Jason Theodor's Creative Method and Systems Channel

This typographic poster, "A Field Guide to Typestaches", is a perfect and playful way to present the personality of individual fonts. It appeals to my inner type geek. And it reminds me of The Art of Looking Sideways , a phenomenal book by Alan Fletcher. Artfully designed and weighing in at over 1000 pages, it is less of a book and more of a fount of inspiration. You can open it anywhere for nourishment— dive in, or just splash your face. It works hard to make you think in a different way, which is exactly how creative people find unique perspectives.

Perspective is everything. Just ask an optical illusion. Every idea we have, every execution, is a perspective. It is a way of looking at something and then presenting it in a new or interesting way. A perspective must find a balance between the way the creator wishes to express things and the way the audience actually sees things. I call this Connection— it is the second Element of Creativity, also known as 'glue'. It is what connects an idea to an audience. It is what allows people to connect to your work, whether they are a niche target market, a political party, an entire culture, or your own mother.

Making lists is how I start most create projects and ideas. I write down at least ten ideas in ten minutes (or less), and then go from there. Lists are great for focusing. They let you know how much you already know. They expose your default thinking (the places you turn to again and again because they are common and safe). And they act as a foundation for organizing items into groups, so that you can see patterns and bigger pictures.

This fantastic poster by plaid-creative is, at its core, a list of different types of coffee. It was likely created so an intern doing a coffee run would know the difference between a Long Black and a Basic Black. But it does so much more than that. It shows recipes and patterns. It shows form and state (notice the blue cups for the cold coffees?), it shows ratios and ingredients.

If I asked you to come up with 10 new kinds of coffees in ten minutes, you would do much, much better with this poster in front of you because you would be able to expand on the existing patterns. Your brain could start to mix, match, and substitute instead of struggling to create something from nothing. What would you call a coffee with 4 espressos? What if the Miami Vice was chilled? What if you put whip on a Red Eye?

Sometimes you need to make a list of what already exists before you can create something new. And sometimes you just need a good shot of caffeine.

Human beings, in social situations, are all about storytelling. Campfires, water coolers, and colour printers seem to support this theory. So how many times have you been hitting your stride, telling a great story, getting to the passionate part, or about to deliver the punchline when someone's phone rings? It kills your conversation dead. Sometimes modern small talk feels more like modern art: broken and deconstructed. For all the advanced hardware and technology we carry around to facilitate communication, we're actually getting worse at the art of conversation.

I think I might buy one of these "MY PHONE IS OFF FOR YOU" stamps. It's such a wonderfully passive-aggressive way to guilt someone you care about into paying attention to you for a few minutes. Who knows, you might even get to tell a few good yarns.

A few years ago Bob Flynn created this entertaining exercise: see if you can guess who these comic characters are based solely on their silhouettes. As a cartoonist, he saw it as an important demonstration of form.

I see it as an important demonstration of Deviation. These characters are outliers. They are originals. Most characters are not this iconic, or memorable. Most comic and cartoon characters (and there are thousands of them) cannot be recognized in full colour, never mind as a silhouette.

What sets these characters apart is the fact that they have character. Pink Panther looks cool, Daffy looks cocky. Spongebob looks kooky. Taz looks crazy. They are infused with personality. They are not trying to be the same as everyone else. They have distinct and exaggerated personalities and the shape to match.

The next time you are worried about being original, about creating distinctive art, think about your own personality. Amplify it. Exaggerate it. Become a caricature. What would a cartoon version of you create? This forces you to distill your personality into an essence, and it is this essence, however distorted, that makes you an original.

So stop trying to fit in and start trying harder to stand out. These characters couldn't change themselves if they tried. And if you did change them, they wouldn't be special anymore. The same goes for you.

1. Have you copied some Javascript code for your blog? IE, do you know what it’s like to embed YouTube videos into something else, like I did with this post? If you have, you are from the future.
2. Have you written some filters on Gmail to filter your emails? Then you are from the future. (That is the single most productive thing I’ve done this year, by the way, I’ve written hundreds of filters to clean my inbox of noise which has made my email usable again).
3. Have you shared something that used to be private, like your health information, your credit card information, your drunken college photos, your baby’s birth, your sexual orientation, or something else that used to be taboo? Then you are from the future. Extra points if something like that has gotten redistributed in Techcrunch and you kept your job.
4. Have you gotten your cable upgraded or fixed just by Tweeting @comcastcares ? Then you are from the future. Extra points if your company is using tools like UserVoice, Spigit, GetSatisfaction, or Zendesk.
5. Have you started up a new Linux or Windows server from an iPad or iPhone or Android phone using a cloud service on Rackspace Cloud or other cloud hosting provider? Then you are from the future.
6. If a streaming news system like SkyGrid, My6Sense, Genieo, etc to get your news instead of looking at a news brand like the New York Times, then you are from the future.
7. If you have a Sprint 4G modem in your pocket, then you are from the future.
8. If you use a VNC app to call into your home computer from your iPhone or iPad or, even, your old-school Windows 7 netbook (I use LogMeIn on my iPad), then you are from the future.
9. If you watch TV online, then you are from the future. Extra points if you are using Boxee.
10. If you discover music on Spotify or Pandora from your Facebook friends, then you are from the future.
11. If you check in on Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, Fiddme, or use Google Latitude with your friends then you are from the future.
12. If you use Salesforce Chatter, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, Box.net, or Yammer at work with your coworkers, then you are from the future.
13. If you use Skype more than you use standard old cell phone service for your voice calls, then you are from the future.
14. If you no longer are bothered by the penises on Chatroulette, then you are from the future. Extra points if you already have come up with a way to do business on it.
15. If you sign up for conferences but only go for the lunch-time networking (I’m watching the SmashSummit on Ustream right now) then you are from the future.
16. If you read Techcrunch in at least three different places (I read it on Techcruch, TechMeme, Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz) then you are from the future.
17. If you know how Techmeme selects news, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can pick founder Gabe Rivera out of a crowd.
18. If you have deleted your Facebook account, then you are from the future. Or, if you, like me, have gotten over Mark Zuckerberg’s throwing privacy under the bus and have just marked all your accounts as totally public because that way you know you’ll never be disappointed by something leaking into public view that you weren’t expecting to, then you are also from the future.
19. If you have hosted a live video stream on Ustream, Qik, or Justin.tv then you are from the future.
20. If you can tell at least three reasons why the New York Times iPad app sucks then you are from the future (or Steve Jobs, and we all know he’s from the future). BTW: it sucks because it’s not streaming, not complete, not easy to share, not easy to participate in.
21. If you share your vehicle’s location on Waze instead of using Google Maps, then you are from the future.
22. If you have more than five Twitter lists then you are from the future. You are even more from the future if you have listed yourself on both Listorious and Tlists.
23. If you have a Google Profile that’s filled out then you are from the future. Extra points if you have more links to more things than my Google Profile has.
24. If you have augmented your Gmail with something like Gist, Rapportive, or eTacts, then you are from the future.
25. If you feel dirty when you save a file to your local file system, then you are from the future. You are even more from the future if you are using a device, like the iPad, that makes it hard to, if not impossible, to save to the local file system. Extra points if you already think DropBox is your file system and JungleDisk is your new hard drive.
26. If you know that the number of followers on @Twitter really doesn’t mean anything, then you are from the future. Extra points if you already have implemented Twitter’s @anywhere feature on your blog.
27. If you know the difference between uploading a photo to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, or Facebook, and why you would use one vs. another, then you are from the future. Extra points if you pay for an account on at least two of these services.
28. If you are having discussions with your friends about how Facebook will take away Google’s air supply then you are from the future.
29. If you are already planning to buy Xbox Natal for your Christmas gift to yourself, then you are from the future. Extra points if you are going to stand in line for new Halo Reach coming too. Master Chief is definitely from the future.
30. If you think Wordpress is old school and Tumblr or Posterous is the way to blog now, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can articulate what the difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are.
31. If you manage your conference schedule in Plancast, then you are from the future.
32. If you have hooked your Plancast up to Tungle.me which is managing your Google Calendar, then you really are from the future.
33. If someone has gotten mad at you because you take three minutes at the beginning of a meal to Foursquare, Gowalla, Fiddme, Tweet, or do something else on your iPhone or Android phone, then you are from the future.
34. If you know two things that are best on iPhone, RIM, Android, Palm, or Nokia, and two things that suck on each of those systems, then you are from the future. Extra points if you have one of each in your pocket.
35. If you manage multiple Twitter accounts, then you are from the future. Extra points if you can explain the differences between Hootsuite and CoTweet.
36. If you have a monitor that only displays Tweetdeck or Seesmic, then you are from the future. Extra points if you have an iPad that only displays social media apps.
37. If you use iPads to DJ your parties, then you are from the future.
38. If you already have Facebook like buttons on everything you build online, you are from the future. Extra points if you don’t, but can articulate why.

The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught. And yet we waste billions of dollars in time looking for them where they're not.

In the ad agency world we often pretend that we have tamed and trained Creativity. We have efficiently commoditized the magic of imagination. We have It all tied down and caged in timelines and budgets. We trot It out in meetings and force It to jump through burning hoops to great claps (or gasps). Everyone is amazed (or terrified) by It's beauty and relevance.

But where do we catch this mythical beast? Where does Creativity come from? It comes from a serendipitous collection of connections, a combination of fate and physics that touch our consciousness (or unconsciousness). It comes from looking and doing and discovering seemingly random elements. It comes from filtering the projected 'media' of the Universe through our own unique perspectives and experience. It is a distillation of our most interesting selves. It is practiced magic.

No matter how much we try to capture Creativity in our work, It originates in play. And play, by it's very nature, is undefined. Creating timelines and budgets around play is like asking how much your ideas weigh. So how do agencies do it?

Ad agencies charge admission to an improvised Circus of the Imagination: sometimes Creativity is a reduced to a tent full of opportunistic freaks, and other times it is a once-in-a-lifetime three ring circus of awe and wonder. Presentations of Creativity are always filled with suspense. You never know if someone is going to get mauled or a miracle is going to occur. Either way, it is wild and unpredictable— which is precisely why it stays interesting.