Looking back on our linear timeline of history, innovation seems obvious. Of course the Earth revolves around the Sun, of course we can fly, of course we’ll use cell phones to check Facebook on a daily basis. However, there is nothing more intimidating or terrifying than being sat down and told to be innovative on command. Businesses need to be increasingly creative to stay competitive in the current market. Often, this happens when someone from marketing is forcibly grabbed from their desk, locked into a room, and told to come up with the next biggest thing on the FaceTube.

This is hardly fair to the poor chap from marketing.

As much as we like to pretend that we are all brilliant and can be brilliant on command, when it’s down to the wire and everyone is looking, you’re frequently going to trip and fall. Putting your nose to the grindstone and giving yourself tough goals and strict deadlines can help you accomplish most goals. Creative goals need a different formula, mainly:

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.   These words are hidden and you found them! Way to go you creative person you!

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Look at all that space I just gave you. You could draw a picture there. You could write a new paragraph to improve this absurd blog. You could use it as a break to realize that you should really be doing other things, and reading this may not be the best use of your time.

Give yourself space, and give yourself time. Companies like Google, Apple and NASA have all found that their employees work best when they have a combination of specific project goals and semi-free time to think about things outside of their usual scope.

This blog post started by being a story about how space shuttles became cell phones and the last shuttle launch is happening next month so you better watch it if you’re a good American. It was not a good blog. It died and made room for this blog. If your client wants something that will get a lot of views on YouTube, give them Justin Beiber playing with a cat (I’m positive nothing would ever get more views). If your client wants something that’s truly innovative, ask for the space to do it.

Youtube's new Vuvuzela-izer. Also, a kitten in a hat.

All this attention means vuvuzela vendors are enjoying a huge windfall. One grocery store — in England no less! — has already sold over 40,000 at £2 a piece; their briskest sales measured one horn sold every two seconds so far. Vuvuzela producers are struggling to keep up with overwhelming demand, churning out an amazing 20,000 a day. These sorts of numbers show what happens when a product, idea or brand go viral – immediate, global exposure which translate into amazing opportunities for growth.

What is especially important to notice is the vital role the internet, and it’s social media features, have played in building up the vuvuzela hype. Emerging communication tools (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Mobile web and apps) have been particularly well leveraged to spread vuvuzela fever and build it into something more than just a traditional African horn. It has become THE symbol of the World Cup. This is every brand builder’s dream and shows, once and for all, that if we want to grow and communicate online, it is no longer possible to ignore these marketing tools. We have to develop an overall online strategy that takes these traffic sources into account or risk losing out on being the next Big Thing.

I thought Mitch’s recent post about his coffee making philosophy was a pretty interesting way to explore what he’s all about. So for the sake of comparison, I figured I’d also do a post that related my working style to food preparation. Suffice to say, there are some significant differences.

It’s no coincidence that Mitch’s examples were all foods that benefited from consistent preparation. Regardless of the task, Mitch is not a guy who I would say is eager to be surprised by the end result. He wants to establish his end goal up-front, and then meticulously outline the process to ensure a predictable outcome. If our company were making music instead of building websites, Mitch would not be the improv soloist in a jazz quartet– he’d be the conductor of the orchestra. And that makes him well-suited to his position as project manager.

As art director, I’m in the complete opposite situation. My goal is to create something unique every time. Adhering too closely to any one process actually inhibits me from doing my job well. And so I would compare my work flow more closely to something like making chili than to making coffee.

Chili is sort of a catch-all term that describes stews containing similar ingredients, but actual recipes are highly individual and represent the tastes of their creators. There’s no ‘wrong’ way to make chili. It’s this variation-friendly approach that leads to chili cook-offs. (Have you ever heard of a coffee brew-off?) To make chili, you just need to understand some basic cooking techniques and be familiar with your ingredients. It’s the combination of elements and the execution of techniques that leads to a successful batch of chili.

So as you’ll see in my chili-making flow chart, there’s no mention of instructions, recipes, measuring, cooking times or anything else quantifiable. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever succeed in making the same pot of chili twice, and to be honest, that’s exactly how I like it. I start with some core ingredients, but from there the recipe evolves based on what I have on hand, my mood and my appetite. I add ingredients, season with a pinch of this or that…. I’ll throw in chocolate, or a can of beer– whatever seems right at the time. The end result always reflects what I happened to be hungry for that day. In this way, my meal is always uniquely satisfying.

Graphic design is a little bit like making chili. If you learn the basic techniques and the fundamentals of design theory, then you can turn any combination of elements into a successful layout. The basic steps of your process will always be fairly similar, but within each step you’ll have the freedom to experiment. And in this experimentation is where the unique design will really take shape.

It’s pretty cool to work at a company that embraces and thrives on both approaches. We’re always making little tweaks in our process to best utilize all our skill sets, and I think it’s really one of our strengths. So I’ll leave the coffee making up to Mitch. And if we decide to enter a chili-cook off, I’ll be ready with my apron.

The Holiday Card

Now that ‘Holiday Season ‘08’ is in the bag, it’s probably as good a time as any to wax philosophical about our holiday E-card. This year’s concept stemmed from a colorful conversation that included a retelling of some of the more infamous moments from Manning parties past, as well as a discussion about office party clichés. With a little Photoshop magic and a few hundred hours of work, what emerged was a bizarre virtual party that combined celebrities, pop-culture references, employee debauchery, and more than a little alcohol. But we got there aided by using content that was ‘borrowed’.

If you happened to visit the site, have a pulse and even a slight sense of humor, you’ll probably agree that the final result was at least mildly entertaining. Or anyway, we were fairly proud of it. But when you really think critically about what makes the site successful (and since we hope to eventually get better at what we do, we try to do this once in a while) you can’t help but realize that the amusement has its foundations in a lot of shared cultural experiences.

Drawing on Culture

In our postmodern, pop-culture devouring society, customs like Christmas have taken on a sometimes perverse universality. (The perversion is driven largely by a strong commercial undercurrent, but that’s probably another discussion entirely.) So in America in 2008, shoppers in Miami have their holiday cheer whipped into a frenzy by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ just the same as their counterparts in Montana. Never mind that there’s a good chance that the Floridians have never actually experienced a snow-covered December 25^th—they know that Christmas is supposed to be white. Americans’ idyllic notions of the holiday season have become something of a mash-up between personal memories and inherited cultural memes.

You don’t have to take my word for it. ‘A Christmas Story’, the most sugar-coated, nostalgic vignette of Christmas Americana ever put to film, has become a cultural staple. During the 2007 version of TBS’ annual airing of a 24-hour marathon of the movie, over 45 million viewers tuned in. That’s 15% of the population tuning in for something on cable.

It’s this shared awareness of Christmas iconography that allowed us to give our friends and clients a good laugh. Because mixed in with hard-drinking employees, angry snowmen, and the president-elect were references to ‘A Christmas Story’, ‘The Nutcracker’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘The Grinch’ and others.

Creativity, Originality

Here’s the twist: As ‘creatives’, we’re supposed to endeavor to come up with unique and original solutions to our clients’ and our own design challenges. When we do so, we are credited with ownership of the resulting product. It’s this premise that protects the value of our business. Similarly, copyright law protects the creators of the Christmas classics listed previously.

But at the same time, if our goal is to give people a holiday-inspired laugh, would we be leaving something on the table by not referencing pop culture?It was our opinion that indeed we would be. So to create our holiday party, we borrowed heavily from existing (and most likely copyrighted) material.

Is this practice acceptable? Since our intent was primarily to create art (whether or not this term an apt description is up for debate) and not to realize financial gain, we took the position that our use of copyrighted material was ok. Had the original creators of this material decided our work was financially or artistically threatening, we would have gladly pulled the plug. But it was our belief that what we created stood on its own as a unique form of expression.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

From Dada collages and ready-mades to Andy Warhol’s ‘Soup Cans’, we are by no means the first to explore this artistic grey area. But the rise of the desktop computer, the internet, and the availability of media via applications like YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing has allowed virtually anyone to enter this arena. I thought it might be interesting to explore some other examples of this process. And by far, the easiest place to find this work being done in contemporary culture is in the music world.

Danger Mouse

In 2004, a producer by the name of Danger Mouse released the ‘Grey Album’—with songs created by using bits of The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ with a-capella verses from rapper Jay-Z’s 2003 disc ‘The Black Album’. Danger Mouse knew from the outset that he’d never be able to score legal rights to pursue this project, but the internet allowed him to distribute his work and it became a huge hit.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zJqihkLcGc 425 324]

Although he made no money directly for his work on ‘The Grey Album’, he has since parlayed the notoriety it earned him into a successful career as a music producer. Along with rapper/singer Cee-Lo, he forms one half of the Grammy-winning group ‘Gnarls Barkley’. (Even the group name is ironically referential.) He has also released records as part of the British super-group ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Queen’, and most recently produced Beck’s newest record.

Girl Talk
Another producer, Greg Gillis, takes things to even more of an extreme. Under the name ‘Girl Talk’, Gillis has released dance-friendly albums of mash-ups that do not contain a single original note. Where most producers will use a sample as part of an original composition, Gillis creates songs by splicing together hundreds of samples. The result is a mind-blowing witches brew of top 40 songs mixed, mashed, and layered together into a cohesive whole.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK3O_qZVqXk 425 324]

Gillis’ work has appeared on ‘Best Albums of the Year’ lists and been critically acclaimed, but has also been called ‘a lawsuit waiting to happen’. So far he has avoided legal action, but his label has already prepared a defense based on a Fair Use argument. ‘Girl Talk’ has even been endorsed by a Pennsylvania congressman who is an advocate of Fair Use.

There Will Be Blood

In an example that bridges the gap between popular and classical music, the score for ‘There Will Be Blood’ was disqualified for Oscar contention in 2008 over issues of originality. The score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, was widely considered by critics to be one of the year’s best. Nearly 35 minutes of the film’s score was original composition, but 46 minutes consisted of Greenwood’s arrangements of songs in the public domain such as Brahms’ ‘Concerto in D Major’, along with some of his repurposed earlier compositions.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HjWIr80ln4 425 324]

Sita Sings The Blues

The last example comes from the film world, but again regards music rights. Animator Nina Paley spent five years creating the film ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ which has gone on to critical acclaim. However, outside of the festival circuit, virtually no one has seen this film as its distribution is stuck in a legal gridlock over music usage rights.

Paley originally conceived of the idea for ‘Sita’ as a retelling of the Indian fable, Ramayana. The project was inspired by blues recordings by Annette Hanshaw, and much of the animation features musical numbers synchronized to these recordings.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4wAA2eVXjo 425 324]

Some Indian groups are angry over Paley’s use of the Ramayana story, and the usage rights for the Hanshaw recordings are being withheld by the record company which owns them. So the film remains unable to find a distributor.

Paley admits that she knew ahead of time that there would be potential issues with the recordings. However, her argument centers on the fact that copyright laws in their current interpretation stifle creativity. She sees the fact that artists are required to consider such issues so thoroughly as a factor that potentially hampers the artistic process.

The lines regarding ownership and artistic freedom are sure to become more blurry as the availability of technology expands. But creativity does not exist in a vacuum, and the question remains: at what point is something sufficiently recontextualized to constitute an original work of art?

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