the interface would be changed to a picture of a living room. To find the program you wanted, you had to click a household item such as a sheet of paper for the word processor and a pile of envelopes to access email. If you got stuck, Rover the dog was on hand with helpful advice. The project was overseen by Melinda French, now better known as half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was killed before the release of Windows 98. Steve Ballmers described it as a time when Microsoft “decided that we have not succeeded and let’s stop.” PC World Magazine gave it seventh place on its list of the 25 worst products of all time.

You’d think that that would have been enough of a warning, but no. Still convinced that its customers were too daft to figure out how to use its products by themselves, Microsoft included the Office Assistant in its Office programs from 1997 to 2003. Whenever you started doing anything, a paperclip called Clippit would pop up and ask if you needed help. So annoying was Clippit and his friends, Merlin the Magician, F1 the robot, Links the cat and Rocky the dog that even Microsoft’s developers were said to have renamed Office Assistant TFC – “The Fucking Clown.” Sometimes it’s possible to overdesign a product.

Stick a Cell Phone to Your Head

And sometimes it’s possible to underdesign a product.

The Cell-Mate, which was actually shown at CES in 2009, calls itself a hands-free cell phone holder. It’s a headband. It looks  like a headband. It acts like a headband. And it appears about as cool and sexy as a headband. A metal headband with black disks.

Usually, simple is good, and there is something to be said for not looking like the kind of constantly connected android that walks around with a Bluetooth earpiece. But actually for the kind of problems that the Cell-Mate (and really, the person who came up with that name deserves a cellmate) solves, Bluetooth is fine. No one can see you looking silly when you’re doing the dishes or sitting in traffic – at least no one you care about. With so many cool and sexy ways to talk with your hands free, sticking a black disk on a couple of metal rods just isn’t going to cut it.

The Sinclair C5 — A Cold-Weather Convertible for the Suicidal

Fresh from his success at creating the first popular home computers, the ZX81 and the Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair looked to make another massive technological leap with the launch in 1985 of the C5. A battery-operated tricycle, the C5 followed at least some design rules. It looked cool, space-agey and sleek.

Unfortunately, that neat look hid a small problem. It was almost completely useless. The low ride led to worries that drivers wouldn’t be able to see it until they were driving over it. The motor was too puny to climb even the gentlest of hills. And January in England probably weren’t the best time and place to launch an open-top vehicle. Altogether fewer than 17,000 C5s were sold, making it about half as popular as the Segway.

Apple Newton Proves that Bad Ideas Can Only Go Down

Jonathan Ive might now be regarded as the master of all things design but even the best designers can make mistakes, especially when they’re just starting out. The Apple Newton was a good idea, a little ahead of its time. Launched in 1993 as an early personal organizer, the Newton showed the road ahead by ditching the buttons and using the screen as the main interface. Its  handwriting recognition software was supposed to make keyboards a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, the software wasn’t quite ready for primetime and repeated attempts at writing the same word made using the Newton felt a little like teaching a two-year old to read. Still, Ive did come on a bit… once Apple’s software developers had caught up.

Photography: drurydrama (Len Radin)

Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little better. Although many have been known for their ability to down the odd bottle with friends at the end of an unproductive day, a hack’s best collaborator has always been his moleskin or his typewriter, not a loyal group of friends. But the notion that ideas come best when we’re alone, often in the shower, might well be one of creativity’s biggest myths. In fact, group work can bring out some of the best concepts.

We can see this at the highest end of art. The work of an Impressionist painter always reflects his own ability; it’s produced by just one pair of hands. But the ideas that went into the final picture are the results of long discussion among the painters themselves about what art should be and how to produce it, discussions held in bars and cafes and continued afterwards by letter. None of those ideas – and Impressionism itself – could have been produced by just one artist working alone.

The same is true of the kind of creative thinking that led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs. In Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Michael Michalko describes how Einstein, Eisenberg, Pauli and Bohr were almost unique among scientists of the day for their informal meetings and open conversations. While other scientists kept their thoughts to themselves in case they were described as controversial or revealed their mistakes, the real breakthroughs came from the scientists who weren’t afraid to speak their minds, even when what was on their mind was only half-formed.

The Creative Thinking of the Impressionists

If the café chats between the Impressionist painters like those held at the Café Geurbois where Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro would meet, or the talks between Einstein and Eisenberg were productive it might well be because they followed the principles of “koinonia,” a Greek term that describes the sharing of ideas. Socrates was so fond of these kinds of group dialogue, says Michalko, that he and his colleagues formed principles that guided the discussion. Participants had to listen carefully to each other, identify and remove their assumptions, talk honestly without fear of sparking controversy and, when disagreeing, avoid arguing or interrupting another speaker. Koinonia, says Michalko, allows “a group to access a larger pool of common thoughts that cannot be accessed individually.”

But as anyone who has sat through a brainstorming session knows, koinonia is much easier to say than to do. Forming a group to spark creativity and inspire new ideas means doing more than listening respectfully and biting your tongue when someone says something stupid. It also means finding the right people to form the group with. You could argue that if you put Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro in a room together, you would have to put a lot of absinthe on the table to stop the good ideas from flowing. Put a manager in the room with his creative team and you’re going to find that the first thing people will do is clam up. When participants feel that their ideas are being judged – and that their chances of promotion depend on not saying the wrong thing – they will censor themselves. Worse, they’ll try to say the things that match the ideas of the most important person in the room, even when his ideas are wrong.

Creative Group Members Must Be Equal

A creative support group then needs to have members who are equal. They might not be of equal status – it’s likely that when Socrates got together with his pals, everyone knew who the smartest guy in the room was – but they should treat each other as equals. While there should be a facilitator, that facilitator’s role isn’t to judge ideas but to guide the discussion and keep it focused on the goal. He or she can also encourage participants to contribute more by notifying them in advance of the subject of the meeting and asking them to bring three ideas with them, or by setting a number of concepts to be created before the end of the session. While some ideas will be unusable, having to make up the numbers may generate some original thinking.

It would be great if all creative support groups worked that way but it’s clear they don’t. In practice, many sessions tend to be dominated by a small group within the group or people find themselves agreeing with each other so much that few, if any new ideas, are generated. But that isn’t always a terrible thing either because creative support groups actually come in two different forms.

While some support groups inspire creativity, others help creative types to implement those ideas. Writer’s groups, for example, tend to fall into the second category. Aspiring authors rarely come together to talk about the role of literature or to toss around new story ideas. Instead, they focus on reading each other’s works and giving advice on how they could be improved. This isn’t feedback that inspires creativity; it’s criticism that produces better craftsmanship. It’s valuable but it’s not quite the same as inspiring creativity.

Putting together a support group that helps with creativity then isn’t easy. While it’s simple enough to follow the rules of fair and open dialogue, and to set up processes that encourage thinking and contributions, an effective group depends mostly on the people in it. They have to be people you can consider as friends not rivals, people you respect but don’t compete with, and people who will listen without judging. And if they’re as smart as Einstein or as visionary as Monet, that would be a big help too.

Photography: Daniel Y. Go

In an ideal world, the people with the brightest ideas, the most original minds and the most inspired inventions would end their lives with the most amount of money. They might not have been the ones who turned their spark of genius into production lines and mass sales, but they should have been rewarded fairly for the brainwave that defined the products.

Often, it happens. James Dyson, the inventor of the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel, lived off his wife’s salary as an art teacher for five years while he developed a prototype for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. He now owns a chateau in France and a personal fortune estimated at around £1 billion ($1.6 billion). Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, might not be in the same economic league but his annual salary was reported at “more than £1 million ($1.6 million)” a year… in 2003. He’s probably earning a bit more than that now and, no doubt,  gets a free iPod too.

But not everyone is so lucky. Here are five creative types whose ideas either haven’t translated into material success yet… or never will, and what the rest of us can learn from their financial failure.

Bust at Sixteen

She’s not the most famous person on our list but Kira Plastinina is certainly the youngest.  In May 2008, the 16-year old Russian fashion designer opened twelve boutiques across the USA with plans to open another 250 stores.

Nine months later, the KP Fashion Co. filed for bankruptcy. The company owed $54.5 million to more than 100 creditors, including Verizon, the Glendale Police Department and Ford Models Inc. According to the bankruptcy filing, it had less than a fifth of that in assets and was involved in a trademark infringement suit brought by Pacific Sunwear.

Kira was helped by having good contacts. Her daddy is Sergei Plastinin, a former chief executive of Russia’s largest dairy and juice producer, who has a personal fortune estimated at more than $600 million. He is said to have put $80 million of his own money into his daughter’s business. But it might have helped more if instead of asking for a handout, she had done a little market research and produced designs that didn’t compete directly with those Paris Hilton, Avril Lavigne and Jessica Simpson.

There’s a reason even creative types have to pay their dues if they want to succeed in the business world. On the other hand, Kira is still big in Kazakhstan.

When Beautiful Designs Go Bad

Kira Plastinina failed because she didn’t have the experience to back her ambitions. That wasn’t the case for John DeLorean. By the time he set up his DeLorean Motor Company, he was in his fifties with a track record that included designing a new gearbox for the Packard Motor Company, taking the credit for creating America’s first muscle car and heading General Motors’ Pontiac division. His new car, a two-seater designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, would feature eye-catching gull-wing doors and a look that would be immortalized in Back to the Future.

Despite a £100 million (now $160 million) investment by the British government, the firm collapsed in February 1982 after operating for little more than a year. DeLorean  himself later faced trial after allegedly agreeing to take part in a drug trafficking operation to help pay off the company’s debts. He was acquitted after claiming entrapment.

It’s tempting to see here a rerun of Kira Plastinina’s failure: when money comes in too easily, it goes out easily too. But it’s probably got more to do with hubris and the belief that if you spend enough money on an attractive enough product, people will buy it. Sometimes you barely get to make it.

Cooking up a Storm

Celebrity chef John Burton Race did get to make it – several times a day. In 2004, together with his wife Kim Burton Race, he opened the New Angel restaurant in Devon, UK. The opening of the restaurant was documented by a British reality show and the venue went on to win Michelin’s coveted stars.

Three years later, while he was in Australia filming a series of the reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here,” his wife shut down the restaurant. The New Angel was sold to Burton Race’s friend Internet entrepreneur Clive Jacobs, who then re-employed Burton Race as head chef. In May of this year, Burton Race was declared bankrupt.

Opening a restaurant is always a tricky business but Burton Race might not have chosen his partner too wisely. Three years after opening the restaurant together, Burton Race left his wife to live with his mistress and their 2-year old son.

It’s good business to be inventive in the workplace. But a traditional family life tends to provide stability… especially when you’re running a family business.

Building Too Little for the Future

Today, Louis Kahn is remembered as one of the world’s great architects. A professor of architecture at both Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he was a master of the International Style and known for his attention to “servant” space – areas in a building that served other open areas.

In 1974, his body was discovered in a public toilet at Penn Station in New York. It took the police several days to identify him. He had died of a heart attack and was bankrupt.

It’s certainly possible that, like Burton Race, Kahn’s convoluted personal life had held him back –  he fathered three children by three different women – but the real cause was probably more prosaic. Kahn continually revised his designs, even after construction had begun, prompting his clients to assign him a manager.

Groundbreaking designs are vital for creative types but you also have to keep a close eye on the cash.

Taking Your Chance

There are few more successful creative types than Walt Disney. The company that carries his name now has a string of brand names recognized around the world and annual revenues of $35 billion.

But life wasn’t always so good for Disney. An early company producing Laugh-O-Grams for Newman cinemas in the Kansas City area was unable to generate enough income to cover the animators’ high salaries. It went bankrupt… and Disney went to Hollywood.

And that might be the best lesson to learn from creatives’ bankruptcy: a failure doesn’t have to be the end of the story. In fact, it might just provide the experience needed to create the next big success.

Photography: jef_safi

Ask most people to describe their ideal job and it’s likely to contain a giant salary, of course, but also lots of responsibility and perhaps most importantly, plenty of creativity. Having the freedom to think for yourself – and be rewarded for it – is priceless.

And one of the advantages of a world in which iPhone apps can let cubicle workers give up the day job is that earning from creativity is easier than ever before. If once imaginative thinkers were restricted to the creative departments of large advertising companies – where they were free to think up catchy slogans for airline companies and sketch storyboards for TV slots – today’s creative types have a giant range of options.

Join a Creative Profession

For conventional creatives, the number of artistic professions has exploded. Walt Disney might have been known for having teams of animators whose job was to draw the same character in minutely different ways (or as the company’s historians have pointed out, simply copy the movements from previous films), but Pixar’s animation team gets to do much more fun things, moving characters around, animating tiny details (like hair) and creating new characters with ease. And animators aren’t restricted to movie companies and television studios. Their skills and imagination are also needed by video game firms, whose products tend to start with movie-style intros and whose characters have to be created and planned, as well as online publishers, music promoters and marketers.

The world of graphic design has become much more exciting too. Image editors with knowledge of Photoshop can now create the kinds of graphics that artists of the past could only dream of. That’s only increased expectations. Back in the old days, it was enough for a weathergirl to physically move sticky, plastic clouds across a map of the country; today, the designers are expected to recreate the changing weather itself, making even the old jobs more fun.

Create Your Own Creative Job

But perhaps the biggest improvement for creative thinkers is that they no longer need to go to interviews and persuade old-style employers to pay them for their new-fangled skills. They can put their imaginations to work, create their own products and make them available for sale without having to be told what to do by a boss.

Online malls such as Zazzle, Cafepress, and for craft-y types, Etsy, have turned the Internet into a giant bazaar for people with enough imagination to come up with new product ideas and the skills to create them.

But while sticking a funky design on a t-shirt and offering it in a Cafepress store might be simple and available to anyone, in practice, it’s the sellers with the most original ideas and the most unique styles that tend to be the most successful. Few sellers on Zazzle, for example, have reported sales of more than $500 a month. Yet, Vlad Gerasimov a Siberian designer, has managed to carve out a niche for himself with a naïve style that’s instantly recognizable and all his own. It’s allowed him to give up his day job (designing software interfaces) and focus on creating wallpapers and images that his fans pay for on a subscription basis.

When creative selling is open to everyone, it’s the market that picks the sellers with the genuinely valuable ideas.

Even eBay is allowing artists to make money from their creations. Instead of  having to lug a portfolio of paintings to a gallery and persuade an owner that their pictures really will sell, artists today can put their creations in a “Direct from the artist” category and offer them to collectors themselves. With over 50,000 works available at any one time, that must make eBay the world’s largest art gallery – even if it’s not the most successful. Gallery pictures might go for thousands of dollars at a time but when you have 49,999 competitors of varying talent just a click away, many artists will be lucky to win more than a two-figure sum.

Get Creative with the Marketing

Unless they extend their creativity from the product itself to the way that they sell it.
This might not be what most people have in mind when they think of being creative. They’d rather be known for designing the iPod than creating the Mac versus PC ads that promote Apple. But creative marketing can be as much fun, as challenging, and the results as measurable (and as satisfying) as coming up with innovative product ideas and styles.

And like creative production, it’s also something that today can be done as easily from a small office – even a home office – as it is do as part of a large corporation. The success of a viral marketing campaign about a product – now recognized as one of the most effective ways of spreading a sales message – depends on the quality of the idea behind it, not the cost involved in creating it. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken ad, for example, was created not by its advertising firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky, but by the Barbarian Group, a smaller agency to which it had outsourced the viral part of the campaign.

Even Vlad Gerasimov, who doesn’t advertise, has built up his following in part by sharing his production tips, making him popular with other designers, and by using a fairly unique subscription model to make sales.

Create a Creative Company

That might offer a clue to what could be the best way to make money out of creativity: create a creative business. That’s going to require a little more than sticking a picture on a t-shirt and uploading the design to Zazzle. It could mean writing a business plan, finding clients, selling your skills, and perhaps at some point, finding other creative types to share the workload. But these days, you can do that creatively too. iJoomla might be a successful software company that creates extensions for Joomla, but it’s also an entirely virtual company with no central office and employees scattered from Los Angeles to Romania and beyond.

When you start to think outside the box, there’s no limit to the way that you can earn.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the original Renaissance Man, was best known as a master painter and sculptor. He was also a capable inventor, mathematician, scientist and more. In fact, he was a polymath who studied multiple disciplines including music, writing, anatomy, architecture, botany, plate tectonics, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

The number of scientific inventions da Vinci produced was truly remarkable. These include the basic designs for a helicopter, tank, solar power, and calculator. He documented a great deal of his thoughts in a series of notebooks, the text versions (sans images) of which are available for free at the Project Gutenberg website.

Photography: manoellemos.

Arguably, every inventor today can learn something valuable by studying da Vinci’s life work. Freelancers can learn a great deal as well.

The promise of freelancing is that you get to pick and choose from work offered to you. The reality is that you are sometimes limited in your choices. However, that does not mean you cannot enjoy what you’re doing. In fact, quite the opposite.

Freelancers are often generalists, able to learn a new niche fairly quickly. The true enjoyment of freelancing – beyond the superficial aspects of freedom of work choice and schedule – is the opportunity to learn many disciplines and produce original work.

Analyzing da Vinci

Here is a rundown of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s thinking and work procesess, plus an interpretation of how freelancers can be benefit by doing likewise.

1. Study structure. Da Vinci was a master artist (painter, sculptor) because he spent so much time understanding the underlying structure of his subject. He studied anatomy, 2d/ 3d geometry, physics, and architecture, the understanding of which gives his work so much realism.

Interpretation: Prep and prime your mind by studying the theory and structure behind your subject. Understand what makes up the building blocks of your subject, and how the blocks interact together.

2. Build broad knowledge. He was part of the original Medici Effect. He learned about art, the human body, architecture, science and then came up with fresh concepts for inventions as well as masterpieces of art.

Interpretation: Absorb knowledge from many niches and create your own modern Medici Effect. The intersection of fields leads to some of the most groundbreaking ideas. You do not have to be an expert in everything. Focus on 1-3 areas of expertise, and treat everything else as a interest. This gives you flexibility to change careers, if necessary.

3. Learn by osmosis. Da Vinci regularly sketched out ideas or wrote down his thoughts in his many notebooks.

Interepretation: You can absorb information by not only consuming information in many forms (print/ web, audio/ podcasts, TV/ movies/ web video) but also by using mind mapping to learn niches. Using point-form notes, mind maps allow you to absorb concept with a deeper understanding than if you simply tried to memorize a list of details. This approach can be like learning by osmosis.

4. Demonstrate your understanding. Da Vinci made thousands of sketches in his now famous sketchbooks. (Though he also filled them with mundane items and logged monies owed to him.) His multitude of sketch studies allowed him to produce masterly finished works.

Interpretation: Do your own “sketches,” whether that means drawings, writing exercises, or snippets of code. For example, before I was a salaried/ contract programmer, I taught the basics of computer coding to students. I knew how the basic computer statements worked, regardless of programming language, and learned “structure” by applying pseudocode first before writing real code.

5. Value your studies. When da Vinci wasn’t doing commissioned work (or even when he was), he was pondering or experimenting on new ideas, exploring his thought processes. He managed to balance personal interests and work.

Interpretation: Always be learning or testing your ideas. When one project is going nowhere, work on something else, or deepen your knowledge of an area of interest. You might in fact find the answers you’re looking for

6. Value your effort. A careful study of da Vinci’s sketches shows that he reused his knowledge of a subject over and over. Anything that he had done before was rarely wasted effort.

Interpretation: Leverage your previously gained knowledge, but keep in mind that even if you have to start over on a project, the existing effort was not wasted, provided you learned something. It’s far better to start fresh than to spin your wheels try to revive something that just won’t work. In Project Management principles, this is known as sunk costs – a cost that has been spent and will not be recovered. That itself possibly spawned the saying, “don’t put good money after bad.” If “time” is your money, then putting in more (good) time after bad (spent, wasted) time is a bad idea. Just start again. The knowledge gained from whatever effort you’ve put in already might be leveraged at some future time on another project.

7. Multitask properly. Da Vinci’s varied interest meant that he worked on many projects, probably in an overlapping time period. While he was learning about one discipline, he might have been working on a commissioned project.

Interpretation: To have success as a freelancer, most of us need to manage many projects (work and research) over time – sometimes simultaneously. To do that, you need good workflow and the ability multitask properly. Multitasking done right produces an efficient workflow. The basis of that means not trying to tackle a big project all in one shot. Break it down into smaller tasks and take one step at a time. This allows you to work on something, get away from it to “think it over,” and meanwhile work on something else.

It’s probably been said countless times: humans are visual-oriented creatures. Yet, many people do not use any form of visualization capabilities, whether for goal-setting or simply solving problems.

My research and personal experience shows that problem-solving is easier when you approach it from a “visual thinking” process. This can be as simple as creating a few sketches or as complex as a structured diagram using predefined symbols.

Diagrams stimulate both the creative (right) half of the brain as weil as the the logical (left) half. Using colors helps, too, especially if there is some structure in how you use color. For example, you could use different colored text to represent different types of solutions, or colored lines, backgrounds, borders, etc.

Some Elements of Visual Thinking and Diagramming

Here are some of the more common elements you’ll find in diagramming or visual thinking methods in general.

1. Text – for node, line, and callouts.
2. Color – borders, connecting lines, text, backgrounds.
3. Shapes – typically for nodes.
4. Borders – node border shape and color.
5. Texture – backgrounds.
6. Connecting lines – with/ without arrows and end symbols.

Visual Thinking Styles

Not all of the following are part of pure diagramming but they are part of visual thinking processes.

1. Doodles – These are less formal than sketches/ drawings, and often aimless.
2. Sketching and drawing – Sketches are “practice”, whereas drawings are a finished product.
3. Diagramming and schematics – E.g., UML diagrams, state diagrams, flowcharts, blueprints.
4. Mind mapping – Sophisticated mind mapping packages can double as diagramming tools.
5. Image snapshots – e.g., computer screen snapshots produced with a tool such as SnagIt.
6. Presentations – E.g. slideshows, PowerPoint presentations.

Benefits of Diagramming and Visual Thinking

Here are just some of the benefits of approaching problem-solving from a visual thinking mindset.

1. Stimulates both creative and logical halves of the mind
2. Easier to absorb visuals than a mass of text.
3. More universal than words. (See #2.) Back in the late 1970s, many common signs in North America changed over from text-only to having an image and text or sometimes just an image. E.g., bathroom signs. Visual lexicons were created and often used in various parts of the world.
4. Easier to modify/ update/ transform a diagram than to have to rewrite text.
5. Starting with, say, a sketch, you can transform it to a diagram to a drawing to a solution, or something along those lines, depending on your need.
6. They’re a great memory trigger for a more complex concept. So if you only have time to sketch out an idea but in your mind you have some complex thoughts about your idea, a diagram can help you retrieve your thoughts at a later point.

Downsides of Visual Thinking

For those of you inclined not to think visually, trying to adapt visual thinking to your problem-solving approaches might initially have its downsides.

1. Might suffer from blank-page syndrome.
2. Might feel compelled to be an artist.
   Just sketch, use schematics. This is not a drawing. Don’t doodle, as that usually is not a productive activity. Even professional artists might sketch elements several times before they decide to finalize a piece of work. If you’re embarrassed about your sketches, there’s no need. Who’s going to see?
3. Might feel like you have to get it right immediately.
   Maybe you don’t want to waste paper. For this reason, I often use recycled notebooks for initial drawings. Ultimately, I end up finding I switch over to a clipboard full of printer or scrap paper.

If you want to use a formal approach, you have to either learn or develop a set of symbols to represent various elements. This is the hardest part for some people. Some diagrams look suspiciously mathematical, which tends to scare a lot of people. It takes a certain “geek” mindset to want to even work this way, but hey, this is Geekpreneur.

What type of symbols you use really depends on what types of problems you are solving. For structured diagrams, there are different approaches for different purposes, each with its own tightly-bound set of symbols. For example, many of you might be a bit familiar with flowcharts from when you took that college computer course. Then there’s  UML, or Unified Modeling Language, which is a general-purpose diagrammatic “language” used for software engineering. Basically, it’s a much more advanced form of flowcharting, but has its computer and business analysis elements.

What I’ve done over the years to take elements of various diagramming approaches and come up with my own hybrid visual thinking process. My version only means anything to me, just like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings at one time probably meant something only to him. My diagramming approach is organic, and it changes frequently, when necessary. Overall, since I use diagramming/ visual thinking to solve all types of problems, including writing, coding, design, finances, and even goal-setting and achievement, I’ve found that not worrying too much about structure appears to be the best approach. I do often use mind mapping, but my paper-based mind maps usually turn into some sort of hybrid diagram that looks like a combination of football plays and wizard incantations. And it works for me.

Visual Thinking Tools

Some people prefer working with pen(cil) and paper, others like to work digitally. For me, it depends on whether I’m just sketching or producing a finished visual. Unless I have access to a sketch tablet, it’s easier to sketch on paper. Sketch tablet prices seem to go up exponential as they increase in square inches of drawing area. So it’s not always feasible to have a suitable for all types of visualizing. What’s more, paper doesn’t feel so restricting. You can always tape pieces together if you have to. However, for finished diagrams/ visuals, I do use digital tools.

Here are some of my visual thinking tools, past and present.

1. Paper – loose sheets in a clipboard, or a bound sketchbook.
2. Pilot HiTecpoint V5 Extra Fine ink pens. As a hardcore pen addict, I’ve wasted a lot of money on pens over the years, but these seem to work the best for me, both for writing and for visual thinking.
3. Sketch tablet – I always keep a couple of small ones on hand but rarely use them. If you’re going to, get the biggest one you can afford, and then design your workspace with the tablet in mind.
4. Visio – Visio, part of MS Office, is probably the granddaddy of digital diagramming tools.
5. Gliffy – Can’t afford Visio? Gliffy is web-based and free, though not as powerful.
6. SnagIt – SnagIt is a powerful screen capture tool from TechSmith.
7. Smartdraw – SmartDraw is like Visio on steroids. It probably costs more, but it’s worth every cent because of all the extra features.
8. MindManager Pro – MindJet’s MindManager Pro is not the only mind mapping package nor the first, but in a 1.5 year study of about twenty packages, I found it to be the most sophisticated.
9. Adobe Illustrator – One of the kings of vector-based drawing tools.
10. Adobe Photoshop – One of the oldest and most comprehensive raster-based image tools.
11. Adobe Fireworks – Fireworks is like a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop, offering both raster and vector imaging features. Once a rival of Adobe products, now owned by them.
12. Gimp – The Open Source lover’s Photoshop.
13. Inkscape – An OpenSource beta competitor to Illustrator and some Fireworks features.

I also spend a great deal of time visiting David Armano’s site, Logic + Emotion, for incredible visual inspiration. I highly recommend his site, and you should also check out his L+E Visual Thinking Archive at Flickr. For more discussion about visual thinking, diagramming and sketching, be sure to check out Sketching is the New Black, which links to numerous articles on these topics.

If you’ve ever seen the “geek secret agent” TV show “Chuck,” you’re probably familiar with those sequences of images that flash through Chuck’s head whenever his internal “Intersect” database gets triggered. The thing is, our brains can produce similar streams of images and ideas, if we provide the right conditions for creativity.

This of course comes in handy if you’re involved in any sort of creativity work or activity. Greater flow of creativity and productivity translates either directly or indirectly into greater income, especially if you’re a freelancer or work for yourself.

It’s also possible to lose the flow, if you don’t sustain the necessary creative environment. What’s necessary for achieving this state of mind? Mental stimuli and breaks from whatever you’re doing “right now”. At least, that’s been my long-standing experience, both as a programmer and as a writer.

The crucial ingredient is a constant stream of input. Back before the Internet, that might have been newspapers, books (fiction and non-fiction) and magazines. Nowadays, you also have your pick of countless websites.

My own experience is that when you “feed your brain,” with stimuli (text, images, video, audio) from several niches, you cause the opportunity for ideas to intersect. (A fascinating book called “The Medici Effect,” by Frans Johansson, discusses the intersection of ideas in great detail. You can get a free PDF copy at the main website.)

Some Tips for Revitalizing Your Creative Flow

Those of you who’ve suffered creative blocks for long periods of time get into a cycle of doubt. But the solution might be a lot simpler than you think. Here are some suggestions for stimulating your creativity, regardless of what kind of creative work you do.

1. Consume voraciously. Whether it’s newspapers, magazines, books, websites, movies, whatever. The more mixed, the better.
2. Surf the web. Browse at least 50-100 web pages/ articles in a short period of time, say 1-2 hours. You do not have to do this every day – just when you’re feeling your creativity and productivity turn to a trickle.
3. Take notes. Glance at article and section titles. Save links or snippets of text and notes to a mind map.
4. Feed your eyes. Take in as much visual stimuli as possible: images, diagrams, video. I like to mix in browsing of design sites with whatever other topic I’m trying to write about. Flickr is a great place to start.
5. Feed your mind. Don’t just browse; try to do some reading as well.
6. Feed your passion. Make sure that your consumption of information includes topics that you are passionate about. If you’re lacking this, no amount of input is going to help your creativity.
7. Take a break. Go for a walk and think of something unrelated to the type of creativity you’re trying to stimulate. If you can’t take a walk, take some other form of relaxing break: watch comedy, listen to music, take a shower. Physical activity is often best.

My preference is to build up a mind map while consuming information. Not everything you see/ browse/ read needs to be saved – only that which catches your attention or begs for further exploration. Keep building the map as you go. You don’t need a new mind map for each day, though you can break the map down by date if you prefer. When you’re finished with some bit of information, you can remove it from the map to reduce clutter. (Or you can move older information off to a separate mind map.) Keep your “research” mind map organic.

This process will help you to store trigger points for later creative thinking. The break from your research environment is critical to generating ideas. It doesn’t mean you have to go for a walk every time you want to generate ideas, but it doesn’t hurt. As odd as it might sound, walks and showers seem to a great trigger for coming up with fresh ideas.

Some Caveats

The drawback is that regularly absorbing all the stimuli that you need to keep your “creative flow” does take time. If you’re a freelancer or contractor, you probably know this more than others that “time is money.” However, the alternative to not taking the time is to suffer a creative block – sometimes for long, fruitless periods. Find the time, make the time. Make it part of your work.

If you use an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader to track articles on websites in one or more niches, just keep in mind that it’s possible to get carried away. As a word of caution, I’ll point out that RSS overload last year led me to abandon subscribing to 1000+ feeds and I went the opposite way: not following any. So even though I kept visiting sites on occasion, my source of creative stimuli dried up, causing a several months long creative block. Now, even though I’m still staying away from feed readers, I’m making sure I have a flow of stimuli to keep my creativity and productivity going.

Photography: kazze

For some people, it happens early in the morning. For others, it takes a jog through the park. And for lots of people from Archimedes onwards, new ideas have a habit of turning up about a minute after they step into the bath – and about thirty seconds before the phone rings.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. It’s always easiest to be creative when we can free our mind from the distractions of daily life. If the day hasn’t begun, no one has started nagging us about the things we have to do. Jogging is often done alone – just you, the road and the sound of your mind. And bathtime is an opportunity to lean back, relax the muscles and clean the junk out of your head, leaving room for concepts you would never have thought of otherwise.

Despite what the creativity books tell us about the best ways to spark creativity, there are no general rules. Different environments generate different responses in different people. Meditation can leave some people refreshed and open to a new day; it can leave other people feeling silly and nursing sore knees. Traffic can drive some commuters to distraction; for others it’s an opportunity to be away from the family, turn on some light music and just think.

This isn’t a Time for New Ideas

But while discovering the right times to encourage creativity is something we all have to do alone, there are better times than others to use the results of that creativity.

Sure, it would be nice to be original, inventive and groundbreaking every time we produce a new piece of work, but in practice we neither need to nor should do. A client hiring a graphic designer to produce a website, for example, will expect his supplier to understand the current online trends and be able to reproduce them. He won’t want a carbon copy but he will want the sort of thing he can see in the designer’s portfolio altered to match his own needs. If the result is too different, it might be unfamiliar to customers who expect a retail site or an online portfolio to look a certain way.

A big difference also likely to be more expensive. Having a template to work from – whatever the job – means that it can be done faster, with fewer mistakes, less effort and for less money.

You  might still need to add a dash of originality but there’s a big difference between remodeling and breaking the mold.

Sometimes though a client really will want to break new ground. She might have a completely new product that’s going to shake the industry – or more likely, the company will want to use a new approach to stand out in the marketplace in the same way that the iPod used design to dominate the market for music players. That’s one time when you do need not to just think outside the box, but to toss out the boxes and build your own. It’s also a time to charge extra.

Those sorts of jobs don’t come along too often but they do happen sometimes. More frequently, you’ll find yourself working as part of a team, and that’s another time when you want to be creative.

Impressing the Team

In part, that’s because you’ll want to make an impression. Teamwork is a chance to network, to show off your skills and win valuable references for the future. To do that, you’ll always need to be at your cutting-edge best. While you’ll still need to make sure that your suggestions are practical as well as original, if you can make it clear to the other team members that working with you is a valuable experience – one that will improve their portfolios as well as satisfy the client – you could find that it’s not long before you’re leading the team and creating the concept that’s on your mind rather than someone else’s.

Of course, it should go without saying that perhaps the most important time to be super-creative is when you’re displaying your own portfolio. That might sound obvious but in practice, for many people in creative industries, it can be a difficult choice. Portfolio sites like ifp3.com make it easy for photographers to show off their work but at the price of making their work look indistinguishable from that of other photographers; creating something new and high-impact, like Sacha Dean Biyan’s Eccentris site, demands a much higher investment – of both thought and money.

But perhaps the best time to pull out all the creative stops is when you want to have fun. There are few things more rewarding in any job than being able to sit back and say “I did that.” It’s a feeling that’s worth more than any pay check and brings more satisfaction than landing any contract.

In practice, when you’re working full-time, it’s not a feeling that you can have every day with every job. Even people in the most creative industries are selling their craft skills as well as their creative ideas. But if you can find a way to inject a little bit of your own originality into anything you do, the work will always going to be a lot more enjoyable.

The Fish bone Diagram is a common name for the Ishikawa diagram, a simple and highly effective problem solving tool devised by a highly respected Japanese quality expert. Also known as a cause and effect diagram, this is a concept every entrepreneur should be familiar with: it provides a visual way of organizing disparate data as to come up with a solution to a problem, or otherwise achieve a desired outcome. The reasoning behind this diagram is breaking down the intertwined factors which either build up as the problem or could possibly could build up as the solution.

A tool for Dissecting Problems in pursuit of Solutions

By learning how to use fish bone diagrams to create a layout dissecting the task at one, one can benefit from increased perspective on the causes and effect associated with a specific scenario; with such perspective, one should hope to gain the ability to tackle any kind of problem more easily. The purpose of this tool is to break down a complex problem into the simpler underlying causes. The expression fish bone refers to the appearance of this schematics: not unlike a fish skeleton, where the head represents the problem, and each bone sticking out from the vertebra represents factors contributing to the problem.

Keep your focus: Know your Bones

While building up a fish diagram, one will usually start by drawing the head of the fish, along with a set numbers of bones – usually 4, 6, or 8, associated with the manufacturing industry (Machine, Method, Materials, Man, Measurement, and “Mother Nature”), the administration and service industry (Price, Promotion, People, Processes, Place / Plant, Policies, Procedures & Product (or service), and the Service industry specifically (Surroundings, Suppliers, Systems, Skills). For most online entrepreneurs, the latter set of causes – referred to as the 4S’, is likely to be most relevant.

FishBone Diagram Hands-on Example

So, In order to flesh out a cause and effect diagram, you simply draw a fish skeleton with 4 bones, which you’ll tag “Surroundings”, “Suppliers”, “Systems” and “Skills”. For example, let’s imagine the problem you want to study is “My website does not get enough traffic”; first off, you tag the problem in the head of the fish. Now, for each bone, you’ll set additional scales, stemming from that specific cause. In order to do this, a brainstorm is recommended, where all people involved in both the problem and the solution are expected to come up with every possible facets leading to the specific problem.

Branch out your problems to the Root

So, when discussing the issue of low website traffic with your associates, you’ll focus branch while taking notice of every possible cause stemming down from each aspect of the problem. For example, while considering the first branch “Surroundings”, three important sub-branches would be “few inbound links”, “ineffective social media marketing”, and “Lack of visitor engagement”. Now, once you consider each sub-branch, it becomes easier to isolate specific actions that should be   taken to clear the bigger problem. Some examples would be “make link exchanges”, “create link bait”, “develop social media profiles”, “video broadcast”, “Create newsletter”, “Create forum”. As you can see, at this point one clearly gets a sense of actual things that should be done in order to tackle the problem.

The Golden Rule for effective Brainstorming

While brainstorming the possible causes behind each bone in the cause and effect diagram, it’s important to keep an open mind; at this stage, no possible cause should be discarded without careful consideration. The main purpose behind the fish bone diagram is to scrutinize all causes underlying a specific problem, some of which are likely to be unexpectedly subtle. For an optimum effect, a maximum possible causes should be considered, all of which should be clearly organized within the diagram. The Golden Rule for an effective brainstorming is quite simple: don’t hold back any idea that comes to mind, just put in on the table for everyone to consider; brainstormings are meant to be catharses, not organized efforts.

A tool is no good unless you can use it

Once you’ve completed a fish bone diagram focusing a specific problem you’re currently faced with, what you’ll get is nothing short of a road map, showing which steps should be completed in order to make sure the problem is overcome. While this is by no means a magical tool that will instantly dismiss your problems, it’s definitely a highly relevant tool which will help you organize your thought and get insight into something which prevents your business from running full speed. If you’re currently faced with troubles which look too complex to be sorted out, you should experiment with this strategy, since it might just help you get started on the way to a possible solution.

[tags] fishbone diagram [/tags]

“It is a shame that most creative breakthroughs never materialize.”

That’s the philosophy behind Behance, a company dedicated to helping creative professionals turn their ideas into reality. The firm’s website provides networking opportunities, creative job listings, and articles and advice to enhance productivity.

That’s all useful stuff and certainly the positions on offer on the site, though few, are high quality. (There are only sixteen of them and none seem to be freelance, but Flickr is looking for a senior visual designer, and Apple wants someone to do design work on the iPhone.)

Behance’s main offering though is its Action Method.

This is a productivity approach designed specifically to help creative staff ensure that their plans aren’t lost somewhere between inspiration and implementation. It involves pulling three elements out of each creative process, whether that process is as formal as a brainstorming meeting in a lava lamp-lit room or as spontaneous as an article you’ve read on the MUNI or an idea that hits you on the head while sitting in the bath.

Each concept, Behance recommends, should leave you with Action Steps, Backburner Items and Reference Items.

The Action Steps are relatively clear. Behance gives examples that include “follow up with x, review y, meet with z.”

The Backburner is intended to be a place to hold ideas that “may someday require actions, or just to clear your mind of the little and non-urgent things.”

And Behance recommends that reference items should be kept sparingly to avoid clutter.

Burn your Ideas
None of these elements is particularly revolutionary. The BackBurner, for example, could be one of David Allen’s folders — a place where things go never to be seen again. (It’s not entirely clear why productivity systems think they need to tell us how to procrastinate but it does seem to be a vital — and probably the most popular — part of every work method.)

Reference Items are dismissed in one article on Action Method’s own website as being “generally pretty useless.” That’s likely to be an exaggeration. Most ideas will need some sort of research before the implementation process can begin, but it’s possible that Behance’s recommendation to keep that research to a minimum is one of the company’s most valuable suggestions. Collecting reference material can often be just another way of pushing an idea onto the backburner, replacing an action step with a procrastination step.

Reading about your project feels too much like you’re doing something to make it happen — even though you’re not.

It’s the Action Steps themselves though that are likely to be the element that brings the best results from the Behance’s system. Having an idea is nice. Describing that idea to other people and persuading them it’s the killer app that’s going to bring in the mega-bucks is even nicer.

But nothing is going to happen unless a course of action is clearly laid out right away.

Just being reminded of that simple truth is important. Remember to follow the Action Method and you should be able to drag a vision down to the ground and begin to put it in practical terms.

The Holy Grail of Creative Productivity
But the Action Method stops there, leaving any creative thinker with a whole bunch of vital unanswered questions. How do you organize the action steps? Which steps should be taken first and which put off until later? How do you prevent those later actions from disappearing over the edge of the backburner and never being acted on at all?

And most importantly, how do you extract practical steps from a creative vision? Is there a routine workflow that can turn any idea into a series of standard steps that need to be taken to reach the goal?

That’s really the Holy Grail of productivity systems and it’s one that, as far as we’re aware, no workplace guru has managed to track down.

It’s possible though that it is addressed in one of Behance’s advisory sessions, and it’s here that we can really begin to see the genius of the company’s system.

The ideas might be simple but as a marketing method designed to give potential clients a taste of what the company can do, Behance’s Action Method provides a great example. It attracts attention, outlines the benefits to clients and generates leads for its main product.

And it also provides sales for its long list of Action Method products — notebooks color-coded to match the system.

For any business looking to sell something as intangible as advice, it provides a great marketing model, even if it doesn’t do a great deal to increase creative productivity.

The Action Method does have its uses though. It can remind creative types that they need to get practical if they want to see results, and it tells them that it’s okay to put some things off and skimp on the research. But other than its lack of detail, it does have one major flaw: it isn’t a shame that most creative breakthroughs don’t materialize.

Most creative breakthroughs are worthless. Only a few will go on to generate money, and it’s those that tend to spark the enthusiasm and motivation to become real. It’s better that an idea withers away before it’s born than after months of effort have been put into its Action Steps and Reference Items.

Part of being successful involves knowing when not to take action — as well as which Action Steps to take.

Take a look at the Action Method here and tell us what you think.

[tags] gtd, productivity, creativity, behance [/tags]

Photography: Diego A. Marino

For Proust, it was famously the taste of a Madeleine dipped in limeflower tea that sent him spinning into an involuntary memory. He needn’t have worked so hard. Just sniffing the biscuit would have been enough to spark those associations and make him indifferent “to the vicissitudes of life… its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.”

Even more than taste, smell has the strongest connection to memories and mood. A quick whiff of something familiar — fresh bread, wet leaves, the sort of rice pudding we ate as children — can quickly affect how we feel and what we’re thinking.

For creative workers attempting to think out of the present and produce new ideas then, scent can be a very powerful creative tool.

Deep Breaths Now
The easiest way aromatherapy can work is by removing the stress of an impending deadline, replacing pressure with the sort of relaxation that lets the mind focus on something other than an angry client.

That’s easily done. A few drops of something calming into a warm bath — or in the middle of a busy work day, into a diffuser or even just a scented candle — might be enough to lower the blood pressure and spark creativity. An odor without specific associations such as Jasmine, Lavendar or Cedarwood is likely to work best here and can be easily picked up in most decent health food stores. Dr. Joie Power, a neuropsychologist and an expert on aromatherapy, offers a number of scent recipes here which she says can inspire creativity but which are most likely to simply smell nice and make you feel good.

The idea isn’t to direct your mind, but to release it. If concerns about the work you need to do next, fear that you won’t finish on time or distractions about what you’re going to have for supper tonight are blocking your color choices, subject ideas or design directions, then just closing your ideas and letting a sweet aroma pull your thoughts away could be enough to remove your blocks.

You could even try skipping the essential oils and taking a leaf out of an Asian sutra by burning an incense stick. The scent would be relaxing, the curling smoke would be inspiring, and sight of the stick slowly burning down would be a gentle reminder to get on with it before time runs out.

An alternative approach though is to use scent to spark particular associations. That’s harder to do but it can be very powerful. Looking at pictures of woodland, for example, might be helpful when trying to create a design with a natural theme, but if the scent of eucalyptus can almost physically you take to a wood you visited in your youth then the inspiration will be a great deal stronger than anything images can produce — and the result a great deal more effective.

What Does This Remind you of?
The challenge here is to know what agents are most likely to spark your memories, and how to find them. One option might be to spend a few minutes in a store testing various Bach aromatherapy oils and making notes of what each smell makes you imagine. But as Proust spent thousands of pages trying to explain, memory is often sparked when you least expect it. The smell of a rubber ball, for example, could be enough to place you in a school gym — a useful place to be for a designer working on website for a sports company. Sparking that sort of memory would be relatively simple but freshly-cut grass brings summer to mind for many and that’s not always easy to get hold of.

It might still be worth creating a database of aroma-memory associations so that you know where to turn depending on the project. You might well find that it’s even more valuable than the sort of inspiring image banks and magazine references that many of us turn to when looking for ideas.

Of course, you also have to know what to do with the associations once you receive them. That’s where your creativity and production skills have to come into play. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to impregnate a website with scented oils (although choosing particular kinds of wood or fabric might work in an interior design, at least for a while). And the associations sparked by an aroma are always unique. For you, cut grass might spark thoughts of lazy summers and relaxing lake trips; for someone else it might mean memories of sweaty, wasted days mowing the neighbor’s lawn for a few extra bucks.

There are however, a few aromas that can be almost guaranteed to have positive associations. Supermarkets pipe the air from their bakeries into their ventilation systems because they know they’ll make the stores more inviting. At least one company sells a product designed to reproduce the smell of a new car.

If you really want to create an inspiring association though, you could trying spraying your office with Comme des Garcon’s new 888 Perfume which was designed to replicate the smell of gold. It might not inspire your designs but it could motivate you to produce one. At the very least, you’ll smell like success.

[tags] aromatherapy, creativity [/tags]

Photography: Smaku

The Japanese have a word for it. “Umami” can best be translated as “savoriness,” a fifth flavor beyond the sweet, salty, sour and bitter that Western cuisine usually targets. It describes the heavy, meaty flavor of mushrooms and soya sauce — or any food that contains a high level of glutamate, an amino acid that helps form proteins. Ketchup has it, and so do parmesan cheese, wine and seaweed.

In Japan, umami has been recognized for more than 100 years but it’s only now having influence in the West. Both top chefs and food manufacturers are looking for ways to add umami to their foods, making them tastier without increasing salt content.

Nice for the food industry but what does umami have to with ideation — the ability to be creative and conjure up new ideas?

With a little thought, quite a lot. The discover and exploitation of umami can inspire anyone looking to discover and build uniqueness.

Thinking Beyond Borders
The first lesson we can learn from umami is the value of thinking outside the box. For centuries, chefs had been thinking in only four dimensions. The idea that there was a fifth that they could exploit — or that others were already doing so — didn’t occur to them.

Today, of course, ideas flow around the world as easily as bird flu. But that doesn’t mean that every foreign concept has landed on every shore. There may still be plenty more umami flavors waiting to be discovered for every type of industry.

Designers, for example, may discover that African cultures see color or form in a way that makes them think again about their own work.

Engineers could find that an island’s boat design gives them new ideas about beating resistance and improving usability.

And any entrepreneur might be inspired by a discovery that success can be measured in different ways by different cultures.

Nor do you have to look abroad to find new concepts. Questioning any limits — or even categories — you take for granted could open up a whole world of new opportunities.

Build your own Ideational Umami Bombs
Now that chefs have discovered umami, they’re making the most of it. Master Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, for example, has created “umami bombs” that use umami-rich ingredients to focus the flavor.

Once you’ve discovered your own umami, you can do the same thing.

Artist Yves Klein, for example, found a unique shade and made it the main point of interest in his painting “Monochrom blue.” When it became clear that the ability to hear different frequencies diminishes with age, ringtone companies created ultrasound ringtones that only teenagers could hear.

Creating a product that’s based entirely on your new idea is always the easiest first step towards making the most of it and highlighting its most important features.

Get Portable
The next step though is to open your discovery for everyone to share.

That might sound like a terrible idea. If you’ve just found something new and valuable, why would you want to give it away?

The main reason is that discoveries rarely stay hidden for long. The people who have made the most money out of umami aren’t the chefs charging $185 for parmesan custard and white truffles. They’re the companies that isolated the glutamate and sell 95,000 metric tons of MSG in the United States alone.

Creating a product that makes the most of your discovery will get you noticed. Building a product that enables other people to use it, may get you wealthy.

Get Creative…
And then you can really start to play. Inevitably, the first products based on a unique idea are going to be relatively crude. The first MP3 players were interesting but nothing like as stylish as the iPod. And it took a few years for the iPod to develop into the iPhone.

The same may happen for your idea. It’s first uses will be obvious. Its adaptability will create stability and allow you to benefit from your work.

But once you have that stability, you can really start to push the envelope. Just because an accelerometer was designed to change screen format doesn’t mean it can’t also be used in video games, for example, or in digital spirit levels. The more juice you can squeeze out of your umami idea, the more you can benefit from it.

And Start Again
Eventually, of course, your novel idea will be all squeezed out. Just as machine-based operating systems are giving way to online software so your new discovery will become another part of the system.

Once that happens though, it just means you’ll have a new border to think beyond.

[tags] creativity, umami, ideation [/tags]

Photography: xtream_i

Most of you agreed with all the items on our list of creativity killers… all but one. Music, many of you said, was inspiring, uplifting and provided a useful background when you were working on Photoshop.

We can’t argue with that.

Listening to music while you work can be useful. Creating images on Photoshop might well be one of those times — provided the creative thinking has already been done. If you already know roughly what you want to do when you sit at the computer then music can make the mechanical work of toning and layering more pleasant.

But if you’re thinking while you’re working — and hoping that something develops as you click — then we still believe that music can whack your creativity.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. The lyrics are off-putting
The biggest reason that music kills creativity is that the words get in the way. Listening to music with lyrics is like trying to concentrate while someone is talking to you. It’s difficult and limiting. Every time a train of thought runs into a dead-end, instead of tracing your path back to the last junction your mind skips on to the words in the music and follows someone else’s track.

Work like that and it will take you a very long time to get where you want to go.

2. The harmony is off-putting too
Ashli wrote in the comments to our list of creativity killers that s(?)he listens to music without words when she’s trying to write. That’s certainly going to be less harmful than having someone bawling on about their broken heart while you’re trying to think but even classical music can kill your own creativity.

Your thoughts might not be following the words but they will be conjuring up images created by the composer’s harmonies and movements. You want your thoughts to be conjuring your own images.

3. Music is limited by genre
Listening to music also involves making choices and placing limitations. Music is sold according to genre and even sub-genre. That might make finding music you like easier on iTunes but it boxes art and forces it to follow rules that have more to do with easy categorization than creating excellence.

You want your influences to be open rather than limited by type.

4. Music is manufactured, not created
And worse than being squeezed into genres, music is also forced to be commercial. That doesn’t just mean that almost anything you’re listening to will have had to follow the rules of its genre, it also means that much of its originality will have been ironed out to make it an easy sell.

Unless you’re listening to a group that no one’s heard of and whose music fits no category, your thoughts are going to be inspired by the effects of commercialization not just art.

5. Music causes procrastination
Creativity is rarely a regular process. It shoots ahead, floats, takes flights of fancy, stalls and soars, and it does all in unpredictable rhythms. Music though stops and starts according to pre-determined time slots.

That means that when your thoughts begin to slow, it’s always tempting to kick back and listen to the music… at least until the end of the song.

Add up all the time you spend listening to the rest of the song, and you might well find that you’ve lost half your morning listening to music instead of creating your own works.

6. Songs end
And even if you’re not listening to the song, you might find yourself listening to the next one when that one ends. The change in tempo from one song to the next can be as intrusive into your thoughts as a poke in the back of the head with a room-mate’s finger.

And that’s assuming you don’t tell yourself that you just love this song, and stop thinking for a while to listen to it.

7. Albums and playlists end too
It’s not just songs that can end and disturb your creative process. Albums can end, playlists can run out of songs and of course, you can run out of patience with the sort of music you’re hearing.

At that point, you have to stop thinking what you’re thinking and start thinking about what you want to listen to next.

8. You can only think as fast as the music
The tempo of the music too will dictate the speed at which you think. If you’re listening to Van Halen, you might find that your thoughts flow fast and furiously… for a few minutes. Then stop. If you’re listening to Vivaldi, they might meander, developing slowly.

Neither of those is a disaster, but wouldn’t it be better if your ideas came to you at the speed that suits them… and you?

9. Music is addictive
One of the biggest problems that can arise when the music ends is that you want more but don’t have anything you want to listen to right now…. so you go shopping. iTunes might make the buying easy but you have to listen to the samples, search out similar tunes, find the best buys.

If you’ve just lost half your morning listening to the ends of songs, you could be about to lose half the afternoon buying more.

10. Music replaces thoughts
The bottom line is that music always replaces thoughts. When you’re doing mechanical tasks — even if those tasks involve implementing creative ideas you’ve already thought of — music can be pleasant and helpful. When you need to think though, the only sounds you should be able to hear are those of your own inner voice.

Still disagree? Tell us here.

You know what it’s like. You need a novel solution, a unique design, a mind-blowing, market-changing, million dollar idea that no one has ever thought of. And every time you sit back to let your brain do its thing, the only thought that comes into your mind is…

…“What’s for lunch?”

If that’s ever happened to you, don’t sweat it. It doesn’t mean you’re not creative or that you’re obsessing about food. It just means your creative skills could have taken a whack from one of these powerful creativity killers.

Caffeine
Caffeine is great for staying up through the night when you need to cram for an exam, but not so good when you need to do more than recite facts from rote. A strong cup of coffee will cause the body to release adrenaline, raising blood pressure, tightening muscles and slipping some extra sugar into the bloodstream for a quick energy boost.

All of that is useful if you want to stay awake for a short time but harmful when you need to let your synapses form associations and allow the ideas to flood in.

The real trouble starts though after the caffeine wears off. Big coffee drinkers can feel tired, irritable and depressed as withdrawal sets in. All they can think of then is when they can get their next fix, and that can be pretty distracting.

Hyperactivity
You might think then that if being tired and short of coffee is bad for your creativity then being hyper and energetic would be good for it.

Wrong.

Although some researchers have argued that creative children may be mistaken for those with attention deficit disorders, in practice, rushing around wildly is more likely to send your mind down multiple avenues instead of focusing it on the one route likely to solve a specific problem.

Relaxing your thoughts so that you’re aware of them and can direct them is likely to bring much better results.

Multi-Tasking
And that’s why multi-tasking is a major creativity killer too. If you’re listening to music, watching television or waiting for a download to finish while you’re working on a project, your mind won’t be focused. Inevitably after a few seconds, you’ll find that it drifts towards one of your other tasks, anticipating the next line in the song, looking up to see what’s happening in the show or checking to see if the download has finished yet.

When you really need to get something done — and done in an original way — it often pays to shut the door, turn off the music and listen only to what your thoughts are telling you.

One Information Stream
Before you turn everything off though, listen to what lots of people are telling you.

Creativity might be about producing things that no one else has thought of, but all creative processes start somewhere and the more input you have at the beginning, the more launching posts you’ll have later on — and the more ways of getting to where you want to go.

So even though you’re likely to have a favorite source to which you like to turn regularly for inspiration, it can pay to expand your options. And that includes looking at different fields too. Photographers can benefit from looking at trends in graphic design, programmers can follow what animators are talking about, and designers could find themselves hit with a bright new idea after seeing news about the dance world.

A creative mind needs to be an open mind too.

Competition
Sometimes a little competition can force us to focus but you can have too much of any good thing, including concentration. Although deadlines help to ensure that things get done, they don’t guarantee that what’s delivered on time is the best that can ever be delivered.

That applies to the effects of competition too.

If you’re battling to produce a widget, wonder-tool, website or whatever that’s better than someone else’s, you’re going to be spending at least half your time looking over your shoulder to see what the competition is up to. That competitor then can become the one main information source that’s holding up the creativity.

If you really want to break the mould, try assuming that you have no competitors and that your product will be the best because there’s nothing else like it.

It works for Apple.

Fear
The real trouble with being creative is that creative people are first. That means they’re in untested territory. Come up with a whole new way of putting content on the Web, of sharing photos or comparing prices and you’ll have no idea if the idea is sound or silly.

Build on someone else’s idea and they’ll have done the hard work for you. But that won’t be very creative.

[tags] creativity [/tags]

It sounds either horribly confusing or wonderfully psychedelic. Synesthesia is the ability to hear in color, taste words or imagine numbers as shapes.

The condition comes in a variety of different forms, with the most common linking numbers or days of the week with a color. “Tuesday” might be red, for example; “3” could always look green. Other synesthetes might associate low musical notes with dark colors and higher notes with light tones, or they might taste chocolate every time someone says “table.”

The condition could affect as many as one person in 23 — more if the level of synesthesia is scaled rather than a condition that someone either has or doesn’t.

Interestingly, synesthesia has also been linked to creativity. Synesthetes, it’s believed, may be better able to create associations that can lead to harmonious musical composition or clever wordplay.

So can synesthesia improve your creativity, even if your only experience of the condition is seeing Mondays as black and the figures in your bank account as red?

Here are nine ways to use synesthesia to boost your creative thinking.

1. Mindmap
If we are all synesthetic to some degree, then mindmapping might be a way to release your synesthetic potential. You can create your map on paper or electronically (Mindjet provides a free trial of its mindmapping software) but the idea should always be to use different colors and let the map form its own shape.

Both the colors and the shapes might enable your mind to form associations, sparking new ideas and creating original thoughts.

2. Listen to music
Mindmapping can be tricky, especially if you’ve never done it before. Listening to music is very easy. Many people associate musical tones with color, and composers aim to create images with their music. Relaxing to music then — especially instrumental music — should set those associations flowing.

3. Play with numbers
Number form synesthetes automatically arrange streams of numbers in shapes. One to 12, for example, might appear as a clock face while 20 to 30 could form an arc stretching from right to left. Programmers struggling with algorithms then might find it helps to break away from the restrictions of code lines and arrange the figures they have on a piece of paper. The empty spaces might suggest their own missing numbers.

4. Mix sounds with icons
If sound and color can be associated, and if we know that people “see” low notes as dark and high notes as light, then designers might want to bear those links in mind when choosing the click sound for a colored icon. Synesthesia might help them to create designs with less user dissonance and a closer match between vision and sound.

5. Match text with shapes
In one of the most compelling synesthesia experiments, test subjects consistently associated the word “kika” with a sharp-pointed shape and the word “bouba”with a rounded shape. That was true of non-synesthetes too.

Again, designers could use that knowledge to ensure that the design they created matched the sound of the text on the page. A page with plenty of hard sounds when read aloud, for example (a synesthetic metaphor), might have sharp corners while a page with softer sounds could use rounded edges.

6. Look at a color sheet
In the most common form of synesthesia, numbers or letters are each associated with a different color. It’s possible then that the opposite is true and that colors bring particular numbers and letters to mind. If that’s the case then glancing at a color chart — even the font color options in a word processor — might steer your subconscious towards the start of the next word in an idea or number in a chain as it focuses on a color that appeals. At the very least, it might help you to understand whether your mood is dark or bright — and even affect it.

7. Trust your instinct
The value of synesthesia is in its unusual free associations. So let those associations come. Even if your own level of synesthesia is very low, it’s possible that much of what we call “instinct” is derived at least in part from the associations we make naturally when we look at a word or hear a tune. Instead of dismissing those associations, try to identify them, trust them… and use them.

8. Show what you feel
One way to use them is to depict them in art. Synesthetic painters have tried to portray what they see when they hear music, and composers have attempted to reflect colors in sounds. Whether you’re writing, painting or composing, synesthesia — or an imitation of it — can add a whole new sense to your work.

9. Fake it!
Clearly, all of these ideas are going to be much easier if you actually are synesthetic. If you’re not though, you can pretend you are. There’s no shortage of research material on synesthesia explaining exactly how synesthetes perceive the world. Even if you can’t taste words or hear colors, you can still use that knowledge to cook up a tasty poem or compose a Technicolor tune.

[tags] creativity, synesthesia [/tags]

If there’s one thing that geeks seem to have plenty of its ideas. Those might be ideas for new businesses and products, but they could also be ideas about getting more from technology. After all, few people have a better understanding of hardware and software than the people who create them and use them every day.

As long as other people can benefit from those ideas, that knowledge is valuable. But delivering it in a form that generates income isn’t easy. The most obvious method is to write a blog, plaster the sides of the pages with ads, load up on affiliate products and work hard to bring in traffic… while posting daily and building a loyal following.

That can work. There’s no shortage of blogs on tech-related topics (although how many of them turn a profit for their writers is a whole other business.) But the ultimate goal for any tech-head with advice to share is to put it in book form. Not only can you enjoy the passive income that derives from a product that’s ready-made and ready to ship, but you can’t beat the bragging rights of having your name on the dust jacket and your picture on the back.

To be successful though, a book has to have a central theme. It has to have a central idea which your suggestions can make happen. For Gina Trapani of LifeHacker.com, for example, that idea was that technology can make life more efficient in the same way that smart hacking can improve inefficient software.

A central idea like that is the minimum and it was enough for Gina to attract the attention of a literary agent… who was quickly followed by six others.

But even that doesn’t mean that the path to successful geek author will be smooth sailing.

Gina Trapani found that it took three months just to create the proposal and she still had to create her own marketing plan and rely on her blog’s readership to supply buyers.

For techies with a book in them but no loyal blog following, the process is likely to be even harder. If you’re looking to take the traditional route then you can expect to write a lot of query letters to a lot of agents… and receive a lot of rejections even before you’re asked to put together a complete proposal.

There is an alternative though, and it’s one that’s strangely underused by people who know about technology.

Blurb.com is an online print-on-demand service that lets anyone produce a book and make it available for sale. You can either order a bunch of copies and sell them yourself any way you can, or you can put them in Blurb’s online bookstore, charge a mark-up to the printing costs and let the site worry about production and delivery.

You’d just have to take the cash.

The site was founded by Eileen Gittins who had been the CEO of two venture capital-financed software companies. In 2005, she managed to raise $2m and hired a bunch of designers and developers to start building the platform.

Although the idea behind the site owes much to vanity publishing, Blurb is actually dependent on a neat bit of software.

“Blurb BookSmart [is] a free client download, works on either a Mac or PC [and] produces a highly standardized file that drastically reduces the manual labor for set-up and printing — thereby making copies of one economic,” Eileen explains.

The program makes creating the book’s layout very simple and even lets wannabe authors slurp images directly from their collections at Flickr.

And so far, that picture publishing been the main use for Blurb. Although Eileen points out that:

“increasingly we are seeing professional books like portfolio books, client presentation books, company capability books”

and adds that the service is used by:

“…architects, commercial and prosumer photographers, visual designers of all kinds, artists, travelers, bloggers, family historians…”

the most popular genre by far is Art and Photography.

In fact, the Computers & Internet section of Blurb’s bookstore has just one entry, a book entitled “GuiFX Collection” by the creatively pseudonymed GuiFX User. The Business Books category also has a collection of essays entitled “Organizing and Managing in IT: Stating the Obvious” by Hendrik van Wyk.

And as far as tech subjects go, that’s it. Even Poetry has 140 books on offer.

That has to be something of a wasted opportunity. Blurb might be ideal for photographers who want a low-cost way to publish their images and make them available for sale, but a service created by a former software CEO and reliant on a pretty unique piece of publishing software must have something to offer geeks.

You don’t have to be an outstanding writer to produce a book that can sell through Blurb. Like Gina Trapani, you just need to have a central theme around which you can hang your ideas.

And a marketing plan to bring people into Blurb and persuade them to place their orders.

Get both of those right, and you can make the most of Blurb’s opportunity.

[tags] blurb [/tags]

Photography: Elijah

We all know that Steve Jobs is the world’s second most successful college dropout. (Bill Gates, of course, is the world’s biggest failure).

But here’s something you didn’t know. After Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he went back to school as a drop-in and studied a subject that turned out to be vital to the development of the computer as we know it…

He took a course in calligraphy.

It’s hard to believe but according to a commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005:

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating….

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.

So there you have it. Whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, your computer owes everything to Steve Jobs’ understanding of the intricacies of sans serif.

The Creativity of Calligraphy
But we started to wonder what else a crash course in the art of writing might have done for Steve Jobs. Did all those curlicues and italics spark Jobs’ creative juices, get his ideas flowing and lead him to build a company that owes as much to the appearance of the gadgetry as the whiz-bang programming under the hood?

And what could it do for anyone? Could it help you to create a tech company as stylish as Apple?

Maybe, says Alok Hsu Kwang-han, a Chinese artist who specializes in creating calligraphic art, but it depends on you. He told us:

Practicing anything, including calligraphy, can enhance one’s creativity or it can reinforce an old rut and mindset! It all depends on whether you bring to the practice a willingness to be playful, to be fully present without expectations, to experiment without judgment, and to thoroughly enjoy yourself! The truly original creativity cannot be practiced…

I think Steve Jobs by dropping out of college and dropping into what he loved to explore, brought these qualities to his enjoyment of calligraphy at Reed College.

That potential to release creativity (rather than create it) is particularly true of Chinese calligraphy, adds Alok. Its technique allows the brush to move vertically as well as horizontally, and calls “the calligrapher to be very present and available to the possibilities offered in each moment of the movement. It offers an alertness and a letting-go that promotes creativity.”

Zen and the Art of the iPod
That’s all very nice but Steve Jobs was practicing western calligraphy rather than the sort of Asian brushwork that involves turning complex characters into flowing artworks. He was also talking specifically about the benefit of having a variety of fonts available on computers rather than releasing his own hidden creative talents.

And yet if you compare the sort of minimalist images produced by Alok Hsu Kwang-han with the stark style of the iPod with its white space and hidden buttons, you can’t help but feel that maybe there’s something to it. Even if Jobs spent his time learning Times New Roman and letter spacing rather than shufa and the thickness of xuan paper, could his being in the moment — while being in that calligraphy class at Reed College — have helped him to appreciate the value of having nothing but a click-wheel on the front of an all-white media player?

More importantly, could the creativity of calligraphy — and the sense of just letting go that comes with any successful endeavor — do the same for you?

Well, maybe not with calligraphy and maybe not with Asian calligraphy in particular. According to Alok, it doesn’t really matter what the practice or art form is; it’s the fit and the result that matters:

[It] depends on who the person is. Dance, theater, song writing, drumming, to name a few, are also good ways. I have discovered that calligraphy is a very good way for those attracted to engaging themselves in it. As Chuang Tzu says, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

So what does that mean for you?

It might mean that all of those lava lamps, bouncy balls and basketball hoops that are as de rigueur in Silicon Valley offices as paper shredders are compulsory in the Pentagon actually do something useful. By letting their programmers play, companies are benefiting from what Alok Hsu Kwang-han would call “The Creativity of Non-Doing.”

And it might mean that when you’re sweating over a keyboard unable to see the way forward and with a deadline fast approaching, the best thing to do might not be to strain harder, but relax. Pick up a brush and a stick of Chinese ink. Or beat a rhythm on the bottom of your wastepaper basket. But try dropping out, doing nothing and just being there. It might be enough to let your ideas back in… and let you create the next Apple.

[tags] steve jobs, calligraphy, creativity [/tags]