The secret to infinite creative productivity

From Medium:

In this post I will show you how you can increase your productivity 10x and get to better results faster in any creative discipline. We’ll uncover the essence of perseverance and the iterative process in the realm of design and creative problem-solving.

We are all grownups here: We know the secret to success in the creative industry does not rely on the genius, or the talented, or even the…well genius. The secret is really that the ones that want to solve the design problem the most, and by want, I mean, REALLY want the thing, they will solve it. At any cost.

The Importance of Persistence in Design

When facing a creative problem, the designer that manages to create more value per output, is the one that will get closer to success. Design is a process of discovery, you will start doing something, and it will not match what you have in your head, so you need to iterate over and over until you start discovering that little seed, that little thread that you need to pull until you figure out what that thread is.

It is in the repetition, in the exploration and in the discovery that you will find what tool, technique or driving force actually starts to multiply the output. That is for example, the essence of style.

The Significance of Style

Style is a set of choices and decisions that are repeated over and over forming a pattern that is recognizable and over time, it starts to mature its coherence.

The Dual Approach to Problem-Solving

The formula is on one side understanding the problem and on the other side trying to brute force a solution, eventually you will manage to marry both. The more experienced a designer you are -more library, more tools, more skills- the faster you will transform overclocking your brain and trying to bash through a problem, but everything starts on those two energy demanding edges.

Application of Principles Across Creative Disciplines

Here is the thing, that principle can be applied from developing a custom set of brushes, to drawing circles in order to learn how to draw basic shapes and also if you want to learn anatomy in order to complement the foundations, and you manage to repeat this every day until it becomes second nature, then you will start finding solutions faster.

This happens also when you are trying to solve hyper complex design problems, in real time for example, working on a landscape or an environment, you need to understand your foliage brushes, distances, landscape design, scale, composition, etc. Then in order to get to a perfect frame, you need to go through hundreds of iterations.

In concept art, usually before starting drawing, people do thumbnails, and they do sheets of dozens of them until they find that seed of what they are looking for.

Same applies to character design, character designers go through many iterations until they find the right curves, the right colors, the right expressions, etc.

With photography its the same thing.

The Art of Discarding

Bear with me with this one… In philosophy, via negativa is used to explore the nature of existence and reality. It emphasizes the limitations of human language and understanding when it comes to describing complex or abstract concepts. By focusing on what something lacks or what it is not, philosophers aim to clarify the boundaries of what can be known or defined.

We judge design, by what its not, and so, we try to define what it is, since designing is bringing something useful into this world (serving a commercial purpose then digital design has intrinsic value), we poke, challenge and stress test design and see where it fails.

Some designers value their work too much. They believe that their output is something that comes from the gods, and treat their work. But its the other way around, you can create divine work only if your decisions translate to an end result that solves the design problem.

Link to the rest at Medium

PG isn’t certain whether the OP will be of benefit to authors, but he thought “infinite creativity” was a good hook in the title.

Converging Lenses: Issues in Contemporary Photography

From The Jewish Museum:

On the evening of April 23, a diverse crowd gathered in the Jewish Museum’s Scheuer Auditorium for the much-anticipated panel discussion Converging Lenses: Issues in Contemporary Photography. The event sought to dissect the concerns of contemporary photographers working today — in an era characterized by an obsession with consuming and disseminating images on the internet and through social media. This panel was the latest in a series of medium-specific conversations held at the Museum, this one in conjunction with the exhibition Laurie Simmons: How We See. Writer, artist, and moderator of the panel, Chris Wiley initiated the discussion with his diagnosis of 21st-century visual culture, claiming there was a “crisis in photography precipitated by the rise of the image environment produced on the internet.” Barbara Kasten, Lucas Blalock, and Talia Chetrit joined Wiley in giving a brief overview of their own work before discussing more generally the impact of technology and the “image environment” on the state of contemporary photography and fine art.

While each of the panelists was invited for his or her own unique approach or perspective on photography, all of them shared a renewed interest in using artistic interventions to create photographic subjectivity. Barbara Kasten, an early figure of the post-pictures generation, discussed her most recent series entitled Transpositions. In these photographs, rectilinear pieces of Plexiglas are arranged to create abstract geometrical compositions. Kasten uses the photographic process specifically to highlight the materiality of objects and the illusions created by the camera when light is translated through the Plexiglas. Although her images have an alluring formalist quality, Kasten states that the subject of her work is that of what is performed in front of the lens. Rather than move the camera around a finished composition, Kasten shuffles the Plexiglas panes around the camera, using the viewfinder to guide her.

Shifting the focus to more recent applications of photography, the other three panelists represented the current vanguard of contemporary photographers who demonstrated other ways in which artistic interventions were used as a photographic practice. Lucas Blalock described the process of transforming his photographs into “drawings” with Photoshop. His compositions often compromise verisimilitude in very obvious and clever ways. Blalock spoke in favor of digital tools and platforms, claiming that they were instrumental in shaping his approach to the medium.

Talia Chetrit, on the other hand, presented a body of work that juxtaposed photographs taken in the artist’s teenage years with newer work inspired by anecdotes from her biography and personal life. These “intimate moments” are characterized by simple compositions that deny any narrative insight, thus prompting the viewer to examine the “poetic sensibilities” of the image itself.

. . . .

Despite the initial sense of anxiety surrounding the discussion of photography in the internet age, the panel was able to expose how such conditions prompted contemporary photographers to re-examine the parameters of the medium. By incorporating their own artistic interventions into their practice, it seems that these artists, and many of their peers, are expanding the definition of “photography,” which is of particular importance now as the medium becomes a predominantly virtual, non-physical art.

Link to the rest at The Jewish Museum