Not a great deal of making was achieved this week.
I give myself a D- for this lack of productivity but I give myself an A+ on double click liking many of my Insta Heroines and a few Lovely Lads. I liked for Ozshtraylyia this week!
I keep telling/deluding myself that if I look at the magic others are making for long enough, I’ll bounce enthusiastically from my day job to working on my yarny creations…and not just create but create a masterpiece.
Despite my lack of physical productivity this week I did manage to tune into some great sessions at the Adobe MAX conference. The most memorable was by the quirky and maddenly brilliant Stefan Sagmeister. He discussed how to have ideas.
He looked at De Bono’s ‘riffing’ approach where you look at anything, really anything (a twig, a cloud, a water bottle etc.) and ‘riff’ about all the uses for something and take yourself on a journey of random associations. He says: “The reason this works is because DeBono’s method forces the brain to start out at new and different points, preventing it from falling into a familiar groove it has formed before.”
The second approach was a mind mapping approach where you connected everything you could possibly think of about a subject.
The third approach…ummmm…err…I forget.
It was what he said about how you don’t have ideas that made the biggest impression. He said that scrolling through Pinterest or Insta in the hopes of getting an idea is a sure fire way of not getting an idea that will satisfy or sustain you. He said something like you may find something that you like, but in your heart of hearts you know it’s derived from someone else’s work and it’s a difficult way to sustain an idea over the long term. But when you have your own Eureka moment you know the light of this type of idea can keep your journey lit for a long time. Thanks Stefan.
To make myself feel a little better about my lack of productivity I’ve posted a closeup (what is it with me and close ups?) of a festival hood I made for my beloved doof-doof niece. I made it before The Great Plague of 2020 when it looked like she’d go to her first music festival. Looks like she and her hood will have to wait.
If we’ve achieved nothing this year most of us have learnt the patient art of waiting. That’s got to be productive right?
Last words go to the great Sagmeister:
Q. First, you made a film, then an exhibition about happiness, then another, about beauty. What’s next?
A. I will stick with beauty. It feels like that’s exactly what I should be doing right now.
Happy weekend lovelies. Here’s to beauty. Always. 🙏
Ps. You can still tune into some great creative sessions at the #adobemax conference. Download the Creative Cloud app or go to the Adobe MAX website. The conference is free. Gotta love that. ❤️