These are some of the headlines from Easter Sunday. If Easter were about plastic eggs and pastels, candy and churchy activities, I would not celebrate it. Probably no one would. But Easter has more to do with today’s headlines than with today’s Easter baskets – it’s about the beginning of the restoration of all things. It’s about a God who is with us here, who grieves with us for a season while He works to make all things new. I don’t understand, or believe, all this as well as I want to, but I do believe that that larger story is the only one that matters. God forgive us for our part in those headlines. Happy Easter, everyone.

Being Human, Community, Ideas

Market is primed for “readerless books”

After seeing the growing interest in driverless cars, I’m designing a new line of readerless books. I think the market is ready for an innovative solution like this. Imagine the time saving potential–a book that sits quietly in a corner and reads itself! These books are virtually indistinguishable from traditional “user-dependent” books, but the owners of these books will be freed from the difficult task of looking at all the words and sorting them into meaningful sentences, and then sifting ideas out of those sentences.

You might also be interested in this article about why we obstinately continue reading books: Why read books?

Book Design, Books, Ideas

This is a continuation of an earlier post, The Creative Process, Part I: The Myth of Orderly Progress.

Creative work is non-linear

Some work follows a clear path. Step 1 is always followed by Step 2, and if you know how many steps there are you can have a pretty good idea of how the rest of the work is going to go and how long it’s going to take. Elements of my work are like that. But the most rewarding and enjoyable projects are the ones that require creative, conceptual exploration–projects where the the path to the end is not mapped out. For that type of work an iterative workflow with regular, incremental improvements to a design isn’t much help.

Deadlines aren’t shy about tromping all over my non-linear creative process if they have to.

But those projects are never open-ended. They have to happen within a certain timeframe, and the deadline isn’t going to be shy about tromping all over my non-linear creative process if it has to.

In Part 1 of this post I talked about how there would be some comfort in a process that was mapped out and more predictable. But in my experience the creative process is less like following a map and a lot more like getting lost in the woods (over and over) and then finding your way home.

Lost in the woods

After the initial discovery phase I usually start with two or three different concepts to try, and the initial excitement about the project carries me along until I realize that none of them will work. By then, I have a much better understanding of the constraints and requirements, and I can sometimes go back and rework one of the dead ends based on the new insight. Sometimes that goes well, but there are times when it doesn’t. (This is the part where the most useful keyboard shortcut is Control  +  A  and  Delete or, “Select All and Delete.”)

To start over at this point is

1. depressing (because I’ve used up a lot of energy),
2. anxiety-producing (because I’ve used up a lot of time) and more importantly,
3. very difficult (because I have no creative momentum.)

A little distance from the project is in order, and for me that probably involves some combination of coffee, exercise and/or human connection. The ideas will come.

Welcome the Muse (Do the hard work)

I wrote in Part 1 about the seemingly passive role we have when it comes to having good ideas. The best ideas seem to come from the least expected places, and serendipity is a ticklish thing to try to manufacture.

“With these things there’s no telling, you just have to wait and see.
But I’d rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery.”

–Bright Eyes, First Day of My Life

The ancient poets would invoke a Muse before they wrote or recited–this is when it would be nice to have a Muse. It’s not like I can go to the Idea Drawer in my studio and pull out two or three shiny ideas and start building them into a finished product. (Although I do have such a drawer, sort of.) The deadlines don’t wait, but if each good idea seems like an accident then it doesn’t seem like I have much control over when the next one happens.

Part of the reality is that “the muse” is a lot more likely to come to me after I do the hard work–after I sit down and immerse myself in the material, after I’ve done some research into the topic, after I’ve doodled some terrible ideas in my sketchbook. You may not be able to command your muse to sit down beside you, but you can prepare a place for her and make her feel more at home.

Falling down at the finish line

Don’t doubt in the dark what you knew in the light.

The last hurdle for me comes in the form of 11th hour anxiety and self-doubt. This doesn’t always happen, but often enough that I consider it a normal part of the process. As the deadline seems to approach faster than the project can possibly come together, it can be tempting to second guess the direction you’re going, to wonder if you should start over, to start looking for another line of work and begin to ask yourself if anyone has ever really loved you. It’s best to just ignore all that mess and push forward. My dad used to tell me, “Don’t doubt in the dark what you knew in the light.” If you’ve done good work up to this point and laid solid, thoughtful foundations for the work you’re doing then those anxious thoughts are probably baseless. Press on and see those ideas through.

What’s your process?

I’d love to hear what other people’s “normal” creative process is. Tweet them to @PaperbackPage, comment on Facebook, or send me a message.

Creativity, Design, Ideas, Illustration, The Nerdatorium

I don’t always know what I’m doing

When I worked as a house painter, it was easy to figure how the work would go and how long it would take. You have a 2″ brush and 300 feet of trim to paint. There were occasional problems but for the most part the goal was clear, and the process was simple: the trim of the house should be red, and the sidewalk, windows and cat should not. It was good, hard work and a joy to do it. It was also a straightforward process, and you almost always knew what to do next and how long it would take. When I’m working on a creative project, I’m often not sure what to do next. And it can seem like I’ll never finish.

The Myth of Orderly Progress

We talk about the design process being iterative, meaning that we create a series of solutions to a design problem, and each solution is tested and refined based on the shortcomings of the one before. It implies an orderly progression, a series of incremental improvements gradually climbing from an Uninspired Pile of Unoriginality to a Pinnacle of Irrefutable Excellence. (See the drawing above. Simple, right?)

For me the design process looks a little more like getting lost in the woods, over and over.

This myth of Orderly Progress has not been my experience. My experience of the design process looks less like an Ikea instruction manual and more like a page out of my sketchbook. Which looks like getting lost in the woods, over and over. The creative process is not linear. It starts with discovery and exploration and it’s messy and unpredictable and serendipitous. Sometimes the goal isn’t clear until after you’ve been immersed in the material for hours, which can make everything up to that point feel like wasted time. There are false starts and dead ends, and it’s common to spend an hour following an idea, only to have to scrap that last hour’s work.

And sometimes you have to go “back to the drawing board” and start over altogether. As Dave Crossland and Eben Sorkin told us in their Crafting Type workshop, sometimes the most useful keyboard shortcut is Control  +  A  and  Delete (or, “Select All and Delete.”) Starting over can be disheartening, especially if there’s a deadline creeping up behind you and you don’t have a clear direction forward. You can’t make the good ideas come.

Inspiration and Muses

The word inspiration comes from the concept that ideas or thoughts are being “breathed into” someone from an outside source. The mythological Muses were said to attend to artists and poets, to whisper ideas in their ears and guide their hands. There is something about the idea of those external sources of creativity that resonates with creative people. There are times in the creative process when you feel like you are developing ideas that have come from your head and through your hands, but you don’t know how they got there. You are an active participant in shaping the work, but you also feel that you are somehow a passive recipient of the ideas.

Projects have deadlines and the work doesn’t wait. It’s hard to manufacture serendipity.

That may be the most disconcerting part of the work that I do–the feeling that my best ideas have come from mysterious, unexpected places that I do not have direct access to. And at the same time I have projects with deadlines and the work doesn’t wait. It’s hard to manufacture serendipity. If my best ideas come from inaccessible places, and if each good idea seems like a fluke, a lucky break, then I don’t have much control over when the next idea will come.

Part 2 of this post is about what a “normal” process looks like to me, and how I approach the “Select All” + “Delete” phase of a project.

Read The Creative Process, Part 2: Lost in the Woods.

Creativity, Design, Ideas, Illustration, The Nerdatorium

Why should we read books? Is it worth spending the time to sit down and follow an author’s thoughts page after page? The simplest answer is that books take us beyond ourselves and give us access to experiences, thought and wisdom that we could not otherwise reach.

Freedom from our limited perspective

Each of us are only allowed a few years to live, and during that time we can only have a handful of jobs, live in a few places, and we only get to know a few people on a deep level. Books allow us to live many different lives, at different time periods, with different social and economic situations. We begin to see how other people’s priorities and motivations lead them to make decisions that we would otherwise not understand. We learn to empathize with people who are not at all like us–we walk in their shoes for a couple hundred pages and we understand them (and the rest of humanity) better.

A distillation of a lifetime of thought

Why read books? One of the best reasons to read is that it gives you access to the author’s best thinking on a topic that they know well and have considered deeply. It is a distillation of insights they have been gathering for years. We understand the world better by sitting at their feet and hearing their reflections, following their thoughts and seeing why they’ve come to the conclusions they have.

In just a few hours and with relative ease, the reader gains some of the wisdom and experience that the author has wrestled and fought for decades to earn. They stalked the wild beast for years in the wilderness of the mind, with great personal discomfort and sacrifice, then labored for months to shape and prepare it, just to give it away, putting their ideas on our plates in thinly sliced, easy-to-read chapters. We would be fools not to eat.

Wisdom from suffering

Experience is, essentially, wisdom that has come from suffering. In most cases we are stubborn enough to suffer on our own, and create our own experience. Books offer us an opportunity to learn from the suffering and experience of other people, both real and imagined. We see how the characters or historical figures lived and suffered, how they responded to different situations, and we learn. When we face similar situations in our own lives, we have access to the experience we gained from watching them.

For some more thought on the purpose of books, check out this great video from The School of Life.

Book Design, Books, Ideas, Illustration