My studio is across the street from Creative Woodworking and they have a box where they put scrap wood for anyone who wants it and it's irresistible to me and there were a bunch of oddly shaped things with multiple sides so I painted on them realizing that different themes could coexist depending on which side and that led to adding sculptural elements and words and basically opened a new horizon for me.
"When I'm writing fiction, I tend not to read fiction. I actually don't want other people's voices to sneak into my head," Rushdie said recently. That's not to say that other writers' books aren't an important part of his process-posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of works that have offered guidance for his own writing, including a novella that appears in " The Eleventh Hour," his latest book,
"All that is is people just being like, 'No, actually you're wrong about that; no, actually there's something you haven't perceived in that actually; no, you're actually stupid,'" he says. "It's like, 'My God, guys, it's a YouTube short of a man doing a backflip.'"
The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles' 1960 recording of " Georgia on My Mind"? Last year's A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold's well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
Yet for many designers, product marketers, and creative professionals, that fun often turns into frustration when ideas are not organized. Designers think in wireframes, marketers think in messaging, and product managers think in roadmaps. This slows progress and leaves projects feeling incomplete. Notion mood board templates make it easier for cross-functional teams to align and move from inspiration to execution. Here are the best Notion templates to turn your creative vision into concrete outcomes.
I was still learning about songwriting and by the time I got to Something/Anything? [1972, featuring I Saw the Light] I was slipping into formula verse, chorus, bridge and so on, always about the girl or boy who broke your heart. I moved my hands about the keyboard and 20 minutes later that song was done. It's partly why I went completely off the grid for my next album, A Wizard, a True Star [1973]
You know you've got a great idea when it could double as an unforgettable headline. My team has long applied this "headline test" to make sure concepts stand strong on their own. The question is simple: Can you distill your creative notions into a compelling five-to-seven-word headline? If yes, you've got something that not only resonates but sticks. Traditionally, this was an internal exercise.
Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a modern-day romance that wasn't necessarily romantic, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart class, race, nationality, family history as those that bind us.
I've been a passionate creator of monsters and otherworldly beings since I was old enough to pick up a crayon. While I'm a mild-mannered graphic designer by day, I explore the worlds of darker creatures by night. For many years, I thought my art had to look like everyone else's to be successful. I started by colouring at Image Comics in the 1990s and went almost exclusively into comic-based digital work for many years after.
Blame George Orwell, who in 1946 famously published "Why I Write," an essay contending with the motives of "political purpose" and "aesthetic enthusiasm," which fueled his career, even while noting that the decision to put pen to paper is in some ways inexplicable. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," Orwell wrote.
Randy Douthit has found a way to transform professional challenges into sources of creative energy rather than depletion. His work delivers unexpected rewards.
One of the best use cases that creatives have found for AI is getting over the fear of the blank page (or empty InDesign file). Sometimes you just need a few suggestions to get the creative engine running.
Jack Sachs transformed a hand injury into an opportunity to pivot from traditional illustration to a notable career in graphic design and CGI, including collaborations with prestigious clients.
Field Notes' one-day-only film festival celebrates the intentionality behind their quarterly notebooks, showcasing short films that reflect their ethos of creativity and tangible tools.
