Since my last article on Ideation came out, there has been an interesting study done by the University of Illinois at Chicago regarding the effect of alcohol on creative problem solving. The study worked with the proposition that alcohol affects the brain by diminishing the working memory capacity (WMC) and that WMC — the ability to remember one thing while you’re working on something else; is more useful for analytical problem solving or problem solvers. 

This study proposes that diminishing our WMC actually leads to creative breakthroughs. So how would diminishing your ability to concentrate or focusing your attention increase creative problem solving results? There are two theories at play here; the first is that the use of alcohol opens up the brain to accessing remote ideas or neurological pathways in the brain, and the second theory is that the use of the alcohol inhibits the linear reasoning process that keeps you on a singular track of thinking. Of course the researchers caution that the alcohol had to be used in moderation, just shy of what most states consider intoxication, (0.80 blood alcohol level). So it worked with just a moderate amount of liquid goodness, while getting a major buzz on it reduced both concentration and working memory tasks.

Another interesting side note from the study was that there were other things that tend to assist creativity; working in groups with varying levels of skill, working in groups of three versus groups of two, changing one’s routine, sleeping, and one we cannot control: aging… Damned, at least there is one good thing about getting old.

Apart from the history of artist’s using mind-altering substances for creative inspiration, I really am personally hesitant to recommend alcohol to enhance creativity so let's just say it should be a personal decision, not to be lightly taken. This is because so many famous creative talents self-medicate to basically “turn off” their minds. Pearl Buck once said: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive." And sensitivity is not necessarily an asset in our modern society.

To recap the most effective ways to be creative and ideate

-       Brainstorming seems to be generally a poor method when used in any process that is linear and in a rigid timeframe or formulaic

-       Presenting the problem in a creative way tends to get creative responses

-       The use of three individuals tends to trump just two

-       Conflict should not be avoided in an idea presentation or formulation

-       If ideation is critical to an organization, then anything that can take office politics out of the sessions will help with the results

You have to be a critic. Someone is going to have to make the call on the decision or direction of the ideation and decide on which ideas are moved forward, which are tabled. The lack of leadership is probably the greatest idea killer of them all. Many great ideas do not move forward because they lack a champion or critical thinker. When I think of a business with such an individual as an example, I would have to say Steve Jobs’ role at Apple. I am certain that Jobs didn’t always make the right choice among the ideas that were developed and brought to him, but once he chose an idea to develop, he became the first and last evangelist of his company’s products from creative ideas. Innovation was key to his decision-making criteria and he was also a champion critic.

Prior to any ideation session, list the requirements of the solution. Many ideas might sound good, and based on the individual’s presentation / persuasive personality, those ideas may have energy and seem like viable options. However, to lead-  to use critical thinking when dealing with new and unique ideas - keep the objective or goal at the forefront of your decision, and it can help break any deadlock to decide on which idea to pursue. If you have two great solutions or ideas, pick one and table the other for a future campaign, but most importantly, make a decisive call. I find the most frustrating aspect of ideation is the lack of decisiveness or trying to use a “Frankenstein” solution of cobbled ideas. As a leader, you need to be make tough calls to bring breakthrough ideas to life..

Great ideas don’t come pre-packaged together and there is no secret formula for creativity, but following my guidelines can give you and your team a better chance at the next BIG idea.

 

In my last article regarding ideation, I suggested that conflict, not harmony, made for better team ideation results. But before strapping up your armor to participate in a heated ideation session, there are some critical points of preparation that are needed and the first one is an ideation brief or briefing that will help kick start the team into their critical thinking.

Sun Tzu ended “The Art of War” with a chapter on intelligence and counter-intelligence, but when one is looking for a new idea that is where to start. Prepare your team with a brief of the situation including the core elements needed to create a solution to the client’s problem. There are numerous versions of briefs around the web that can provide direction to help you create an effective one. A good brief is critical to the success of the project. By defining a client’s needs clearly, the team can avoid distraction and deliver real results. Equally important is answering the why, when and how: why are they being asked to solve it, how will the ideas be used and when will the ideas be implemented. An example might be “how would you get young adults or late teens to consume more hot coffee via social media in 2012?” The team might be derailed if they argue the benefits or detriments of coffee as an appropriate beverage for teens or get too carried away by weighing factors like caffeine versus antioxidants that are relevant, but don’t address the solution. To do a good brief, you have to give the team enough understanding of objective, directing them on the task and allowing enough ambiguity for exploration. The result should be solutions based upon their collective thinking related to the customers, the culture, where the product would be consumed or purchased, economic considerations, the product itself, new uses for the product, past accepted uses and practices, past successful or failed campaigns for getting more people to drink coffee via social media and how all these factors influence each other. If you have prior research, personas or previous campaigns, the briefing is the time to make sure everyone has access to the material.

Sun Tzu’s ideas require time to implement. Creative ideas require time as well. In fact, studies have shown that our best thinking is done when we are relaxed and not directly focused on the problem and that requires time, hours, even days. So once your team is briefed, turn them loose and give them a minimum of a day to come up with their solutions. Attempting to hammer out a solution by keeping the team together is the least effective technique I know to get genuinely new solutions. When teams tackle problems together it is very easy to get into a virtual loop and follow it, just as people who are lost tend to walk in circles. With regard to relaxation, I have seen brainstorming consultants fill a room with little toys in an attempt to relax their corporate teams but the reality is they are still confined and tasked with a deadline in a room where any sense of fun or play is merely contrived. Dismiss the team and actually give them the hours to do it their own way. It is not mere coincidence that companies like Google and Nike have everything from table tennis to warm showers on their corporate campuses. So instead of focusing really hard on the problem, engaging in another activity or merely relaxing can be more productive then being together until ideas are forced.

Relaxation is the real key to productive ideation. The simple act of walking can trigger ideation. Einstein once said: “The legs are the wheels of creativity” and “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” He knew how important relaxation was to his thinking. So for your next brainstorming session, have your team go do something relaxing or engaging that is not directly focused on the task. Encourage everyone on your team to keep notes of ideas that might be forming if they can, when they can, but without rules. I recommend the use of moleskin style notebooks or even notes on the smartphone to keep track of ideas. Work in a style that is individualistic to you and you cannot go wrong.

In my last part of this blog series on creativity I will address the presentation of ideas and the techniques to using criticism and conflict to sharpen the final output of brainstorming or ideation.

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Recently I spoke at SXSW Interactive regarding presentations for right versus left brained audiences. I was asked about the ideal client and I brought up a past experience that I only recently discovered again. As anyone working in creative communicatons realizes, few logos and identity projects ever survive to maturity, just as most businesses fail in their first few years.

My ideal client at the time was Selima Salaun of Selima Optiques. I first met Selima in 1986 at the Alain Mikli Optique on 5th Avenue. I was a fan of Mikli eyeglass frame designs and owned several pairs of them. Selima was a creative spirit and a skilled designer and hat maker in Paris before opening the New York location for Mikli. We became friends as we were both fans of opera.

A few years passed and I received a call from Selima, who told me she was working on opening her own designer line of eyewear and had located a store space in Soho for her location. She had been thinking about her business name and the importance of the eye in her business, so she was calling to see if I could design a visual icon that would include both aspects for her new business: Selima Optique. I was living in Roswell at the time, so we would review over the phone and through digital files I sent. In the end, the right design came about from using a hand-drawn technique. It was distinctly different from other brands in that space at the time. Selima accepted the final comp and files, paid me and I lost touch with her over time.



Over 15 years passed, and then I rediscovered that Selima Optique was not only still in business but had expanded to Barney's, J.Crew and the Selima Optique brand was both trendy and global. Not being a celebrity or fashion follower, I never had an idea that she was doing custom designed shades for Bono, Lenny Kravitz, Michael Jackson and others. But I cannot think of a more deserving person for this success.

So what makes a great creative client relationship? The client with a passion for their brand or vision goes a long way towards good work. And they must also really have the authority or ownership of the work. I have been involved in too many failure stories where the chief marketing officer took it upon themselves without much involvement from the ultimate owner or visionary (typically a chief executive officer). The result, no matter the level of the work, was not well received and died a quick death.

Another other most importance factor in success with brand work is having the courage to trust in the team you have engaged to build the work. Success comes to those that dare go the opposite direction of the competition. It requires a lot of bravery and trust and that is not common in general, let alone in building a significant brand.  The western corporate world is littered with “curving stroke logos” that frankly all owe their inspiration to the Nike mark. The original swoosh was created by a single designer working directly with a right-brained visionary.
 

I am in the business of creative communication. Ideas. Images. Shaping together thoughts, images and communications into stuff like Web applications, brands and the visual and sensual experiences that make memories and impressions. I have been at this business for a long time but that doesn't make it any easier to find the right idea. So what have I learned about creative that keeps me at my job and serving a lot of different clients? Namely, that perspiration leads to inspiration...
 
There have been a handful of occasions when the right concept just came to me. Like the scene in "Lust for Life" where Kirk Douglas (playing Vincent van Gogh) attacks a canvas then reveals a plein air masterpiece.  But this is more movie myth than reality. If you ever read Letters to Theo, you get the other side of the story and the real struggle to come up with a style of his own. Then there was the sheer volume of work the artist actually did to get to that point of success. In other words Vincent worked his butt off.
 
Lucky for me, I knew from the history of visual art that creative breakthroughs are rarely instantaneous. Most artists lead a very workman-like existence like Picasso. He was know to be in his studio every day around 6am and spent the better part of his day at work in the studio. The result was a prolific career spanning over 13 thousand paintings and over 100,000 other handcrafted works.
 
Aside for putting the time into the work itself, one has to show up prepared to make the effort to do good creative work. You have to come in prepared and focused. I like to come in with both the schedule and my tasks up to date and the deck cleared.
 
Before I can contribute to good design and creative I have to know the background of the assignment or better yet, be part of the learning process for the objective. In my business this means some good investigative teamwork that will eventually live in a brief or document. It might be a persona study or even a video of real customers.

The point is time must be dedicated to understanding what the creative work is supposed to do in the context of experience. I have found more success when I am actually part of that process of intelligence gathering than when I am handed the discovery work. I think this is because the creative process takes time and my mind is working on the issues in the background while I am typically focused on something else.
 
Creative concepts take time. I have heard it called incubation time, described as ideation and the failure of it termed "writers' block".   I think that making new connections and insights within various sets of data requires time to process and then reform the connections and filter out the obvious and most likely ideas that would not differentiate the creative work. However we describe it, it takes time and effort and filtering to get good work. Good creative is work.
 
 

It took a little over a week to get over my SXSW experiential (and literal) hangover and to sum up my thoughts on the 2010 Austin event. One word sums up my thoughts coming out of this year's festival..."Anticipation".

Remember the Heinz TV spots of the early 1990's, with Carly Simon singing for ketchup. This year it seemed like everyone was waiting for something, but it just didn't seem to show up. Since this was the venue that Twitter and FourSquare debuted in years past, I think the majority of the attendees were "anticipating" more. Instead there was a lot more marketing of Miller Lite beer, Chevy Volt and Monster energy drink, more parties, more free beer and a whole lot more people. Over 6,200 more folks in fact, all anticipating something, some next big thing at SXSW 2010.

Anticipation was also common Twitter theme and with so many birds of a feather together, the Twitter and FourSquare servers seemed to lag during certain keynotes and party hours. FourSquare had to invent a new badge for the experience called a super swarm. This designated that over 250 users checked in to a specific location, like the Frog Design party at MACC on Sunday evening. Everyone was gathering and waiting on something to happen.

Sometimes it pays to look the other way. While most of the crowd was attending keynotes given by the founders and thought leaders of social media, some big news was breaking in some smaller sessions and workshops.

This year three key developments signaled future implications for web interface design that will change the visual future of the web. CSS 3, HTML5 and Fluid Type are what I am talking about. The ability to leverage thousands of fonts will release web design from restrictions and separate creative talent from web generalists. HTML5 will do away with the use of proprietary plug-ins for basic rich media.
 
HTML5 adds video and audio capabilities to core markup languange with the intention of reducing the need for browser plug-in-based rich internet applications (RIA). And it is being employed now. Big entities like CBS are displaying their content video while Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash are just beginning to do battle. The take-away is that open source code will have the ability to display media that the bulk of Flash and other RIA's are doing now. This spells the end for many plug-ins and the best part is HTML5 is here now and should reach W3C Recommendation by late this year.
 
CSS3 is still currently under development but many of the recommendations are working in existing browsers. The list of features continues to grow and the ability of designers to use these features to extend web design is exciting.

Consider what a designer might be able to do with just multiple backgrounds. This feature already works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Don't ask me about IE, but even IE has revealed better CSS controls are on the way.

Jason Cranford Teague might have given the most interesting presentation. I have known Jason personally for over ten years and I can testify that his vision of the future of web development has been uncanny. He was one of the very first to author a book on CSS, and in fact later served as an advisor to the CSS W3C group. Now he is an evangelist for web design and his passion is releasing the artform of typography to the web.

As any designer knows, fontography online is a shadow of what is capable in print, film and other fixed media because of browsers, usage laws and technology. But there are now alternatives to system fonts and type displayed as bitmapped images.

Jason's new book presents three approaches to using a wide variety of fonts in web design and goes into depth in his explanation of just what fontography really is. After being an interactive creative director for more than a decade, I can say with authority that most of the web has become a sea of sameness because of the lack of font variety and the ability to design with fonts.

Fluid web typography will give artists access to over 100 thousand fonts versus the less than 5 that are typically used online. So take a look at embedded open type, license font servers and web-font linking. You just might realize another wave of innovation in web design is already here.

A couple of links worth reading:

• Jason Speaking
• Font Squirrel
• Matthew David's article Inside HTML5 on O'Reilly