A Creativity Category Is Born

You may have noticed that we've done a little redecorating recently. Up there, over my right shoulder where we keep the categories, "Design" has been replaced with "Creativity."

This section is still the place to go for all our blog posts and features for graphic designers, including Deke McClelland's every-other-weekly, fully fab-tastic dekePod. But we've also added a new set of posts just starting up that we're tagging as "The Creative Beat." This section will focus on a wide swath of issues related to our creative lives, and in particular, the way tech is changing things up — changing how we express ourselves, how we share our art with others, and especially how we motivate ourselves to get off the stick and, dare I say, make something.

This change was triggered partly by a project I've been working on under the web-guise of "Cecil Vortex" — a set of interviews with artists about the practical side of creativity, and the things they do to help themselves unlock the whoosh. One quote in particular from an interview with Ze Frank has stuck with me for a while now. Ze said:

"I've also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we're entering into. You've got so many people that are making things now, whether it's emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What's really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who's gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that's being produced right now. And I think it's the wrong thing to look at. It's actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that's the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate."

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. Some grand push toward greater expression. Some yearning that isn't new, but maybe it's twirling a tad faster of late. Our hope with this section is to spend a little time examining that twirl, poking it from various angles, seeing how it relates back to our own creative lives, what we can do to find new ways to express ourselves, new ways to get ourselves to get things done.

Of course, we'd love to hear from you — what you're personally creating, what you've found out there in the wild, where you might like us to dig around a bit. Drop us a line at creativity@oreilly.com and let us know what you think. Or join us in the forums.

But enough of the preamble. Coming up a little later today in the Creative Beat, an interview with Jesse Thorn about MaxFunCon, a new event that bills itself as nothing less than "a convocation of awesome people who seek to become more awesome."

Thanks,
-Dan