So You Want to Be A Creative?
So you want to be a creative? The one who comes up with innovative/creative award winning ideas. The truth of the matter is that it is possible. I used to believe that I could never be the one who could come up with those amazing ideas, and now, I am breaking into the world of advertising. Being a creative isn’t easy, nobody said it happens over night.
Being a creative starts with the right mindset. If perhaps you are sitting there thinking, “I can’t come up with these great ideas” or the simple “I’m a creative hack,” get used to it because every creative feels that way one time or another. It is just a matter of trying to get that voice in your head to concentrate. Often I am asked what I think creativity is. My reply is that creativity is idea engineering. Creativity approaches a problem and solves it by innovating, by showing newer meaning, and getting away from clichés.
You want to know the secret to being creative? It’s a simple concept and with the right mindset, “I am a creative” the solution will come. Creativity as I mentioned earlier is problem solving. Keeping that in mind, real innovative creative solutions will occur after you ask questions that go deeper and deeper.
Lets use an advertising example to help you start-seeing things like a creative does. What if I placed a simple CD-RW (re-writeable) in front of you? Then I asked you, “Describe this CD?” Well for starters we would get answers like its silver, reflective, green on the bottom, donut hole in the center. Then we would want to go one step further. One person may say, lets test this CD and see how many CD burners will reject this CD. But then the analytic mind would say, lets see how many times we can write data on the cd and erase it before it goes corrupt. But then we have the optimist who decides to get an electron microscope and use it to count how many pits are burned into the CD that fits 720 megabytes. The point being to all this is that you just have to question things. Question it to go farther and hopefully when all things are said and done, you have hit that golden question. That question when answered can lead to greater innovation and creativity. Creativity in essence is asking hard questions that do not have obvious answers and may require more research. Next week I will discuss creativity through sketching.