#creative-process

#creative-process

Had Fatima Bhutto been left to her own devices, her devastating forthcoming memoir would have been almost entirely about her relationship with her dog, Coco. I know it sounds nuts, she laughs. And it's true that being dog-crazy doesn't quite track with the public perception of Bhutto as a writer, journalist, activist and member of Pakistan's most famous political dynasty. But the pandemic had forced something of a creative unravelling and when Bhutto took stock, she found herself only really able to write about Coco.

"We started by asking everyone to collect images regularly. Just spontaneous snapshots as we went. Of everything. Sketches, screens, notes, half thoughts, moments in motion. Over time it became this huge grab bag of elements," Simon says.

I just always said to myself, like, I ain't gonna rush it, man. I thought I was ready in 2024, and it was just, like, I thought the court case was going to be, you know, done by, you know, that fall. That kept getting pushed back, and it was just, like, kind of hard to really focus, you know what I mean? Not only that,

Each pet expresses their own personality; the illustrations are simple, yet tell us so much about each individual cat. Gomatsu captured each in a specific moment, and then amplified the action, expression or energy through his characterful drawings. Brown is holding a cold, rigid blank stare while 노호유 is caught mid-clean. Yuki has a mischievous grin, and Bao looks like a stern bouncer (definitely not letting you in).

Generating content for design mocks or writing simple scripts to automate boring tasks. I even built a Figma plugin to easily rename all the icons in our icon library, to avoid the repetitive work, but also because I was curious if I could make it work. One thing led to another. I started playing around and started finding excuses to explore. I built an iOS app to keep track of daily exercise, started playing with V0 and Lovable to quickly brainstorm and generate rough design

I'm seeing more and more clients generate something approximating their desired outcome and essentially asking me to make 'something like this,' It sucks. This practice absolutely invalidates the entire creative process, in my opinion, and makes my job harder and more frustrating. The job of an illustrator or concept artist is to draw from their years of experience to interpret a brief in a creative way.

Lately, my sessions have been filled with clients reflecting on the tension that often arises during periods of transition. Some feel proud of their growth, while others feel discouraged by goals left unmet or intentions that quietly fell away as life became overwhelming. Many wonder what to do with this disappointment and whether to carry these unfinished hopes forward. As an art therapist, I guide clients toward practices rooted not in self-judgment but in intentionality, embodiment, and creative self-understanding.

"When I'm writing fiction, I tend not to read fiction. I actually don't want other people's voices to sneak into my head," Rushdie said recently. That's not to say that other writers' books aren't an important part of his process-posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of works that have offered guidance for his own writing, including a novella that appears in " The Eleventh Hour," his latest book,

"All that is is people just being like, 'No, actually you're wrong about that; no, actually there's something you haven't perceived in that actually; no, you're actually stupid,'" he says. "It's like, 'My God, guys, it's a YouTube short of a man doing a backflip.'"

The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles' 1960 recording of " Georgia on My Mind"? Last year's A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold's well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

Creative Ops Masterclass is part documentary, part playbook,

Yet for many designers, product marketers, and creative professionals, that fun often turns into frustration when ideas are not organized. Designers think in wireframes, marketers think in messaging, and product managers think in roadmaps. This slows progress and leaves projects feeling incomplete. Notion mood board templates make it easier for cross-functional teams to align and move from inspiration to execution. Here are the best Notion templates to turn your creative vision into concrete outcomes.

My mom sewed my high school uniforms with little touches of traditional Chinese style, and my aunt made me tote bags and backpacks out of Sanrio fabric - I still have them in my closet,

I was still learning about songwriting and by the time I got to Something/Anything? [1972, featuring I Saw the Light] I was slipping into formula verse, chorus, bridge and so on, always about the girl or boy who broke your heart. I moved my hands about the keyboard and 20 minutes later that song was done. It's partly why I went completely off the grid for my next album, A Wizard, a True Star [1973]

You know you've got a great idea when it could double as an unforgettable headline. My team has long applied this "headline test" to make sure concepts stand strong on their own. The question is simple: Can you distill your creative notions into a compelling five-to-seven-word headline? If yes, you've got something that not only resonates but sticks. Traditionally, this was an internal exercise.

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a modern-day romance that wasn't necessarily romantic, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart class, race, nationality, family history as those that bind us.

I've been a passionate creator of monsters and otherworldly beings since I was old enough to pick up a crayon. While I'm a mild-mannered graphic designer by day, I explore the worlds of darker creatures by night. For many years, I thought my art had to look like everyone else's to be successful. I started by colouring at Image Comics in the 1990s and went almost exclusively into comic-based digital work for many years after.

Blame George Orwell, who in 1946 famously published "Why I Write," an essay contending with the motives of "political purpose" and "aesthetic enthusiasm," which fueled his career, even while noting that the decision to put pen to paper is in some ways inexplicable. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," Orwell wrote.

As designers, we often talk about color, layout, or typography and we generally think or imagine in moods for instance 'clean,' 'dreamy,' 'grunge,' but AI doesn't understand ambiguity.

Design systems serve as the comprehensive rulebook for user interface design, providing a shared language, reusable components, and clear guidelines for efficient collaboration.

To create a unique visual language for each animated piece, Tala can find herself starting out on a project in a number of different ways.

Randy Douthit has found a way to transform professional challenges into sources of creative energy rather than depletion. His work delivers unexpected rewards.

Stenson emphasizes emotional perception through animals in his carvings, portraying the sweet slyness of a fox or a charming bear proud of its fresh catch.

"The immediate thing that hit me once I started bringing clips onto the timeline was just how buttery smooth it all was."

One of the best use cases that creatives have found for AI is getting over the fear of the blank page (or empty InDesign file). Sometimes you just need a few suggestions to get the creative engine running.

Designers have always been problem-solvers. But until recently, we were often boxed into solving parts of problems - the visuals, the flow, the usability.

The result is both a visual and emotional journey, seamlessly blending art and music into one cohesive experience.