Guest Post: Lexie Kier // @a0k

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via here

Guest Post: Amir Al-Qadaffi // @iamamirhasan

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Being a better Tour Manager inspires me. After my initial round of touring in 2009 where I was thrown to the wolves and generally had a rough go of things (which I am shockingly grateful for), touring for me has been pretty easy. I did the biggest tours of my life in that year, arena tours with some of the biggest rock acts today, Korn, Mudvayne, Black Label Society. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but these acts are all undeniably huge. 

 After that first year, things got easy. I think too easy almost. I went out with a couple of bands that really appreciated and embraced me. The tours were generally pretty easy, and working them was a cinch. Recently I had a not so great experience. I wasn't treated badly, I made great money, I was on a tour bus but there is more to having a positive experience than that. I learned that I value feeling like part of a team, clear communication, and assertive leadership are more important than making more than the next guys will pay, or traveling in the cushy tour bus.

Guest Post: Adam Pierno // @apierno

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Process.

Professional creativity is the result of careful routine. When I speak about "process" with people inside agencies, I refer to the notion that you cannot sit down with a musical instrument and just decide to play free-form jazz. Well. Musicians are trained in the basics, run through the rudiments day after day, rehearse the core components until they understand the texture of the music so well that they can react subconsciously to the other players. This is also how a short-stop can somehow turn an unassisted triple play. Not because he practices that rare play every day. He has never practiced that play. That would be a ridiculous exercise. But it is because he has practiced fielding infield hits thousands of times and his brain is emancipated from thinking about those motions. Those motions are the part of the job we refer to as work.

When you first work with a creative person, you sit down to brief them and immediately they quietly launch into their process. It's rarely discussed in detail. But you can see that every person has developed their own set of rudiments that allow them to build the foundation on which they will surely build their improvisational thinking. I recently met an experience Account Executive who was walking me through a new project she was developing. She opened her notebook and revealed a system of notes that astonished me. Two colors of ink, check boxes, and layer of stick notes. Footnotes to explain to herself what her asterisks, double asterisks and daggers meant. She was explaining a surprise turn the project had taken. And my favorite thing about this exchange was - she never looked at the notes. It was recorded in her process and she was then free to field the shallow pop-up and turn two.

The process is not the white board. It's not the laptop. It's not the concept squares. It's not paradiddles or taking all those ground balls. But those things are the costume of process. Process is how we work our way through the millions of small decisions to get to the few good ones we need to make to create great solutions.

I rarely ask people directly about their process. The details of it. Maybe it's too personal, Or because I don't think they'll actually be able to readily answer. I've been asking people recently, and the latter is proving true. Usually, the first response is "What do you mean?" They claim to not have an organized process. But as I press, they begin recognizing and laying out the steps, however loosely they may be constructed. I've been trying to get to the root of it by pushing them on which components they couldn't subtract from it. Which are the necessary steps.

I'm inspired by the process each person builds for themselves, and the ability it gives them to pull ideas apparently out the air. And the process they go through to double and triple check those ideas and then build on those ideas they deem best. Because the process is the work. A comedian gets on stage and tells a story with four or five punchlines in it over 90 seconds. It's effortless. The story is true or near-true. But the writing, evaluation, editing, and rehearsing of those beats is a process that can take months or years. It's not instant, but the process makes it feel that it is.

As we see more and more integrated ideas come out of agencies, what is setting apart the best of them is that the idea itself feels organic and perfectly executed in each of the media or platforms in which it's being shared. The idea itself can be detached from the execution and effortlessly plunked into the next and still work. But we know the actual effort involved in developing ideas with no anchors..The process behind that is being developed as I type. The basics of it are being pulled in from dozens of other sources and augmented. And we're already seeing people figuring out how to turn those triple plays. 

Image via Christian Rathemacher

Guest Post: Anne Aretz // @aaretz

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…the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

– Steve Jobs, 2005

This is my favorite quote from Steve Jobs; it has always stuck with me and I still have the copy that I printed, cut out and stuck in every journal/sketchbook I’ve had since. As I got older though, every time I looked at the rumpled, coffee-stained and slightly doodled on piece of paper, I thought of my brother Alex.

Alex did everything on his own terms, all in the pursuit of what he loved to do. He went from college to boat captain, to waiter, to bike messenger and a few places in between before starting Taza Chocolate. As a man with a degree in Anthropology from Vassar, the path to a chocolate maker was not exactly a straight one, but he just followed what he loved and eventually landed on his passion. As I get older and become closer to my brother, I appreciate more and more his life philosophy, learn from it and am inspired to bring that into my life everyday.

Jobs’ last line, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life” pretty much epitomizes Alex and what he has always told me when I panic about meeting expectations and not disappointing people (we all have those moments). He always told me to live my own life and do what makes me happy, but my generation (apparently I’m an ‘Older Millennial’) heard those words a lot, but Alex said those words and lived them, which is just plain brave.

Starting at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in 2006, Cameroon-born artist Bili Bidjocka and Lausanne-born curator Simon Njami have been traversing the world inviting creatives of varied professional backgrounds to write on the blank pages of eight enormous books “as if it were their the last opportunity to hand write something.” Their project, called Ecriture Infinie, emphasizes the gestures of writing and the flow of pen on paper rather than actual content.

The project is a celebration of handwriting, and a call to attention around the 3,500-year-old practice that is rapidly fading from our daily lives. Each statement is filmed as it is entered, serving as a reflection on the process of writing and a documentation of the varying writing styles at this point in time.

Guest Post: John Kochmanski // @JohnKochmanski

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I know what you're thinking - how can a dock inspire anyone? Short answer is, it won't, but if you hang with me for a bit you'll understand why it inspires me.

Our dock was the place where, as small children, we tossed fear aside and jumped into what was unknown to us as our parents applauded. It was the place we stood with our first fishing pole hoping to catch our first fish. It was the place we talked with friends and family. It was the place where we would lay on our backs staring at the sky.

The dock was the place for many "firsts." Each person in my family has experienced something for the first time on the dock.

So why does the dock inspire me?

It's a place to let go of your fears and just be in the moment. A place to let your imagination take you to places you don't even understand. A place where you can slow down and experience a "first."

There are eight types of food that account for around 90% of allergic reactions: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat.

The Food Allergen Detector is the result of the course, Brand identity and strategic design in collaboration with Philips healthcare products, at Umeå Institute of Design, 2009.

Design: Erik Borg