I am creative.
In problem solving, in troubleshooting, in work-arounds
But I am not visually creative.
Don’t get me wrong; I really want to be. It’s just not my forte. Give me a camera and I can get visually creative, but a pen and paper? Mouse and monitor? I’m visually useless when I start form scratch.
So this weekend will be a weekend to challenge myself. I’m going to hunt down some tutorials and do some things I haven’t done before. I’m going to make new ideas and follow them as far as they will take me. How else am I going to get creative? Through osmosis sitting next to the designer at work? No! Only by trying and failing can I finally succeed, or something like that.
A couple things I want to try:
- Buttons in Illustrator via Veerle’s Blog. Lovely little buttons with a characteristic cartoon shine. Like the buttons you’d pin on your backpack in high school/college. I’ll try to greate some interesting characters/vector artwork and make the buttons out of that. Heck maybe I’ll bring back the Zodiakids I made back in the day, inspired by Oh my Gods!. That’ll be a blast and a half.
- Get creative through, well…copying. I really want to give the Skype look and feel a shot. Brightly colored photographs, with “cloud cut outs” and then simple vector shapes in bright colors worked over the photograph. Not necessarily useful to copy someone else’s idea, but it’s a great jump point to try new techniques. I don’t think anyone should ever be scared to copy a technique for the sake of trying. It’s using the copy that gets sticky.
- Maybe I’ll even get in some photography this weekend. Start that tattoo series I have been thinking of doing.
- Do a re-design. For fun that is. Find a website that stinks and re-design it. Use all their existing content and re-design the entire site. I could see myself doing that on one of the terrible websites yoga studios/dance studios/tanning salons near my house have. Cause they are just that…terrible!