There is a time and place for the purposeful noisiness of busy. The work surrounding a group of people building an impressive thing contains essential and unavoidable busy and you will be rewarded for consistently performing this work well. This positive feedback can feed the erroneous assumption, “Well, the more busy I am, the more rewards forthcoming.” This is compounded by the insidious fact that part of being busy is you aren’t actually aware that you’re busy because you’re too busy being busy. You have no internal measurement of the amount of time you’ve actually spent being busy.

In my precious hour, I am aware that it is quiet. During this silence, maybe nothing at all is built other than the room I’ve given myself to think. I break the flow of enticing small things to do, I separate myself from the bright people on similarly impressive busy quests, and I listen to what I’m thinking.

Every day, for an hour, no matter what.

Have you ever wanted to pick up a video camera and make a short video or film, but felt intimidated by your lack of knowledge? The explosion of film-making for websites and mobiles gives people and organisations the opportunity to tell their stories and show what they have to offer, at low cost. This collection of exciting videos features The Open University’s experienced team of filmmakers, who will show you some of the craft secrets that underpin good filmmaking, and how professionals stay up to date. You will learn the basics of editing, how to conduct an interview, the role of the producer and other crew members and how to archive your finished project. This material forms part of The Open University course T156 Digital film school.

"If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like & cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
From where I sit creating things does the following:

Let’s you filter to something you like…Frees you…Makes you happy…Plays to strengths not weaknesses…

I can’t say it better than _why [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff ]: "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

…

If you quiet your mind & allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen…with your hobbies…your thoughts) than you thought before. You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts. You deserve better."

Make deadlines, do the work, and work hard to get better with each new project. Make something you love to make, and make it for the audience, not for you. Find the money once you’ve got an audience who cares.

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it— playing it down.

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

WODEHOUSE

I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “Which are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

From time to time, I (not very earnestly) entertain the idea of releasing a book of "rules for writers" that would be deliberately terrible from start to finish, in order to nip the careers of aspiring rivals in the bud. My advice would be designed to exacerbate perfectionism, insisting on absolute silence, the perfect desk chair and specific brands of high-end stationery; it would urge people to wait for the Muse, and to compare their work, in detail, to those of the authors they most admire. Finally, in a Simon Heffer-ish touch, it would pompously assert the absolute unacceptability of certain grammatical forms, even though they're used by everyone from Shakespeare to Ian McEwan.

At a project’s start, the possibilities are endless. That clean slate is both lovely and terrifying. As designers, we begin by filling space with temporary messes and uncertain experiments. We make a thousand tiny decisions quickly, trying to shape a message that will resonate with our audience. Then in the middle of a flow, we must stop and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This typical halt in the creative process begs the question: What does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use this feedback to improve our creative output?

60 years of interviews with noted writers.

Pixar’s secret? Its unusual creative process. Most of the time, a studio assembles a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and cuts them loose when the picture is done. At Pixar, a staff of writers, directors, animators, and technicians move from project to project. As a result, the studio has built a team of moviemakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets.

This last one was the 100th episode of the show, and it went through some pretty serious revisions from pitch to final draft. This is a transcription of a conversation about that specific episode, edited for length and clarity. Also included are the original Story Pitch, Final Outline and First Draft from the writing process (which you can find explained in detail here).

As odd as it sounds, “edgy” these days seems to mean creating characters for kids that are unabashedly smart. Phineas and Ferb put their energy into building things—a lot of highly imaginative and complicated projects, actually—like their own backyard beach or a teleportation device that sends people to Mars. Phineas and Ferb’s world is wild and inventive, more like a Boing Boing post than a Saturday morning cartoon. In other words, they’re geeks. They just don’t know the word for it yet.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? On one level, these are obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful, and it's natural to try to understand it. On another level, looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history.

Ideas are most powerful when they’re wrapped in a compelling story. Leonard’s main point—economies can hardly be “planned” when not one soul possesses all the know-how and skills to produce a simple pencil—unfolds in the enchanting words of a pencil itself. Leonard could have written “I, Car” or “I, Airplane,” but choosing those more complex items would have muted the message. No one person—repeat, no one, no matter how smartor how many degrees follow his name—could create from scratch a small, everyday pencil, let alone a car or an airplane.

I needed to make illustrations for all of our apps for the new 37signals Suite page. The goal was to give a general idea of what the particular app does for customers that may be unfamiliar with our products. The illustration didn’t need to carry all of the weight since there would be a text description alongside it. However, it had to be attractive and detailed enough for people just scanning the page with their eyes.

In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing idea but how you execute the idea will determine your success.

In a communication addressed to parents, (“Have you heard the great news? Your child has decided to write a novel….”) The Office of Light and Letters, the non-profit that runs the event, offered practical advice for the care of the young artist, who will be in friendly competition with students ages five to seventeen from twenty-eight countries around the world, including a cohort of diminutive scribblers from Kazhakstan. (Prose coming from all quarters – stand back!) The note closed with a run-down of the essentials, explaining that while the adult contenders must grind out 50,000 words to be declared “winners,” the children may choose the length of their work. All any of them have to do is finish.

Paul Rand (1914-1996) was a pioneering figure in American graphic design whose career spanned almost seven decades. Always enquiring and investigating, he explored the formal vocabulary of European avant-garde art movements and synthesised them to produce a distinctive graphic language. Rand was a major force in editorial design, advertising and corporate identity. He worked at the Weintraub Advertising Agency from 1941-1954 and, in 1955, established his own design studio, acting as consultant to companies such as IBM, Westinghouse and UPS. His logos for these companies are world-renowned design classics. This book comprises a definitive collection of Rand's works, through an exploration of his advertising, publishing and corporate identity work. Steven Heller's text, with a foreword by designer Armin Hofmann, introduction by advertising guru George Lois, and a concluding essay by designer and writer Jessica Helfand, offer an insight into Paul Rand's work.

I’m feeling somewhat vindicated by the NYT opinion piece “End the University as We Know It” — a call for restructuring the old, creeky ways of the graduate university. The trajectory from graduate school to teaching positions is serpentine, at best. Specialization creates smaller and smaller communities of practice who talk to all seven or twenty or fifty of the other specialists. Ways of knowing become increasingly limited, confined to these small communites. Interdisciplinarity — worthwhile in spirit, certainly — often means getting some disciplines together in a room, rather than transcending the notion of the discipline all together, something that would allow more focus on problems from the top down, rather than as sub-problems of, say, economics or history or whatever.

These qualities – the ones that make for a fulfilling career – can be distilled down into 4 main categories, or “pillars,” as I like to call them. They are: Meaning, Atmosphere, Passion, and Skills – aka M.A.P.S., a career compass to help point you in the right direction.

Just as an IQ test tracks intelligence, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking measures your CQ: how well you think creatively. Usually a 90-minute series of discrete tasks administered by a psychologist, the Torrance Test is not a perfect measure of creativity. But it has proven remarkably accurate in predicting creative accomplishments. We asked a group of ordinary children and adults to try their hands at several drawing tests: everyone was presented with incomplete line drawings and was given five minutes to turn them into pictures. We then sent a selection of the results to two well-known creativity scholars.

I wrote some words and borrowed some pictures about my time at #dConstruct: http://tumblr.com/xrihmo3p8

Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:

ne of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

Psychologist Anders Ericsson and other researchers in the field of ‘expertise studies’ have, in recent years, introduced a plethora of new information about how people develop advanced skills that is beginning to change our view of human potential and its limits. This is an opportunity to move the public conversation beyond clichés such as innate talent, giftedness and nature versus nurture, instead moving towards a more nuanced discussion of how human skills actually develop, ultimately helping people to maximise their potential.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

RT @GrantaMag: Writers' daily routines! Can't wait for the book http://bit.ly/bn05hY

A contradictory set of truths about books and publishing in the abstract: don’t repeat yourself, and don’t write books that are too different from one another. Other writers will pillory you for the first, and publishers will be more than happy to pigeonhole you from the moment you achieve anything like success. Blow out your advance? Great. Now write the same exact book again.

The less people are required to learn programming in order to be creative with computers, the more creative work you get. http://j.mp/csBNoP
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/19291759796

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

RT @nicoleslaw: Writing is design. Copy is interface. http://bit.ly/cr5jw3

Nice interview by @3rdmartini with the superb @lonelysandwich on creative failure: http://bit.ly/a6gXLM

This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth

"Robin ruminates on applying the economic concepts of stock and flow to the media we produce. In short, flow is the low-impact fluff that reminds people you exist. Stock is the valuable, durable content you produce that conceivably has a long shelf-life."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

How dreaming helps us examine the hidden connections and similarities between our daily experiences.

"When I worked as a corporate training consultant I was in charge of innovation training for many years. Despite the widespread interest in the topic it rarely got any real traction at the company I worked. In other words, while most of the executives of the company mention the term “innovation” in their public pronouncements and speeches, when they’d speak in private it had very little meaning to them. They supported innovation the same way Americans are raised to support “mom, apple pie and baseball.” They are good concepts but they have very “fuzzy” boundaries. It is hard to “get your mind around” any of them with regards to WHY they are important."

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential."

"In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."