It was tough to get out of Cincinnati this weekend, but I made it to South by Southwest Interactive in one piece. From a blizzard to a balmy day in a matter of hours, Austin is a world away, especially during SXSW. Here, everyone is focused on the future and how creatives are going to shape it.



Designer Jim Coudal tried to define the essence of creativity in a semi-mathematical formula. His idea is that all acts of creativity start by making associations in the brain between a constant and a variable, the known and the unknown. As a simple example, he pointed to a game from his website called Booking Bands. Try to combine a book title with a band name into something funny. You have to start with a constant like “Of Mice and Men”, then run through all the bands you can think of until you come up with Men at Work and you get Of Mice and Men at Work.

After you've made that association between the constant and the variable, if it's good, it will be amplified by passion, the energy to refine the idea and see it through to creation. The final step in the process is "Like" to the third power. Like as in metaphor, summary and aesthetic judgement.

So this is Jim's creative process, but his larger point was that we each need to define our own process to help us put a real value on our work and know what to charge. If we don't have a process to work through, some ideas will be easy and some will be like pulling teeth (but try explaining to a client that your fee will be more because the brainstorming was hard!)

By the time Saturday ended, I was exhausted from a day of travel and heavy thinking. But by Sunday morning, I was ready to go again. I gleaned one particularly valuable lesson from a session about presenting work to clients. When you’re showing them a final design or choice of designs, don’t try to solve problems on the spot. Instead, carefully record everyone’s worries, thoughts and suggestions. Take that back to the office with you and address all the issues, taking your time to find appropriate solutions. When you re-present the work, be sure to go over your list of issues and explain how you found a solution for each one. This kind of careful attention to detail will help prevent you from making promises to clients that end up compromising the design.

Posted by Megan