The surest sign that you’re incredibly ambitious is a complete and total lack of ambition on all fronts.

Some things that Milton Glaser said to my SVA class, which I still think are good. In no particular order: - It should be impossible to be in the arts and not be generous - One of art's highest functions is to prevent ppl from killing each other. - Fame & money are corrosive, and you need to recognize this early - Art is a survival mechanism - Make ppl feel like they have something in common; that they aren't alone - Every artist should view themselves as citizens, not illustrators, designers etc. - Drawing is one of the only times he sees things that are 'real' - It's one of the rare experiences that he creates for himself. "The noise disappears" - Drawing shows your brain - Drawing expressively and evocatively is harder than drawing realistically - Artists don't say "where do I begin?" They've already began. - Drawing is in the realm of the miraculous. It's a miraculous occurrence. - The most modest of subjects can come alive in a drawing - What is the distance between what you see, and what you draw? - ALL my work is personal work. The only boundary is how I determine how it's used. - You get nothing but problems when you do work that conflicts w your integrity. - In any design problem, your client has needs, your audience has needs, but you also have needs - You attract what you do - Everything is connected and has an effect on the world. - There is no such thing as coincidence - Whether you like it or not, your work is ABOUT social responsibility - Don't overprotect. Share your vision at all times

A 1.5-year thread documenting a game developer’s progress on a generative-music puzzle game, from initial concept to release.

Times are tough right now. We could all use a little help with ideas to stay active, healthy & happy. We’ll gradually add more ideas so come back every once in a while. Enjoy!

This is one of the most interesting-to-me things I’ve ever heard. All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling – apart from the sheer fact that it's Finland-related, I mean. One is how vividly it illustrates a critical insight about persistence: that in the first weeks or years of any worthwhile project, feedback – whether from your own emotions, or from other people – isn't a reliable indication of how you're doing. (This shouldn't be confused with the dodgy dictum that triggering hostile reactions means you must be doing the right thing; it just doesn't prove you're doing the wrong one.) The second point concerns the perils of a world that fetishises originality. A hundred self-help books urge you to have the guts to be "different": the kid who drops out of university to launch a crazy-sounding startup becomes a cultural hero… yet the Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you'll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond. "Stay on the fucking bus": there are worse fridge-magnet slogans to live by.

What I miss about my "90s internet" wasn't it specifically, with its slow data links, tiny JPEGs, buffering RealPlayer, or the tag. It did not have the tiniest fraction of the wonderful content the internet has today. What I miss is that I could "go on the internet" and be in a creative corner of the human experience. Today if you "go on the internet", that means you pulled your phone out of your pocket, dismissed some notification spam and start reading click-bait shared by people you have met on social media. Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy. I wish the internet of creative people and their works had a front page and a search engine. Something that made finding the blog about the search for planet 9 easy to find, and the New Yorker article on it hard to find. [...] What is not clear to me yet is how those tools should work. How do we build a search engine that penalizes media outlets and promotes blogs and podcasts? How do we distinguish between a research paper or an article written by someone about their daily life aboard ISS on nasa.gov from their useless press releases?

I don’t care about advancing the state of the art. I care about being a creative person who lives a good life and does projects that make me happy.

Naming a project is always an awful experience.

Learn the difference between feedback and criticism. Feedback is primarily for you; criticism (in the sense of "a movie critic" or "an arts critic") is primarily not. Criticism is part of an ongoing cultural conversation that's designed to make everybody smarter and better and more thoughtful and to advance the art form itself; it's done even when the creator of a piece is long dead. It's not really for you. Feedback, on the other hand, is aimed at you to make you better, and that's the only kind of feedback worth paying attention to. If you can't listen to it and take it in without your hackles rising, you will never become good. Period, boom, g'bye.

Knowing how to program has been one of the most fulfilling skills I have acquired in my life, but I believe having the ability to ship something into the world for people to use is much more important.

Get a notebook and write at least a word in it every day. I am starting to think that the best advice—the only advice, maybe—you can give comes out of your own haphazard, irregular, lucky, accidental experience.

Yesterday at Atlantic.com, Hans Villarica posted “Study of the Day: Why Crowded Coffee Shops Fire Up Your Creativity,” a rundown of a research study that alleges moderate noise is beneficial to creativity. While I’m intrigued by the question of noise and individual cognition in public(ish) spaces, the Atlantic post exemplifies the way that research loses its contextual trappings as soon as it enters “the cultural conversation” to become the kind of free-floating “news you can use” that inevitably gets “contradicted” in subsequent studies, undermining people’s faith in the academy. …even the most cursory skim of the actual journal article provides contextual information that undermines Villarica’s pithy, straightforward advice.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original. This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that's against the law.

Advice from the successful radio host on ‘making independent media. Making it, and making it your job.’

“Two quick points. Not every idea is going to work. Know that going in. Ideas tend to follow the path of least resistance and more often than not that path is the one where you find yourself talking an idea to death, by getting hung up on the ‘what ifs.’ So you need to actively push ideas out and embrace failure. Fail spectacularly whenever possible. “Secondly, every single person I have ever met or corresponded with about leaving the work-for-hire world and trying to create something of their own, something that they really care about, says exactly the same thing. Win, lose or draw they always express the same thought and most of the time they say it in exactly these words. “What they say is, ‘I should have done this sooner.’”

“RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead. Good. Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.”

Why we need fiction, and why we pretend.

So if people are naturally creative or not, to what degree does 'encouraging' creativity even work? And do we understand this enough to know what aspects of creativity we are encouraging, or rather I should say: do we know how to encourage the 'good' parts of being creative and not make people into schizophrenics/sociopaths?

Great, of course.

Playful and ironic photos and little installations.

Another one of these "How to Be Productive and Creative" lists, but they're good as inspiration/affirmations.

Cute and well-done.

One of the best episodes ever.

Stressing the importance of actively engaging everything that you take in and the way that you take it in, so you can synthesize and maximize and!

From the guys who brought you the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment.

Ten characteristics of creative people. (Basically, they're a beautiful mess of contradictions.)

"Nick Veasey uses x-ray technology to create mesmerizing and intriguing art. In a world obsessed with superficial appearance it is a refreshing change to be able to look beyond the surface."

"This is the best invention of all and I can’t even hardly believe someone has finally taken the time to invent this. You’ve probably seen this at any local pizzeria located within an audioanimatronic aviary."

"Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or 'scenes' can occasionally generate."