A blog about design, creativity, curiosity, and everything in between.
Jonah Lehrer has a great piece on why “creative geniuses” still have failures (Dylan’s Down in the Groove or Steve Jobs’s hockey-puck mouse). Quoting Nietzsche:
Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…. All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
Being a creative genius is more than just having making things. You also need to have the ability to sort those things and sift through to separate the good from the bad. So that raises the question, how do you learn to separate those things? In short: take a break, step away, don’t let yourself get too close:
[W]e have no idea which ideas are worthwhile, at least at first. So the next time you invent something new, don’t immediately file a patent, or hit the “publish” button, or race to share the draft with your editor. Instead, take a few days off: Play a stupid videogame, or go for a long walk, or sleep on it. Unless you take a brief break, you won’t be able to accurately assess what you’ve done.
I’m very excited to announce the release of the Warby Parker 2011 Year in Review! We’ve been working hard on this since the beginning of January and I’m so excited to see it completed and live on the site. As you know, this project was right down my alley and it was great to work with some data other than my own.
I’m hoping to write more on my process and the backstory of the project, but until then, please do take a look!
Wilson Miner’s talk for Build, When We Build is one of those things I’ll need to rewatch every few months. I feel like it’s a disservice not to say more about it, but this is one of those things that anything I add would pale in comparison to just watching it.
(Wilson has also included links to all his source materials from talk here)
“A book ought to not only document its contents but actually perform or enact its contents. In an ideal case, those things are so seamlessly integrated that sometimes it’s hard to tease out the content from the form.”
I absolutely loved everything about this piece from Susan Cain in The New York Times on the importance of solitude in the creative process. If I were to describe how I feel in a paragraph, it might be pretty close to this:
[T]he most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of solitude and being alone with your thoughts. I think this can mean taking time away from your team/collaborators to collect your thoughts or write and think, but I also think this means getting away from social media—closing Facebook and Twitter and getting away from blogs for a while. I’ve been doing this more recently and have found and have found it hugely helpful in my work and life.
I think Craig Mod is one of the most interesting designers working today. Previously the lead designer for Flipboard for iPhone (which is fantastic), he’s currently a MacDowell Writing Fellow working on the future of the books. I like the way Craig writes and talks and most importantly, I like the way he thinks. His career has largely focused on what future books could look like and the experience that shapes them.
His recent talk at the Build Conference is a great look into what books can be and how to bring the nostalgia we associate with physical books into the digital space. We often speak about the artifact or the interface of future books but here, Craig argues what will be most important—most nourishing—is keeping that nostalgia and experience and romanticism as books go digital. I highly recommend this one.
Counterpunch has a profile on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. If his last name wasn’t enough to make me like him, he’s also from Allentown, PA and I’ve played his new album, Rio dozens of times since it released earlier this year. I especially liked this part where Jarrett discusses the limitations of the piano:
Rio opens with a squall of dark chords, pounding against each other, like a contrapuntal storm sweeping over the Amazon forest. The turbulent swirl eases, giving way to a luminous sheen of blues melodies, warm and sinuous. Jarrett’s touch is light and assured, with distinctive resonances of two of his heroes: Bill Evans and Bud Powell. Still the chromatic shadings of Rio have a horn-like quality, something akin to Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax. Indeed, Jarrett has often said that he is frustrated with the limitations of the piano, that he’d like to transform it into a more expressive instrument, such as a guitar or sax.
“Saxophone players have influenced me more than pianists,” Jarrett said. “And if you think about Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman or Coltrane, they’ve got a voice, they have this freedom, and they’re not percussive. They can play a river of notes and it doesn’t matter what the number is. So when I’m playing piano I don’t want to hear the attack as a percussive attack. I’m listening to this flow. That’s one reason the piano can make me mad.”
Happy Friday! Here’s Talking Heads playing “Once In A Lifetime” on the German show Rockpop in 1980.
“If you are implying you cannot express yourself when you are working for money, you are proposing that I might do one sort of work when I get paid and not when I work for myself. But I put the same amount of care into both. You are also proposing that I have a deeper feeling for something when it is not being commissioned by somebody else and that is not true either. Neither of these are true. This is classically how people think about photographers, that they do commercial work they don’t really enjoy doing, where they can’t say what they really want, and they do personal work where they can say things they want. That is not true for me. Every job I take on I do to one hundred percent of my ability and I have to believe in that. Christian Dior, Bjork, SHOWstudio and the others, these are all the things I believe in, and they are about communication just as if I was writing or singing, or if I was doing a film or a painting, it is just communication.”
In 2009 and 2010, inspired by Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, I tracked various data from the year to assemble into an annual report that charts interesting statistics from the past twelve months. Now in its third year, my reports continue to be a popular piece in my portfolio so I’m excited to present my third, the 2011 annual report poster.
“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing — but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.”
Happy Friday! [About as Helpful as You can be Without Being Helpful - Dan Mangan]
“Concentrating, focusing. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?”
—William Deresiewicz in a lecture he gave to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2009 called Solitude and Leadership.
Read the entire thing. So, so good. I think I’m using this as a guide for the new year.
The third issue of Sway, the experimental zine I started with Rory King is now available for download. This issue’s theme is “fame” and features a larger page-size to play off the idea of larger-than-life celebrities. Rory handled the first six spreads and I took the last six. We’re also putting the finishing touches on a full website where you’ll be able to download previous issues and house everything Sway-related. Enjoy!
“I have tried to cutback my noise and output. Trying not to make noise just because I feel a bit insecure. At times I’ve made noises just for the sake of it and have often regretted it and just felt empty and underwhelmed. My intention is make any noise short, compact, interesting and worthwhile. As is obvious to anyone with a connection to the web, a rare skill.”
