3 Tips for Being Creative This Valentine’s Day
For cupid’s sake, make your Valentine’s Day card from scratch
Anyone with five bucks and half a brain can go to the corner store and buy a card. And while giving your valentine a store-bought card is certainly a more thoughtful gesture than not giving a card at all, hand-crafted is definitely the way to go. Hallmark might do a better job of crafting cliche, lovey-dovey Valentine’s prose, but you can certainly do a better job of sharing sentiments (and inside jokes) that only your loved one will fully understand and (ideally) enjoy.
Ideas:
- Go old school – I’m talkin’ construction paper, glue sticks, glitter, etc. (Just be careful with the scissors.)
- Go digital – Bust out the Photoshop (or other design program) and create a card. Better yet, create an infographic that provides a visual representation of how much you love your valentine.
It ain’t about the money, honey: play to your strengths
Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be Spend-All-Your-Savings-on-Jewelry-and-Flowers-and-Other-Crap Day. Instead, it can be a day when you show off your skills and give a gift that you’ve created with your own blood, sweat, and beers. Or tears. (Tears optional, beers recommended.)
Ideas:
- Musician? Write a song about how and when you first met your significant other.
- Chef? Whisk your valentine away to Paris with a romantic, home-cooked French dinner. (Bon appetit!)
- Accountant? Ummm, I’ll get back to you.
Give the gift of an amazing memory
Not something that will be kept in a jewelery box, tucked away in a drawer, or thrown away (e.g. flowers). An amazing memory can last a lifetime (and yes, I’m aware that sounds incredibly lame and Hallmark-y). But think about it: If, hypothetically, you’re a dude who gives your girlfriend chocolate and flowers for Valentine’s Day, how unremarkable is that? Years later, will your girlfriend say, “Hey, remember that Valentine’s Day…when you gave me chocolate and flowers? How awesome was that!”? Answer: No, she will not. So instead, think about crafting a moment that you can both revisit years later.
Ideas:
- “Remember that Valentine’s Day…when we drank hot cocoa inside the snow fort you built for me?!”
- “Remember that Valentine’s Day…when you took me to the aquarium and that penguin kissed me?!”
- “Remember that Valentine’s Day…when you took me up to the roof of that building and we had a picnic and watched the stars?!”
Boston Irish by the Numbers [infographic]
I was in a pickle: I wanted to create an infographic but didn’t have Photoshop or Illustrator. Fortunately, a graphic designer friend of mine recently pointed me toward infogr.am: a free infographic creation site that – for better or worse – takes design out of the infographic equation and let’s you focus on data and copy. With infogr.am, you simply choose a template, then drag and drop different elements (text, images, graphs, etc.) onto your “canvas.”
The coolest feature of the site has got to be its selection of interactive charts and graphs. For my “Boston Irish by the Numbers” infographic, I created an interactive chart that allows you to view the percentage of residents with Irish heritage in Boston and other communities in the Boston area. (Unfortunately, the screenshot below is static, so you can’t interact with it here!)
You can view the full “Boston Irish by the Numbers” infographic here.
Team Creativity Exercise: Monster Mash
Here’s a collaborative creative exercise that I recently ran with my company’s content team. As you may have gathered from the gruesome examples below, the exercise requires that participants draw monsters. But more specifically, each participant is assigned to one section of a monster: head, torso, or legs. The final image isn’t revealed until all of the sections have been completed.
What you’ll need:
Pens, paper, and at least three participants.
Step 1:
Fold a sheet of paper into thirds (see above examples).
Step 2:
Have the first participant sketch the head of the monster and fold over the paper so no one can see what he or she has drawn.
Step 3:
Have the second participant sketch the torso of the monster and fold over the paper so no one can see what he or she has drawn.
Step 4:
Have the final participant sketch the legs of the monster and unfold the paper to reveal the finished monster.
Rinse & repeat as many times as you’d like!
(FYI: I found this exercise on the iD Tech Camps blog. It’s a great source for creative exercises and inspiration.)
Kitchen Creation: Pulled Pork Nachos
What you’ll need:
- Bone-in pork shoulder
- Apple cider vinegar
- Cola
- BBQ Sauce
- Tortilla chips
- Shredded cheese
- Toppings (jalapenos, green onions, etc.)
- Slow cooker
- Oven
- Phone number of a well-respected cardiologist
Step 1
Trim off any excess skin/fat from the pork shoulder.
Step 2
Put the pork shoulder in your slow cooker (setting: Low) and pour in some cola and apple cider vinegar (roughly two-thirds cola, one-third vinegar). The majority of the pork should be submerged, but don’t worry if some sticks out.
Step 3
Put the lid on the slow cooker and go away. Read a book. Fly a kite. Sketch a Sasquatch. Bottom line: You’ve got to let that pork shoulder cook for a looooong time. Five hours is good. Seven hours is better. Ten hours or more will make for some seriously tender pork.
Step 4
Pull the pork (i.e. take the shoulder out of the slow cooker, separate all the meat from the bone, drain the slow cooker, then put the meat back in).
Step 5
BBQ sauce bath! Drench the pork in BBQ sauce and let it cook for between 30 minutes and an hour.
Step 6
Spread some tortilla chips on a baking sheet, pile some pulled pork on top, throw on some cheese and toppings, bake in the oven, and voila! Pulled pork nachos.
Creativity Exercise: Life Is Like…
“My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.'”
-Forrest Gump
Two words: Terrible. Simile.
The oft-quoted Forrest Gump phrase makes no sense, and here’s why: Boxes of chocolates almost always come with those flavor guide thingies that show you what all the chocolates are. So if you take the two seconds to actually look at the thing, you’ll know EXACTLY what you’re going to get.
In his book, A Whack on the Side of the Head, author/inventor Roger von Oech challenges readers to come up with new similes to describe what life is like.
Challenge accepted.
“Life is like a jar of extra crunchy peanut butter. You want to enjoy it, but you never want it to end.”
“Life is like a snowball rolling down a hillside. It keeps picking up new things along the way.”
“Life is like a blind fish in the ocean. Usually there’s open water, but sometimes you hit a coral reef…or get eaten by a shark.”
“Life is like a guitar. The harder it’s played, the sooner the strings break.”
“Life is like drinking a bottle of whiskey. About a quarter of the way through you feel AWESOME. But as you keep going you feel worse and worse. Then you pass out.”
Feel free to contribute your own “Life is like…” similes in the comments section below!
Coldplay’s “The Scientist” on Ukulele
Thank You, Blake Ink United
I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Blake Ink United – Purveyors of Quality Graphic Design – for creating this amazing illustration of Hank & Buddy, the two greatest golden retrievers of all time.
I commissioned Blake Ink to create “Hank & Buddy” so I could give it as a Christmas gift to my sister and her fiance (owners of Hank) and my parents (owners of Buddy). Instead of a photo-realistic image, I wanted something more abstract, but which still captured the dogs’ personalities. I dare say, Blake Ink did an exceptional job.
In my humble estimation, Blake Ink is certainly one of the top 10 purveyors of graphic design in all of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or at least it’s in the top 10 in Central Square. OK, for sure, Blake Ink is one of the top 10 purveyors of graphic design in Central Square, Cambridge whose name begins with the letter combination “Bl.”
Want to see more? Check out the Blake Ink United website. You can also follow Blake Ink on Twitter (@BlakeInk) and visit the Blake Ink United Facebook page.
Creativity: Discovering the Extraordinary Hidden in the Ordinary
Blah Blah Boring Brand is launching a new product. It is, unequivocally, the most useless, most unappealing product to ever come to market and every time you look at it you want to smash it, then light it on fire, then boil the charred remains in a pool of hydrochloric acid.
But you can’t afford to think that way – it’s your job to come up with concepts for an ad campaign that will help promote this (dreadful) product. Lucky for you, you’ve been practicing your creativity like a good William Bernbach understudy, and you know how to extract polished diamonds from this pile of turds. (I think I might’ve gotten my metaphors a little mixed up there.)
“Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.”
-William Bernbach, advertising creative director, Don Draper arch nemesis
Look around your home. Look around your office. Look around at a park. Look around at the beach. When you find something that’s useless, or ugly, or boring, try turning it into something that’s useful, or beautiful, or thought-provoking.
Where someone sees a string, try seeing a clothesline. Where someone sees a dirty old bucket, try seeing a bongo drum. Where someone sees a stick, try seeing a giraffe (why the hell not?). You can arrange sticky notes to make a mosaic, you can hang empty bottles to make a wind chime, you can connect clam shell shards to form a fish.
Creative exercises like these might sound childish or silly, and, well, they are. But unlike other activities that one might consider childish, such as playing video games, or setting off firecrackers, or drinking too much at a party and dancing on a pool table and having the pool table collapse underneath you, creating something cool gives you a tangible reward: something cool.
Even if the outcome isn’t exactly what you expected (aka it sucks), at least you tried and most likely learned a thing or two along the way. Besides, looking back, you might start to realize that your favorite part of the activity had nothing to do with the finished product at all…it was the actual creative “work.” The building process. The physical act of bringing your ideas to life.
Just like practicing your sales pitch can help you get better at selling, practicing creativity can help you get better at being creative. When you practice looking for the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary outside the office, discovering it inside the office will (hopefully) become an easier and more natural process.
And with enough practice, even an ad for Blah Blah Boring Brand could be an extraordinary thing.
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
-Michelangelo, sculptor, painter, pizza aficionado, ninja turtle
Erik Devaney 