Category Archives: Creativity

5 Ways to Keep Your Sanity When Working With Web Designers

MBSTIA is a 7-year old design firm outside of Washington, DC. Specializing in design and color for digital marketing, they offer 5 tips about working with web designers:

Look at other web sites to develop a profile of your tastes for your project.
Figure out what color schemes you like and would be appropriate for your business or service.
Gather important images that will be part of your web site and design.
Decide on who will write your web site copy (the text on read more…

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Don’t blow your budget on just a single feature

When allocating budget for any creative endeavor there is always a tension between what the creative team wants and want the audience needs.  Do you really need to blow the majority of your budget on just one effect, one feature or one gimmick?

Last night I saw  Michael Weller’s BEAST, produced by New York Theater Workshop – the folks who brought you “RENT.” It’s told as a “fever in six acts” and arcs from Iraq to Germany to Crawford, Texas.  From read more…

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The 7 vices of highly creative people.

We all know that creative people just “think differently” than the rest of the population. What makes them great is the source of endless debate. But if you’re in a hurry, you might want to follow Salon.com’s 7 point guideline to achieving creative immortality.

Be a drinker
Begin with a smoke
Put gambling first
Think oysters.
Seek fashion first, then seek to be understood
Sex
Abuse your credit for all it’s worth.

LINK: Original Salon article

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Top 10 Characteristics of Creative Personalities

image of a creative thinker at work

Do creative people really think differently than the general population? Renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent years investing this very notion and distills his findings in “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.” He postulates that there is one word that best describes the personality of creative people: complexity.

 

“They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes – instead of being an individual each of them is read more…

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Creative Loneliness

alone at work

It is interesting that for a field as collaborative as ours just how much time we spend in complete isolation. I look at my weekly time sheets and am amazed at just how much time I am alone, staring at a computer screen. Writers are confronted by a taunting empty document waiting to be filled. The editors I work with can spend as much as 60 hours a week alone in a dark room working on their AVIDs. Directors break read more…

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Why I Love Creative People

picture of the Bulgarian National Orchestra at work

I’m on location in Sofia Bulgaria, helping two friends with their amazing project. Chris has composed the entire score to a feature film and is here with his colleague David who is conducting the National Orchestra, Chorus, and Boys Choir.

Why Bulgaria? Extraordinary talent – classically trained – at prices that make it all possible.

What I enjoy most about working with Creatives is how their (and my) mind work. It is a strange brew of:

technical training
passion for the read more…

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