Presentation Zen [13]
Do Not Force It
Idling or doing nothing is important. Most of us, myself included, are obsessed with getting things done. We’re afraid to be unproductive. And yet, the big ideas often come to you during your periods of “laziness,” during those episodes of “wasting time.” People need more time away from the direct challenges of work. Long walks on the beach, a jog through the forest, a bike ride, spending four to five hours in a coffee shop with the Sunday paper. During these times, your creative spirit is energized. Sometimes you need solitude and a break for slowing down so that you may see things differently. Managers who understand this and give their staff the time they need (which they can only do by genuinely trusting them) are the secure managers, and the best managers.
Enthusiasm
Put your love, passion, imagination, and spirit behind it. Without enthusiasm, there is no creativity. It may be a quiet enthusiasm, or it may be loud. It doesn’t matter, so long as it is real. I remember once a guy commenting on a successful long-term project I did. He said to me, “Well, you have enthusiasm, I’ll give you that…” It was a backhanded compliment. These are the people who get us down. Life is short. Don’t hang out with people who dismiss the idea of enthusiasm, or worse still, with those who try to kill yours. Trying to impress others or worrying about what others may think of your enthusiasm or passion should be the last thing on your mind.
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.
—T.S. Eliot
The Art of Working With Restrictions
My friends at Universal Studios Japan—Jasper von Meerheimb, Senior Art Director, and Sachiko Kawamura, Senior Environmental Graphic Designer—gave an excellent presentation recently for Design Matters Japan on the issue of how restrictive conditions put on creative projects can lead to inventive solutions. In their presentation, they talked about how to develop concepts and implement them under such constraints as limited time, space, and budget. For professional designers, creating great work under a thousand constraints and limitations imposed from the outside is simply the way the world of design works. Whether constraints are good or bad, enabling or crippling, is in a sense irrelevant; constraints are simply the way of the world. Still, as John Maeda points out in The Laws of Simplicity (MIT Press) “In the field of design there is the belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.” Time, for example, and the sense of urgency that it brings, is almost always a constraint, yet “urgency and the creative spirit go hand in hand…,” Maeda says.
Using creativity and skill to solve a problem or design a message among a plethora of restrictions from the client, from the boss, and so on, is old hat to designers. They live it. Daily. However, for the millions of nondesigners with access to powerful design tools, the power and importance of constraints and limitations is not well understood. For those not trained in design, the task of creating presentation visuals (or posters, Web sites, newsletters, etc.) with today’s software tools can make one either frustrated by the abundance of options or giddy in anticipation of applying their artistic sensibilities to decorate their work with an ever-increasing array of color, shapes, and special effects. Either condition can lead to designs and messages that suffer. What you can learn from professional designers is that (1) constraints and limitations are a powerful ally, not an enemy, and (2) creating your own self-imposed constraints, limitations, and parameters is often fundamental to good, creative work.
Self-imposed constraints