What ever happened to the big bucket of Legos?
Remember when the only Legos you could buy came in a big bucket filled with the little plastic bricks? No diagrams, no instructions, just an unwritten invitation to use your imagination and create. Now it’s all about Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Mars Mission. Sure, these perfectly choreographed components are cool, but they’re really just about following directions. Legos without diagrams encourage kids to invent something on their own. Take the instructions way and a kid has to envision a structure and then try and build it. She’s forced to take chances. She encounters failure. She starts over. And, of course, eventually she discovers what’s possible and experiences that little rush that comes from making something original. Who needs licensed Legos to teach kids conformity? We have schools to do that. Maybe it’s time to bring back the blocks.
Recently Googled, “I am not creative.”
“I’m not creative.” It’s a line I’ve heard hundreds of times. From clients, account executives, strangers on an airplane. For some reason they actually believe it’s beyond them to conceive a clever idea, write an ad, compose a story, or create a piece of art. Recently I Googled the actual quote, “I am not a creative person.” It generated thousands of results. Parents, teachers, scientists among them. The fact is we’re all creative. Or at least until about the third grade, 
when they make us surrender our crayons. From that point on parents, educators, and the rest of society teach us to conform, discourage us from being different and instead urge us to fit in. Sure some of us resist, but a lot us stop taking chances, fearing rejection or worse, failure. Of course it’s never too late to get your creativity back or help someone else jumpstart theirs. There are hundreds of ways to go about it. But here are a couple you can link to right from this page. The first is Hugh MacLeod’s How to be Creative manifesto. The second, oneword, is a simple little exercise that will get you started thinking, writing and taking chances. Which is what you used to do with those crayons, remember.
Social Networking: Discovery and Inspiration
One fascinating thing about social networking – Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, etc. – isn’t simply how it lets us connect with each other but how it lets us feed each other’s imagination. It’s never been easier to share ideas, insights, opinions and perspectives. We can open each other’s minds with everything from images, to sound bites, to content we might never find on our own. It even offers us a new way to collaborate. Use it the right way, follow the most interesting people, and you save a lot of time, stay more current, get introduced to new subjects of interest, and maybe even become a little smarter. For example I just found this. It’s a sketchbook, sent in random order between four artists, two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast. Each artist had five days to complete an image and send it off to one of the other three for a visual response. A very cool project that I discovered using Stumbleupon, and one that gives me all kinds of ideas for similar based projects that could be done entirely online, in the social networking space that turned me onto it in the first place.
Animation the good old fashioned way
I first saw this film in the early 1990′s and immediately hired Daniel Greaves, the academy award winning creator and director of Manipulation to do a series of TV commercials for my client Veryfine. The spots aren’t quite as charming as this short film, but if I can find them in the next week or two I’ll add to this post. In those days computer animation was in its infancy. This was done the old fashioned way, manually, by hand, a cell at a time.
