Creative Bones
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About this ebook
Creative Bones is a "how-to" book with the single-minded purpose of knocking the creative process off its mystical reserved-for-people-with-more-talent-in-their-pinky-fingers-than-the-rest-of-us-have-in-our-entire-bodies perch and making it accessible to anyone with half a mind to pursue better answers to pretty much every question out there. It's a book for people who make their living in a creative field but don't have a clue how they do what they do and could clearly benefit from having a little bit of that knowledge. It's for people who are always being told how creative they are and would love to take their talent to the next level. And it's for people who have no desire to create anything more elaborate than breakfast, but who live in a world where they are constantly being asked to think outside the box and would really like to know how to do that besides "working harder." Creative Bones is not another one of those books that tells stories about how other people came up with their big ideas that all end with "and then the answer came to him/her from out of nowhere." It's actual how-you-do-it, it-works-like-this information that anybody can understand and use. It's also occasionally funny.
Guy Bommarito
Guy Bommarito is a freelance writer, creative director and speaker. He has led creative departments in major advertising agencies from Chicago to San Francisco. However, he is probably best known for his tenure at GSD&M in Austin, Texas, where, as executive creative director, he took the agency to its first honors in the ANDY Awards, Cannes Lions, Communication Arts Advertising Annual, D&AD, the Art Directors Club of New York, the One Show and the Radio Mercury Awards. While there, Guy was named to Adweek magazine's Creative All-Star teams twice, including once as most valuable player, and Graphis magazine named GSD&M one of the ten most creative agencies in the world. In addition, he's taught advertising creativity and campaigns courses at the University of Texas and the Chicago Portfolio School. One of a select group of professionals invited to judge Communication Arts magazine's prestigious advertising annual twice, he lives with one beautiful wife and three amazing daughters in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Book preview
Creative Bones - Guy Bommarito
Introduction
An advertising agency I worked for moved to new offices not long after I joined them. As might be expected, one of our first tasks was determining what to put on the walls. Along with the usual suspects — corporate graphics, work samples, awards — was the thought to take one wall and do something fun with it.
One suggestion everybody seemed to like was the idea of producing a series of custom-designed skateboard decks. The boards could be hung in two rows of ten down the main hallway, providing an entertaining counterpoint to the company signage and client logos in the lobby.
To broaden ownership of the project, everyone in the agency was invited to come up with ideas for designs.
A few weeks into the project, I ran into one of our IT guys in the elevator. He asked how submissions were coming. I happily responded that everyone from the creative department to accounting appeared to be contributing to the cause. Then, he said something that hit me as if I was hearing it for the first time, even though I’d heard it a thousand times before. I’d love to participate,
he said, but I don’t have a creative bone in my body.
This time, for some reason, the statement stuck in my gut.
Here’s the deal. Some people tap into creativity effortlessly. Others, don’t. Yet, everyone can create to some level. The problem is, creativity comes with a mystique that leaves most people with the mistaken impression that only a chosen few have the gift
for it.
Worse, people not only perceive creativity as something beyond their pay scales, they go about their lives literally avoiding, negating and discounting creative thinking, all for the very best of reasons — reason
being chief among them.
So to get things started, tattoo this on your favorite body part:
Creativity has less to do with who you are than what you do.
Creative thinking is simply a way of looking at things, a way of solving problems, a way of coming up with thoughts that never occurs to (or is outright rejected by) most people because it’s too silly, irrational or counterintuitive.
To further complicate matters, common definitions that rely on words like imagination
and originality
for illumination do little to clarify. Perhaps a better way to understand creativity is to think of it like this:
Creativity is nonsense that leads to a breakthrough.
Completely illogical. Frustratingly capricious. Contrary to common sense. Creativity, unlike most subjects, defies rational comprehension. As a result, it has proven uncharacteristically challenging for everyone from academics to artists to decipher in a meaningful way. (While creativity has been painstakingly analyzed, documented and discussed, right down to which hemisphere of the brain does what, few studies provide a useful guide to actually creating anything.)
It takes me back to something I learned when I was teaching a course on creativity at the University of Texas. Academia is exceptionally good at taking things apart, identifying every molecule and drawing conclusions. However, dissection and analysis are, at best, starting points to new and fresh — which explains why the talent for breaking down a poem or a novel isn’t routinely reverse-engineered into acclaimed poetry and