Self-Photoshopping Models

The Life of a Typographer

The Life of a Freelancer

The Life of a Documentarian

The Life of an Audio Engineer

A. A. Milne:
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

Abraham Maslow:
The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

Alan Alda:
The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.

Albert Einstein:
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Albert Einstein:
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

Albert Einstein:
Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein:
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Arthur Koestler:
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Beatrix Potter:
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Buckminster Fuller:
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Buckminster Fuller:
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Carl Sagan:
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Carl Sagan:
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Edward de Bono:
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edwin Land:
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Erich Fromm:
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm:
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:
Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Henry David Thoreau:
The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

Lillian Hellman:
Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it’s a stinking way to create.

Linus Pauling:
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling:
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Margaret J. Wheatley:
The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances — are the primary sources of creativity.

Marie Antoinette:
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

Martin Luther King Jr.:
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Monica Baldwin:
The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn’t, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.

Niels Bohr:
Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

Nietzsche:
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

Oscar Levant:
There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Pablo Picasso:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Peter Senge:
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works … images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models — surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works — promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .

Ray Bradbury:
Life is “trying things to see if they work.”

Rene Descartes:
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

Rita Mae Brown:
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Robert C. Fuller :
Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is “spiritual” when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life.

Rollo May:
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Saul Steinberg:
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Sharon Welch:
Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges … [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Theodore Adorno:
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Unknown:
[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

V. S. Naipaul:
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

Victor Hugo:
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Virginia Woolf:
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Virginia Woolf:
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

Will Rogers:
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

William Golding:
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

William James:
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

This was a good read… eh?

So, here are a few things, tips/trick or attributes/qualities, that a designer must have to succeed, things that we usually overlook:

1. Be an adventurer, keep on exploring things and continually experiment. If you are truly passionate about something then by default you’ll be curious about it.
2. Imagination is vital, almost like oxygen. How else can you bring value to the design you make? But imagination must always be practical. Bring new ideas and trends to the table, present arguments that justify those ideas to convince your team mates or clients.
3. Self assessment is very important, if you see your work from the eyes of another person, it may reveal very interesting facts about your person and profession.
4. Designers must be able to communicate, language barriers, both text and speech must be eliminated.
5. Awareness of global trends and social context is important to create an effective design; global trends specially affect online design ideas, or campaigns that are for global brands. Things would sound more appealing to your clients if they are based on market research and social trends.
6. Don’t get bogged down by people who object unreasonably. Concentrate only on those issues that are vital to a project, and be open to ideas. Self-esteem is another vital ingredient.
7. Attention to detail is the key, always look for minor details optimize for the target audience, not everyone has a high spec. computer like you do.
8. In order for the golden formula of under promising and over delivering to work, you need to work on a limited number of projects preferably stick to just one, it maximizes the attention to detail and things start to fall into place.
9. Keep a clean workspace. It would surely boost your concentration and creative juices would start to flow.
10. Take unlimited number of small breaks if you have to. If you are having a creative block, step outside, engage into conversations or take a walk, look into directions that don’t seem like a road block.

So, basically more or less these few things are true for any creative profession, you can either be a regular pixel pusher or you can be a successful web designer. Which one are you?

The idea is to have a very neat and sleek layout. But to most this doesn’t seem like a web designer’s blog, another idea is to distance this blog from those who use cheap glue so that their graphical stickers should fall off or fold from one edge and inorganic plastic boards that glow in the dark.

Home page layout concept

This blog design that took about 48 hours and 2 packets of John Player’s Gold Leaf is ready for your reading pleasure. Loads of thanks to people who gave their sincere opinions but it turns out that I am my own worst client and by definition the client is always right, isn’t he?