There is a wonderful, simple post over at White Hot Truth by Danielle LaPorte. It claims that there are 11 productivity tips that creative types already know. Whilst this may be true, I also think that it is a list of 11 tips that we could all do with being reminded of.
So go, take a look and make sure that you all 11 are inhabiting somewhere in your creative world.
There’s something happening in the bird world that we should take note of. No, I’m not talking about the destruction of the rain forests and the extinction of exotic species, that’s beyond the remit of this blog. I’m talking about Aviary.
Aviary provides a suite of online applications for a growing number of your creative needs. The first applications were image based, photo editing and vector image creation. But now they have moved into audio editing.
Myna, is the latest edition to Aviary. It is a reasonably specced audio editor. You can import or record audio onto separate tracks before mixing away and rendering your final audio creation.
To see exactly what it is capable of have a look at the video below and then let your creativity run free.
Need to try out a quick tune but don’t have your USB keyboard with you?
Then pop along to kisstunes. This little app turns your computer keybaord into a music keyboard at the load of an app.
It can even record what you play! What more do you need when the inspiration strikes.
An amazing online colour /color tool app can be found at colorschemedesigner.com .
The tool is great for trying out what colours work well. It is simple to use, free and does exactly what it says on the URL.
Found this via Moleskinerie and had to share it. The YouTube blurb has the following to say:
Radiolab presents: Moments by Will Hoffman. This film is a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.
No I haven’t fallen off the planet. I have been on holiday and taking a step back from !maginality to rethink a few things. !maginality is coming up to its third anniversary and with that in mind we’re going to spruce things up and ramp things up too.
We’ve got a custom theme on its way, in the meantime a little simple thing to tide us over.
We’ve also got more focussed posts for different times of the week etc.
All in all, I am quite excited about things, but first I have to get back to finishing the design and catching up with the post holiday inbox.
Over recent years I think I have signed up to each and every task management tool that has come online. They are all pretty good and to be honest not too much difference in the way they work. Have goal / project and create some to do / next actions for it et voila.
So when I saw another task management tool that was on the net I thought I needed that like a hole in my head. The Big Picture is the tool and like all the rest it works in pretty much the same way. Create a goal and then assign some tasks and actions etc.
But
The Big Picture does this in a wonderful, visual way, and is totally dragable. It is a breath of fresh air in a pretty stagnant development arena. I love it. I can’t really explain it so check out the video below. And while you’re off doing that I am going to get the obviously needed hole in my head.
The slight negatives at the moment are:
But these are slight negatives. Now to plan my creative future…
A new report on Scientific American has confirmed what many of us naturally realised, you can be more creative if you ‘distance’ yourself from the situation. Read the article for the science and some practical ideas.
What do all these three have in common? Well, apart from CS10 they are all imminently on the way and will change the way we work, allegedly.
The web is creaking under the weight of tweets, blog posts and conversations about Google’s Chrome operating system and it’s Wave concept. And this post is another one of them.
But what does it all mean for us?
Actually it could mean quite a lot. A move from workstation to netstation, which the Chrome OS would encourage, has been creeping into our lives little by little. There are web apps for almost everything these days, for writing, drawing or music creation.
As for Wave, the growth of twitter has shown how a new networking tool can take off.
However, what we must not do is sit around and wait for these new innovations to come our way.
Tool Procrastination
One danger in our creative journey is tool procrastination. I have sat at home many times and said, ‘if only I had the latest version of [insert any desirable piece of software] I could be much more creative!’
And that, my friends, is a lie. That latest piece of shiny software won’t change a thing. If we are thinking like that then we are procrastinating. We are using the lack of software as a reason not to be creative.
Creativity is from you not the software or hardware
Ideas and creativity come from us, from within. Leonardo didn’t leave his idea for a flying machine as an idea because he didn’t have a CAD program to make it look great. Mozart didn’t keep the tunes in his head because his sequencer couldn’t handle the complicated rhythms.
And you don’t have to sit and wish that you had the latest shiny piece of software or hardware to share your creations with the world.
Use what you have, your mind and anything to hand: create!
These are uplifting as well as inpsirational. 12 videos from Vimeo to blow on your creative spark.
Webspiration