andy grayson

latest Nike work: football launch

 

knit some optimism

Sarah Applebaum's work is just bursting with color and cheer. I look at this and just want to scoop my daughter up and go visit this just to see the look on her face. It makes me think there's an idea out there for an education brand/children's clothing brand to own the idea of revolving installations that expose kids to art like this. 

sarah's work

 

 

slow is beautiful

I love this. 

 

I love this.

And so does my wife. Because she loves the Old Spice Man. And so does Mary, my daughter. Because she loves Grover. 

 

fostering creativity

I thought I'd share a few of the nuggets I promised from this week's offsite in Orlando. We had a Disney creative talk to us about fostering creativity inside your organization, and his thoughts were – while basic – good reminders.

1. Creativity comes in different forms. This reminds me of Russell 's t-shirts. Don't think for a minute that creativity is relegated to a department. There are many ways people contribute to a creative enterprise in suprisingly creative ways. E.g. – the accountants have to figure out creative ways to pay for stuff that allows great ideas to happen. Or pitches to be won.

2. Don't filter ideas at the beginning. I think we're all guilty of shooting down or rejecting ideas because we knew going in to a brainstorm or think session what kind of ideas we're looking for. That's actually a negative byproduct of being very smart – because asking the right question is a skill that helps planners enormously. But the trouble with shooting down ideas is that you inevitably throw away possible random connections, or stepping stones, to ideas you'd never have dreamed of. Bottomline: be very open at the beginning and do the weeding later.

3. Let ideas incubate. We had a great, positive & constructive discussion about this with the client. Sometimes when an idea is not on brief, or not answering a very thought through and strategic question/objective, people have the tendency to kill it. Many times it may not "pass through all the filters" you & your client have erected to weed out bad ideas and get to good ones. The problem with this is that you eliminate your gut. Bad idea. If an idea feels great because your gut is telling you so, don't kill it. Ever. Instead, recognize there's a reason for that and shelve it. Park that idea. And let it incubate. Tell people about it. If it's a great idea in the making, somewhere, somehow, someone will breathe life into it in ways you might not have imagined.

bet you didn't know # 22

This is my first video "bet you didn't know". But it's a good one.
In an earlier post I used a Frank Gehry quote to illustrate how creative inspiration can come from anywhere. Jenna made a brilliant post on her blog about very much the same thing using this video of Tinker Hatfield, the nike shoe designer who was inspired by the exposed guts of a modern Paris building resulting in the creation of the first exposed air bubble in a shoe.

creative inspiration

If you haven't seen Sketches of Frank Gehry, you should. I grabbed this low-quality clip from the DVD by using my digital camera – "low-quality" being the operative word. But I think you can hear the quote. Frank talks about creative inspiration, and that it can come from the most mundane of places. It's all about the way you see something.