100 Days of Design Entrepeneurship

Kern And Burn - 100 Days of Design Entrepeneurship


"Challenging designers to follow their passions and choose their own paths. One day at a time."

"Each day, for the next 100 days we will post a bit of inspiration about design entrepreneurs and their projects. Follow along with us as we dream, discover, and get inspired by designers who find a way to turn personal passions into fulfilling careers. It’s an exciting time to be designers, and we are excited to be alive."

There is some really wonderful stuff here, it's quite short so ideal for a quick break from work to read something inspiring/interesting.

(Currently on Day 55)

Never meet your heroes...

This is nonsense. Of course you should meet your heroes. I have mentioned before my admiration for Jonathan Barnbrook, every so often we have a brief exchange on Twitter, and each time I learn something.

Previously it has been about copywriting digital work (a company he sold fonts through offered refunds...on digital items that had already been downloaded) and more recently the software he uses, I also asked Erik Spiekerman. Both replied with pretty much the same software that hopefully I shall be using for my project.

These exchanges are only brief with the 140 characters Twitter offers but, thats all you really need.

I have also had the pleasure of talking to David Pearson, Tim Quinn, Curtis Jobling and Kim Hiorthoy, all were incredibly inspirational.

Always meet and Tweet your heroes.

Keep me busy!

The other week we did a fantastic exercise to spark our creativity. We were given a short amount of time to generate as many ideas as possible around a given theme such as "Anti Royalist souvenirs for the Diamond Jubilee" and "uses for old tin cans".

The main aim for this exercise was not necessarily to produce good ideas, simply to loosen the ability to generate them. Below are some of the ideas generated and their topics.

Alternative uses for tin cans

Alternative souvenirs for anti Royalists

 

I found this exercise extremely useful, I all to often get caught up in wondering if an idea is good enough rather than getting on with having ideas.

I think it is important just to keep doing stuff, there are times when work can dry up slightly and motivation can be lost. I find keeping momentum when there is less work a real struggle. I have decided to start an ongoing project/exercise that I can do to maintain this momentum and keep the flow of ideas.

There is a wonderful project by Johnny Selman www.bbcx365.com where he is interpreting news events as posters for a year, aiming to make the American public more aware of world events.

I would like to do a similar project, taking headlines and generating ideas from them. No set rules of how I can interpret them, the aim would not be to build up pieces of work, simply to generate ideas like the exercise I have mentioned. Some of these ideas or articles may then lead onto other thing as a way of exercising my creativity and ideas generation.

I am a really big fan of A List Apart. There are some brilliant articles on there that, although mostly on web design can be applicable to most creative practices. Two articles that really stand out, in terms of these exercises are, "Staying Motivated" and "Reigniting Your Creative Spark".