4 Digital Creatives doing awesome things

For most Advertising Creatives creativity does not stop at 5:30PM Friday, most have some kind of creative outlet outside of work whether that be writing children's books, tshirt lines or even setting up charities.

Digitally a growing trend that I am starting to see is Digital Creatives using the internet as their canvas. The type of art that I am most interested in is when Creatives are creating cultural statements through their pieces and capturing the attention of the masses. Here are some of my favourite;

1. Jeff Greenspan (Creative Director at BBDO)

Urban Traps (Hipster Traps)
The Most Exclusive Website (Mike Lacher and Chris Baker)
LetterBombing (Chris Baker)


2. Mike Lacher - Creative Technical Manager - Google Creative Labs

Mikala Bierma Youtube Channel
Waiting for Bieber
Shady URL
Geocities-izer



3. Ji Li (Creative Director at Facebook)
The Bubble Project
Goolery
Dummer


4. Chris Baker (Writer at Google Creative Labs)

The Likeable Constitution (Jeff Greenspan)
The Call to Action Generator

As I start to learn Photoshop and Coding I am hoping to start making some of my ideas come to life. Watch this space!

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Digital Strategists learn Photoshop in 8 hours

I am really trying to grow the creative side of my brain at the moment. As I discussed in my previous post on Strategy bullets, I have really been limiting the creative side for the last few years. One of the other main barriers to me being creative was I didn't have the skills to be able to execute an idea (e.g couldn't mock it up in Photoshop, couldn't code up the idea).

I was inspired by Pon Kattera, to change this the other day. He recently taught himself Photoshop via online tutorials on lynda.com. With his glowing endorsement I signed up.

I took the Photoshop CS5 Essential Training course and have taught myself the basics to Photoshop and completed my first mock ups for work on Friday. I was surprised with how good it actually was! It is cheap at a flat rate of $25 a month for all the courses you want. You have to give it a good 8 hours and it usually helps if you have someone with you who knows the basics of Photoshop.

On a side note if you haven't watched 'You suck at Photoshop' tutorials before you need to watch them!

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The new data capture - Emotional DNA Data

Collecting and creating meaningful conclusions from personal data seems to be all the rage at the moment. One area that seems to have been overlooked but of interest is emotional data capturing. Emotional DNA is left on everything photos, places, people, foods. All these can elicit powerful emotions from people.

My work colleague Kendra Salvatore came up with an interesting concept of emotional geographic mapping. Basically what if we were able to visualise the emotions we tie to different places.


One of the exercises that she does is to manually map emotions from different places. I have had a stab at it for Melbourne and Sydney which was a pretty interesting task. However I think this would not need to be a manual thing, you could hook it up to Foursquare or Facebook Places and give a little emoti on what you are feeling at the time (think Nike Plus).

'Going to your happy place' could now become prompted by technology, with a mechanic that understood what places are that happy place. Fornino's and their White Truffle Oil Pizza

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