The care and feeding of your creative mind.
What’s something somebody could ask you at a backyard barbecue (while doing doughnuts on the neighbors’ property in a golf cart) and immediately regret how much time they’ve given you to answer?
Maybe you know which three bands got good after they fired their original drummer. Maybe you’ve spent six years figuring out how to grow tomatoes in a yard that gets forty-five minutes of sun. Maybe you’re the only person in your family who knows how your grandmother actually made that sauce, because you stood there long enough to notice that her “tablespoon” was a soup spoon from a drawer.
Start there. You already pay attention to things other people miss. Give yourself a reason to do something with what you notice.
Find Your Thing. Then Twist It At The Nips.
Now, I’ve always been a car guy, which means I’ve sold several vehicles I now wish I’d kept. As I got older, I got less fast (more fat) and more overland. I bought a 2018 Toyota 4Runner TRD Off-Road and started building it out myself. Eventually I reached out to Trail4Runner.com and started writing for them. Now, a dumb thing I did in my garage could save somebody else an afternoon.
Take the 40-inch light bar. KC supplied perfectly good instructions for mounting it to a compatible surface. I wanted it on my Gobi Stealth rack. A straight light bar, a curved rack, and my conviction that a couple of leftover mounting plates would somehow bridge the gap. I made the job exponentially harder for myself and developed a new appreciation for my dad’s rage when I held the flashlight wrong. The bar fit. I’m proud of the install. I might like the article even more. Read the light-bar review.
If that had been a client job, I’d have called the mounting solution a scope issue. In my garage, it was the part I wanted to figure out.
Your version can be hella’ cheaper. Photograph the weird hand-painted signs you keep driving past and see what they look like together. Draw a map of where the sun hits your yard and mark what actually grew. Film your grandmother making the sauce, then try writing the recipe so somebody who’s never met her can make it.
Now you’re making choices about what to show, what to leave out, and how to help someone see what you see. All of that can happen with the phone you already own and the back of an envelope. Nobody has to put “designer” in your email signature first.
Make Something for Somebody Who Could Use It
The stuff I come back to on my own tends to be pretty consistent. Time with my family. Martial arts. Heavy metal. Cars. My love of martial arts brought me into David Kahn’s orbit, and over the years we built a personal brand around his Krav Maga work. Metal gave me another way in. If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to play the first notes of “Stairway to Heaven,” I’d ask them to tell my family I loved them. I can, however, do some damage with type and a reasonably aggressive color palette. David Kahn Krav Maga
Look around the places you already like being. The band putting on its first show could use a poster. The rescue with a tiny budget might need a flyer for adoption day. The friend who finally finished a book is about to make the cover in Microsoft Word. You might already be buying raffle tickets from one of these people.
Ask what would help. You might be picturing a whole new visual identity while they’re thinking, God, I wish somebody would make us a flyer with the right address on it. Make the flyer. If it’s a recurring event, give them a version they can update themselves.
Then go get coffee and see the damn thing taped to the window. You got to spend an evening making something you liked. They got to spend Saturday talking to people who actually showed up.
Getting There Is the Shitty Part
I feel about initially making things the way I feel about going to the gym. Once I’m there and moving, I’m totally stoked I went. Getting there is when I develop a sudden, urgent interest in reorganizing the garage.
A blank screen, a blank canvas, a camera you haven’t pressed the button on yet. Make the first move small enough that you can do it before you’ve had time to talk yourself out of it. Take one photo. Move one piece of type. Sketch the flyer badly enough that you can finally see what needs to go where. Once the rock starts rolling downhill, I usually want to see where it goes.
Music helps me. Clearing my plate helps more. I can put on the perfect record and still spend the whole time thinking about a work email, a family obligation, and whatever I promised to pick up on the way home. Give yourself half an hour you can actually be there for. If that means taking a walk with your phone instead of setting up a whole shoot, take the walk.
