Stages

“Butterflies are notable for their unusual life cycle with a larval caterpillar stage, an inactive pupal stage, and a spectacular metamorphosis into a familiar and colorful winged adult form.”

—from Wikipedia

Our creative life often goes through stages as well.

Rhythm

Rhythm is created by repeating elements at regular intervals. We all know what rhythm means in music. Expand the definition to include the windows on a building, the running heads in a book, or the veins in a leaf. A solid back beat gives structure to a composition. It can be strong or subtle, regular or rubato.

Graphic designers are familiar with the grid—an invisible framework that lends structure to a page. The underlying grid keeps the elements from devolving into chaos. Rhythm is like the grid, but perceptible. A rhythmic structure provides order and predictability. Once the audience feels the pulse, they move with the flow. It pulls your audience along.

Rhythm can take the spotlight, too, as in a drum solo. Repeating objects, shapes, or sounds can make a powerful impact. You can also have layers of rhythm for added interest and depth.

When your creative work seems shapeless, what you may be lacking is rhythm.

Contrast

The most effective way to draw attention to something is to contrast it with something else. A dark object looks even darker against a white background. A sweet passage of music sounds even sweeter when it follows cacophony. Including contrast in your work also keeps your audience interested. By avoiding monotony, their interest will not flag. The unexpected is fun for people to experience.

Contrast creates a strong message that is hard to ignore. We instinctively notice anything that stands out from its surrounding environment. Use this to your advantage when you want to communicate something powerful. Use contrast when your message will compete with others, when you want to reach the most people, and when they aren't necessarily receptive. Advertising is a realm where you will see the principle of contrast used almost universally.

When your piece has the blahs, what you are probably lacking is contrast.

Creativity and Parkinson’s Disease

From the Parkinson's Disease Foundation website:
“Do you find that creative activities such as painting, drawing, dancing, singing, making jewelry or playing an instrument actually ease your Parkinson’s disease (PD) symptoms? You are not alone in your experience. Many people with PD report that creative endeavors temporarily relieve their symptoms.”

Introduction

You were born creative. Humans are, by nature, creative beings.

Maybe in third grade you thought your picture didn't look as good as the "talented" girl's. Maybe in the hgh school jazz combo you never got the hang of improvising a solo. Maybe in your office culture, offering an unusual suggestion is ridiculed. Maybe your job requires you to be creative every day, and after many years your well has run dry.

You can be more creative. Whether your creative flame is glowing, flickering, or has been doused with water long ago, it can be sparked anew. This book is written to be the spark. You can read it cover to cover, or open it to a random page any time.

I am trained as a visual artist and late in life became an amateur musician. I noticed while studying music that many of the principles are the same as those I learned as a graphic designer. Even some of the words are the same: contrast, texture, rhythm, emphasis. No great leap was required to realize that these basic design principles run through all forms of creative endeavors: architecture, landscaping, writing, business planning, carpentry, programming, interior decorating, and whatever it is you do all day.

The source of these principles is nature itself. That's why the book is illustrated with images of nature.

The first step is to know that you were born to create. Remember the curious and playful child you used to be. You could imagine almost any possibility, from monsters in the closet to traveling through space and time. In that frame of mind, you are ready to create.

Words from the Music Glossary

• accent
• allegro
• andante
• articulation
• backbeat
• crescendo
• decrescendo
• dissonance
• downbeat
• duet
• dynamics
• forte
• fortissimo
• groove
• interval
• lick
• percussion
• permutation
• piano
• pianissimo
• polyrhythm
• pulse
• rhythm
• ritard
• solo
• tempo
• triplet
• virtuoso
• a cappella
• accelerando
• atonal
• augmentation
• blue note
• brass
• cadence
• chord
• coda
• ensemble
• fugue
• glissando
• harmony
• interpretation
• improvisation
• inversion
• largo
• legato
• leitmotiv
• melody
• movement
• passacaglia
• pizzicato
• polyphonic
• presto
• resolution
• retrograde
• staccato
• syncopation
• texture
• theme
• timbre
• tonic
• transpose
• tremolo
• trill
• variation
• vibrato
• white noise

Inspirations

These are some of my creative inspirations, in no particular order:

• Legos
• Play-Doh
• Star Wars
  
• Steve Jobs
• Weird Al Yankovic
• The Ramones
• The Tao Te Ching
• Grand Canyon
• trees
• paint (watercolor, oil, acrylic, interior flat latex)
  
• Dune
• Steven Hawking
• the Alps
• MTV (first few years)
  
• The Art Institute of Chicago
• Vincent Van Gogh
• Marc Chagall
• Kaikoura, NZ
• Aunt Jackie (Jacqueline Ullrich)
• black and white photography
• Paris
• live music
• Allerton Park
• rivers and waterfalls
• CSS Zen Garden
• whales and sea turtles

Now make your own list!

Unity

Unity brings diverse elements into a cohesive whole. A song is a bunch of notes—unified. A painting is a lot of color and form—unified. A creative project should be unified before you present it to others. (Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.) When your project seems scattered and directionless, what you are missing is unity.

Identify the theme—the underlying message, point of view, or mood—of your project to begin unifying. Make sure to relate every element back to the theme. Within the theme you can develop many variations to avoid boredom.

From a visual perspective, unity can be achieved by proximity. Putting things close to each other implies a relationship. Unity can also be achieved by color. Using a limited color palette makes the pieces hold together as one. Unity can be achieved through shape. Repeating the same shapes, e.g., squares, spirals, or stars, throughout a work unifies it.

For a publication, presentation, or website, use styles. Consistent use of styles tells your viewer clearly that all the parts belong together, and the hierarchy of those parts. A style can consist of a background color or pattern, a font, a size, a weight, a type color, a column width, and other attributes.

In three dimensions, unity can be achieved with choice of materials, textures, colors, shapes, and arrangement of objects in a space. Movement can be unified by pace and point of view in addition to the rest.

Music is unified by tempo, choice of instruments, style, key, texture, and dynamic level, among other qualities.

A work is also unified by the emptiness around it. Think about the few seconds of silence between cuts on an LP. Imagine the white wall of the art gallery that surrounds the paintings. This leads us into a discussion of another design basic: contrast.

Drugs

After bringing up the Beatles is a good time to talk about drugs and creativity. After my first lecture on creativity as a new graphic design teacher, one of my students asked, "What about drugs?" Many artists have extolled drugs as opening up new ways of thinking and new perspectives. People who are open and curious will naturally be open to and curious about drugs. The danger is addiction. An addict can no longer be creative without the drug, and the side effects eventually lead to health problems and possibly death. Addictions destroy relationships and stunt your growth as a human being. Taken to the extreme, addicts commit immoral and illegal acts. This blog is loaded with healthy ways to increase creativity.

Creative Serendipity

The Beatles are a case study in how to live a creative life. The Beatles Anthology provides insight into their way of thinking through their own words. They were curious, playful, open to new ideas and new experiences, always looking for something fresh to bring to their music, unwilling to go stale. Here I will relate two anecdotes that illustrate how a creative frame of mind recognizes an accident as a breakthrough.

Paul McCartney on the cover of Rubber Soul: "You know that cover where we look stretched? That was the kind of thing that would happen then. We were all very into that kinda random, little, exciting thing that would happen. The photographer was Bob Freeman and had taken some pictures round at John's house. . . . Back in London, he was in someone's flat and . . . he had a little carousel of slides and he had a piece of cardboard stuck up on a little chair that was album-cover-sized. He was projecting the photographs exactly onto it cause you could imagine exactly how it would look then as an album cover. We had just chosen the photo and said, that one looks good, when the card just fell backwards a little bit, and it elongated the photo and it stretched. We went 'Oh, can we have that! Can you do it like that?' And he said, 'Well, yeah, I can print it like that.' 'Yeah, that's it! Rubber Soul, hey, hey!'"

George Harrison on recording backwards: "John had a tape with the rough mix of the backing track to I'm Only Sleeping. By the time he got home, he didn't realize the tape was tails out. He put it on his tape machine and threaded the tail in forward and got it backwards. That's when he came in the next day and said oh, yeah, backwards! We made him turn the tape over and play it backwards. Then John and I, or Paul and I, played guitars, just random notes, and then we reversed the tape to see what we had. That was the first time we had a backwards solo."

A fortunate accident is called serendipity. Creative people see serendipity where others see a mistake.

Copy the Masters

If you want to paint like Van Gogh, copy one of his paintings brushstroke for brushstroke. If you want to improvise like Charlie Parker, transcribe one of his solos note for note. Copying seems like the opposite of creativity, but this exercise will give you insight into the mind of a genius that you can use in your own work. Imitation is not unethical unless you try to pass your work off as someone else's, that is, you commit plagiarism or forgery. Most likely, your own self will shine through whatever you do.

The Ramone's wanted to write a song in tribute to the Beach Boys, and they came up with "Rockaway Beach"--pure Ramones and one of their greatest hits. Now I wasn't there, but they certainly listened to a lot of Beach Boys tunes and covered many of them before crafting their own original. The Ramones themselves influenced many musicians, including the Clash. Listen to their first hit "White Riot" to hear the Ramones influence and the seeds of the unmistakable Clash sound.

No one is too good to be able to learn from a master. The better the teacher, the better the student.

Example: Olympic Diving Camera

Creative people are curious and seek out new information and new experiences. The more ideas you have floating around in your brain, the more raw material you have for creative expression. Here is an example:

"On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then--somehow--the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water's surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot--and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

"The [DiveCam] is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan named Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago. . . . It's sophisticated, yes, but only because it's simple. They put the camera into a pipe and drop the camera.

"The idea for this wizardry came to David Neal, now NBC's Olympic production supervisor, in what he recalls as a Isaac Newton moment. It was in the lobby bar of the Ritz Carleton 13 years ago in Atlanta ahead of that city's Olympics. He and an associate has been to the diving venue where they had climbed the 10-meter platform.

"'When you stand up there,' he says, 'it makes you marvel at what these athletes will do. We were thinking: What must it be like to plummet from that height? How can we capture that sensation?'

"At which point the apple landed on Mr. Neal's head: 'Why not let gravity do the work?' On the requisite cocktail napkin, and in keeping with Sir Isaac's univeral laws, he sketched a cartoonish doohickey. . . .

The DiveCam has 53 feet of custom-extruded aluminum piping. "The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe's full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass."

--Barry Newman, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008

When Linus Pauling taught at Cal Tech, [almost*] all of his exams were closed book. He maintained that only what you have in your memory bank is available for creative thinking. If Mr. Neal didn't know Newton's laws of motion, he wouldn't have had his flash of insight.

[*see comment]

Quote: "All things are created twice," says Stephen R. Covey

"There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.

"Take the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. . . .

"Then you reduce it to blueprint and develop construction plans. . . .

"You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. . . . You begin with the end in mind.

"Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us."

—from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The power of visualization is this: anything you can imagine you can make real, constrained only by the natural laws of the universe. Use this knowledge to travel down many roads and imagine many possible outcomes until you find the one that feels right. Work out the details in your mind and save a lot of time in the execution.

Your power of mental visualization is the most important creative skill you can develop.

Creativity Killers

• Stress:Although some of us work best under pressure, constant low-level stress will suck away your creative juice.
• Comfort: Staying in your comfort zone will not yield creative results.
• Criticism: Criticism that drags you down will eventually break your spirit. You are better off in the long run getting away from a client who micromanages your work, or who dwells in the negative, or who tries to make you feel incompetent. However, constructive feedback is essential if you are trying to make a living as a creative professional. The best clients will know how to deliver criticism in a positive way that makes the end result even better. Most of the time, the best answer to criticism is: do better work.
  
• Distractions: When you are in the creative zone, you completely lose track of time. Anything that brings you back to real time will stop the flow: a phone ringing, an appointment at a specific time, a chore that needs to be done, a bill that has to be paid. Take care of the necessary tasks before you start a creative project so that they don't hang in your mind. Make list of everything else so that your mind can let go. Then get away from the phone, and don't check your email.
• Judgment: In the creative realm, you don't make judgments. Your work is neither good not bad, it just is. After you have fully expressed yourself, you go back and judge, edit, and refine.
  
• Insecurity: “Who are you to call yourself an artist? What makes you think you can rise above the average? You've never done anything extraordinary before.” We are all creative by nature, and we are all capable of extraordinary things. Remove negative thoughts and distance yourself from negative people. The struggle to stay positive and confident will always be with you, but it is worth the effort.
• Television: Has been proven scientifically to reduce brain activity.
• Perfectionism: Trying too hard is self-defeating. Creative people are not afraid to take risks, and not afraid to fail. Even the greatest artists have laid some eggs. Furthermore, some of the greatest creative breakthroughs were mistakes. Recognize that everything you create has merit. You will learn and improve the more you create.
  

Creativity Triggers

Need to jumpstart the creative process? Here are some ways to spark your imagination:

• Synthesis: add something. Introduce a new element, either similar or completely different.
• Subtraction: take something away. Make it simpler, purer. Reduce it to the bare essence.
• Connection: make connections from your subject to other subjects. Keep moving outward until you find a connection that no one has made before.
• Sheer quantity: how many ways can you think of to approach the problem? Use a sketchbook to come up with 100 possibilities.
• Nature: the source of creativity. Get as close to nature as your environment will allow. Let yourself become immersed in it.
• Complementary medium: for a different perspective on your problem. If you are a visual artist, listen to music. If you are in business, go to a museum. If you are a writer, examine architecture. You get the idea.
• Take a nap: your subconscious mind works while you sleep.

Basic Design Principles

Whether you're writing music, painting, or designing a building, remember these fundamental principles:

• contrast
• unity
• rhythm
• texture
• line
• color
• balance: symmetrical or asymmetrical
• emphasis
• shape: 2D or 3D
• depth
• motion
  

The 5-Step Creative Process

1. research
2. generate
3. incubate
4. execute
5. refine

Why be creative?

Creative thinking can:

• overcome obstacles
• resolve conflict
• give you a competitive advantage at work
• encourage personal growth
• brighten your outlook
• make life interesting

What is creativity?

"The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination."

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006