creative support

Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.

Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, /www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf via northtemple

Content & Technology - Pixar gets it

I’ve always been interested in technology. I got fascinated by it, really, because I didn’t want to become a dinosaur. Then I realized that technology and content creation were the same business. When you ask for a business plan, you ask for a script. One in 10 will succeed there, one in 10 will succeed here. We as creative people have a fear of physics and math. Technological people have a fear of, well, we can’t write poetry, we cannot write a script. They have a fear of content. But they have to join hands.

The one company that understands this is one of the most successful animation companies in the world, Pixar. Pixar completely understood that when you write your software hand-in-hand with the creative people writing the story, you are creating a revolutionary company. The new (entertainment) companies will not be film studios, they will be technology companies. Google, as an aggregator, is already going into content creation. Apple is, Microsoft will have to be one. Cisco — fundamentally a plumbing company — will get into new media. I have a fund in new media in which Cisco is an investor.

Shekhar Kapur (Hollywood and Bollywood director) as quoted by John Murrell, Good Morning Silicon Valley, 26 Nov 2008, blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/11/quoted-933.html

Full Article: John Boudreau, "Famed Indian film director keeps a foot in Silicon Valley," SiliconValley.com, 26 Nov 2008, www.siliconvalley.com/ci_11075690

Put back

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Aljean Harmetz, "Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies," NYTimes.com, 27 Sep 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/movies/28newman.html.

Learning for the joy of being edified

One of the giant steps in maturing and acquiring knowledge and experience is when we learn for the joy of being edified rather than for the pleasure of being entertained.

Robert D. Hales, "The Journey of Lifelong Learning," BYU Education Week Devotional, 19 Aug 2008, speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1788.

Don't stick too closely to your plans

Everyone knows that innovation is risky, and it’s rare that you arrive at your expected destination. But maybe that destination isn’t so important. Maybe what you should be paying attention to are the little detours you take along the way: It’s down those back roads and byways that the real payoff usually is found. Maybe, in fact, the biggest risk in innovation lies in sticking too closely to your plans.

Danny Hillis, "Stumbling into Brilliance," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?value=BR0208&ml_subscriber=true&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0208&articleID=R0208L&pageNumber=1.

Nothing happens without a clear goal

But the key thing was to be clear about where we were headed. I’ve certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don’t have a clear goal.

Ed Catmull interviewed by Gardiner Morse, "Innovation, Inc. (Pixar)," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=F0208C&ml_action=get-article.

logos

The odd saga of Microsoft’s nascent $300 million rebranding campaign brings to mind this nugget of genius from Paul Rand:

“A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like.”

This holds true not just for logo marks specifically, but also in the broader, more abstract sense of brands in general. No brand is better or stronger than the products and experiences it represents. A good brand is strong because it is true, not because it is clever.

John Gruber, "There's Nothing There," Daring Fireball, 18 Sep 2008, daringfireball.net/2008/09/theres_nothing_there.

Evolutionary design is healthier

Stop defying time and put time to work. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design.

Stewart Brand, Part 1 - Flow, How Buildings Learn, BBC series, 1997, www.truefilms.com/archives/2008/08/how_buildings_l.php (quote is at 22:52).
I learned that the series was available on line via Adaptive Path. How Buildings Learn is a great book.

Simplicity

When it comes to user interface, Firefox and Safari have both struggled to balance the desire for new features with the simplicity that contributed to their early success. As the version numbers increase, this kind of pressure is inevitable. What's the best defense against this sort of thing?

Google Chrome makes the argument that Safari and Firefox did not go far enough in their subtractive design approach....

Google's approach with Chrome is different. Rather than removing features from existing web browsers, Google has taken its brightly colored forearm and swept the table absolutely clean. Forget about menu separators; why even have a bookmarks menu? Hell, why have a menu bar at all? Start with nothing. Assume nothing. Add features only as needed, and only in service of a well-defined design concept.

John Siracusa, "Straight out of Compton," Arstechnica, 2 Sep 2008, arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/09/02/straight-out-of-compton via Rich Goade.

enthusiasm & pulling the plug (at Pixar)

One strategic direction after another -- many of which seemed unlikely at the time -- was embraced with vigor and intensity by Jobs, and his ability to at least briefly convince others that it was right and certain to work (using his famous reality distortion field) is interesting and impressive. But in many ways, I am more impressed with Jobs' ability to quickly drop an old strategy when there was good evidence it was failing, and then turn to the next one with equal enthusiasm.

This may sound sort of crazy, but I also think it is how skilled strategists act when what they are doing carries a huge risk. You need to build enthusiasm about what you are hoping to accomplish, as energy and the self-fulfilling prophecy increase the chances that a risky idea will succeed. But you also need to be equally skilled at pulling the plug when your current tactic is failing

Bob Sutton, "The Pixar Touch: A Great Book by David Price," Work Matters Blog, 1 Sep 2008, bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/09/the-pixar-touch-a-great-book-by-david-price.html via Lynn Monson.