William C. Taylor: Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win
Edward R. Tufte: Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
Sam Harrison: Zing!: Five Steps and 101 Tips for Creativity On Command
Jerry Hirshberg: The Creative Priority : Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business
Gordon MacKenzie: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
Jon Steel: Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business (Adweek Books)
Teresa Amabile: Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking
Two of our terrific brains -- Ashley Stewart and Chris Young -- crafted this message for the Obama in 30 seconds competition. It should be noted it's theirs from the ground up: they learned Flash to make this happen, recorded the coice over, did all writing and animation in a short space of time because they wanted to use this as example. Thanks to Shalamar Clark for the VO.
Vote here: http://obamain30seconds.org/vote/?v=view-664-yMQ9JV
The smart folks at Enviromedia came up with the idea of developing an index that looks at green or environmental claims. Kim Sheehan and I developed an index to use and together -- SOJC and Enviromedia -- are looking into how consumers assess green claims.
It's the Greenwashing Index.
What does this mean?
It means consumers can use a simple metric to assess and ad on its greenness.
It means that ad professionals have new evidence that helps them monitor and correct claims that are vague or misleading.
It means that advertising professionals and advertising education work together to be a conscience for the industry.
We need ads to be uploaded (just follow the directions) and assessed.
Been gone. Only way to get back in is to think about something different.
1 -- Explained.
Thanks, Mayer + Bettle. Creative Commons done well.
We've been looking at ways to make story come alive. Whether it's brand journalism, personal narrative, or reportage...how do we use all the pieces of story to make something interesting?
1 -- Mark Blaine -- firestarter and UO brainiac -- turned me onto the pecha kucha phenomenon. What a cool way to bring people together and connect with smart content. Created by designers who wanted to gather to show material from multiple producers quickly, the concept is one that lends itself to getting ideas produced and shared.
2 -- Mediastorm is remarkable. It is photojournalism, photoblog, multimedia platform, podcast, and signals the next chapter of connective journalistic visual reporting. Brian Storm has produced a series of strong stories. For anyone interested in crafting a compelling multiplatformed approach to understanding people and their stories. For brand afficionados, an authentic approach to connecting ideas to audiences.
3 -- From reportage to fanciful...flipbooks and zoetropes are mediatoys that also have beautiful application 
for telling a story in a different way. The digital flipbook is hot right now, but the old-fashioned diy version makes such a cool tactile moment that you really can't pass it up. A soundtrack for your zoetrope world? Oh my.
This photo by Andrew Dunn 04, www.andrewdunnphoto.com
4 -- People telling stories in multiple forms...visual, performance, conceptual. Go back to the remarkable Danny Gregory and look through the archives to see stories take form in multiple media, experimental form through drawing and journaling. He is so nimble with doing ideas that we should all have the WWDD homage tattooed on our psyches. What would Danny Do? Other folks to look at craftmonkeys, zefrank on punctuation, korzekwa.
5 -- Maybe it's just about crafting the perfect sentence.
Let's hit a couple of classics and and some sidestreet moments that take us to new places. Other suggestions welcome:
1 -- TED conferences
Come on, you know this one or you should. Every click offers a new perspective for creative thinkers using design, science, art, culture, technology as fodder for making your own ideas. I loved the guy talking about all the cultural references to 4am...poetic. Some others I've recently loved:
• Steven Pinker on language and thought
• Jeff Skoll makes movies that change thinking
• Carolyn Porco on Saturn
• Stefan Sagmeister shares happy design
• Mena Trott tours her blog-world
2 -- Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Life
This has been around for a couple of decades (!) but oh man is it good. Read and study. Apply it to your work. Look through his design projects. All salute Bruce!
3 -- Edward Tufte and the love of visual information
Tufte is a Yale design prof (emeritus which shows respect, longevity and leadership in the area after retirement) who focuses on design of complex data. His books are intellectual, thick with examples and thought pieces. His courses -- I took one in Portland this summer -- are 8 hours of brain candy (and you get all 4 books...awesome).
4 -- Coudal Partners Video Wall
Intriguing short movies on delicious topics. Look at the keyboard piece. Interesting that Coudal Partners offers this on the site: a design,
advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in
web publishing, design and commerce. Which means they are creating content to see how it works and where it lives. Inspiration!
5 -- I dare you to watch the entire speech. Think of the death threats he had received, you can see the fear in his face but it is not in his voice. Look at the audience dressed in Sunday best. Consider that no such gathering had ever occurred. Understand that if you are a woman, gay, a person of color, a white man looking for justice, you are affected by the seeds planted on this day. This is about you.
Lots of stuff happening..thanks for patience.
I'm starting a new approach to sharing some info for classes and friends. I hope to hear from you about suggestions and new directions.
The concept will be this: 5Great. Every couple of days a new set of five interesting thematic places to go to think about stuff related to ideamaking. Some interesting things collected already that I'm posting. Brett Robbs and I use this technique in our new book Launch! The practical guide to a great first job in advertising in which we've collected some great readings, inspiration, and career direction in the 5Great model.
Yes that is a shameless plus for what's coming out in the spring, published by The One Club. And part of what's been keeping me from this project.
So off we go....
A lovely moment for thinking on where we are. Collins's voice is beautiful enough to make you close you eyes and drift away.
Our Turnbull Center course in Portland gathered a dozen strong thinkers to consider techniques for honing skills in making ideas. We've collected a resource guide for consideration and continuing education and hope to continue to add to it.
Three great moments when people gather to think about thinking:
1 -- process is first mysterious, then surprising, then obvious as we consider how we think
2 -- creativity revolves around giving yourself permission to take the time and energy to do it -- whatever it is -- differently
3 -- creative approaches to problem solving must evolve; they must be used and honed
Big questions : how does your creative process act? how do you use it? where does it start and stop, get stronger, need more help? how do we manage the flow?
Adding to the resource guide throughout the week.
And so, after a rough ride, life continues. Thanks for many good wishes on my mom's death. If there is a lesson in all, it is to prioritize, to work at being happy, and to live fully.
Interesting to think that advertising and marketing shifts are forcing the industry to rethink where leaders live, how new ideas are made, even where to go for inspiration.
GreenTeam in New York makes sense. Brian Hurewitz, an AD there, brings the reality of making sustainable, conscience-ridden advertising as part of the cultural fight. Reading through his blog, it reminds that sometimes we are drawn to our calling out of chance and luck and good fortune. Sort of building your heart into the job search.
Also, link to the greenteam blog which blehblehblehs you with new ideas and ventures, possibilities. Good stuff.
Read up, then think about Enviromedia, Serve, or a number of places that are using talents to make good.
Charts and mapping again. The Diagram Literary Magazine offers this as a way of wrangling all the "___ is the new ___". Sleep is the new awake.
Places to go for a swift kick. Wherein I play my very own version of StumbledUpon for creatives.
Open Culture. One Word. Mr. Picasso Head. Dirty Car Art. Circular.
And a photo of dry ice in gatorade, a Morrison homage.
Stamen Design -- a design and technology studio in San Francisco -- does strong digital work, a pioneer in making content accessible. (One of their founder's first ventures was Quokka Sports, one of Dan's client in the 90s when he went to Everest.) Here, they discuss ways of journaling on paper and how that grows their design work in other media. A piece from the page:
Proving the genius / weird continuum is alive and well, Gondry solves a Rubik's cube with his feet in about a minute as his assistants work in the background.
Rewatch his movies for feet clues...
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a wonderful tool for ideamaking and presentation. The accompanying paper describes in scholarly terms how the table was formed and classified using extant theory in ideation, visualization, and conceptualization. For conceptual thinkers of all stripes, it offers ways of conceptualizing ideas for audiences. For scholars, it offers a typology of approaches for evaluation and explaining rich relationships.
Bottomline: It may be the juiciest overview of conceptual tools ever offered.
Great story from a friend of a friend. Try Beyond Madison Avenue to think about quantity vs quality in making ideas. Which could give us better work? (Hint: there's a real reason to go after those 100 thumbnails.)
Using the mind map analogy that ideas are connected, associative, living entities, here's visual complexity nirvana. Check out knowledge systems, social networks, art.
Idea makers sometimes lose the love when they start actually making those ideas. The reality doesn't feel like the bright idea.
We look for places to make things better. Making journals more usable happens here. Dave Rose's beautiful printing technique makes for a letterpress feel. All of instructables is worthy of spending hours making stuff. Danny Gregory (again!) is worth a read every morning. Hugh McLeod explains why not making stuff makes him hurt.
University of Oregon campus. 120,000 flags, each depicting 6 Iraqis killed. 3,000 red flags depicting the 3,050 American soldiers dead.
What an inspiring visual scape: the meeting of context, culture, message, meaning, visual/verbal offering.
Thanks for the questions on this. The book is Launch! A practical guide to starting your career in advertising (our working title) and the great Brett Robbs (University of Colorado) and I have worked ourselves crazy writing and editing this guide. We have great chapter authors looking at Media (Marian Azzaro), Digital (Gene Kincaid), Planning (Kendra Gale), Account Service (Carla Lloyd), Production (Brett Robbs), and Creative (me). The book focuses on how the best agencies use hard-edged creativity as a skewer throughout the entire process. There are sections on interviewing, tips on making meetings productive, lots of "what happens in my first week" and "here's what to do to turn your job into a career" moments.
Publisher is the wonderful One Club and you should check out other books they've already published here.
We've interviewed hundreds of very smart people in key positions in advertising from the agencies who are inventing what the industry will be in the next five years. This does sound like blurb copy, but we're excited.
Final manuscripts go in this month, should be out for the summer.
I'm in a mood to be inspired by great work and think about what that means for solving problems of the day. These five are first steps first four are going new places for ideas, fifth is doing it).
