How to share two decades of experience in 10 weeks
What is creativity? How it works? Can it be learned and improved? Ignición (ignition) is the answer to all of those questions and the result of two decades of experience in different creative industries and of around 6 years of extensive study of creativity. All of that condensed in 10 lectures that later became into an online course taken at the moment by more than 500 students. It’s the introduction i would have wanted to have when i started into creativity, designed to break many misconceptions and myths surrounding creativity, to understand that a “creative method” can be followed and turned into an habit starting by the understanding of creativity’s basic psychological, neurological and experiential principles and processes. In 2018 i was invited by my “Alma Mater” Miami Ad School to lecture this course where i had de privilege to work hand at hand with my students teaching them all of this principles that enabled them to observe, understand, empathize and ideate creative solutions for real world problems making me very proud of their results all the time.
Tools Used
Services Delivered
CREATIVE DIRECTION
ART DIRECTION
BRANDING
VIDEO PRODUCTION
VIDEO EDITING
MOTION DESIGN
RESEARCH
EDUCATION
STORYTELLING
MY ROLE: I created this course from scratch, it took me years of research and observation to be able to define its structure. This is a creativity course, so it deserved an attractive way to present it. It needed the right storytelling and its own brand. So i created a concept for it, a name, “ignición” because what it does is to ignite creativity. I’ve built a brand for it and polished slides. All of that with the purpose of lighten up a heavy theoretical course. It needed to be beautiful and entertaining. For the online version, i wanted it to look like a documentary, so i’ve put the most important parts of the content together, produced videos, animations and i musicalized it in post production. Let’s see how the process went:
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RESEARCH: Working as a creative director in advertising i could see the struggle of fellow creatives (and me) to actually “be creative” and productive. That struggle derived mostly from myths and misconceptions about creativity: it’s a common believe that there are different levels of “innate” creativity, and that successful creatives are geniuses who were born this way, it’s a common believe that creativity is better done under stress, or that creativity is a “gift” that can’t be improved taught or learnt, “it simply happens”. Is this actually true? more than that: actually what is creativity? Nobody knew, no one could actually define it, so that pushed me to start this journey to understand and define creativity as deep as i could. I found and studied many scientific papers and publications about psychology and neurology related to creativity. I’ve read many biographies to understand the life of the most important creatives in history: DaVinci, Einstein, Newton, Tesla, Edison, Dalí, etc. I’ve studied historic creative booms like the ancient Greece and the Renaissance, i started to find patterns, interconnected insights that allowed me to create this course after around 6 years to get to a simple conclusion: creativity is a skill, not a gift, it can be taught and improved. There are certain perks that can and should also be improved to boost it. And most importantly. There is a creative method that can be followed to always, with no exception, get creative solutions to any problem. I had all of this information, then what?
INSIGHTS: The more i diged the more interesting it got. Despite popular belief, specialization is one of the biggest creativity killers. Creativity needs huge amounts of information, that’s why people with the widest range of experience tend to come with brighter ideas. There is not a single case of a creative master mind who is specialized in a single topic. Did you knew that Einstein was also a great violinist? Edison and Tesla invented all sort of products in not related fields, DaVinci is known as an artist, but he was also a mathematician, anatomist and engineer, he was a pioneer in the study of physics through his early discoveries in light dynamics and optics. All of those experiences, made all of this people the great artists, inventors and scientist they were.
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STRUCTURE: i found myself with a bunch of insights and notes in hundreds of physical and digital pages: a general definition for creativity, myths and misconceptions around it, explanations about their ancient religious and cultural origins, all the personality treats that highly creative people have in common and exercises to harness them, insights on how the brain and mind work when we create and how we can induce creative states, techniques on how to make ideas happen through a creative method, how to be able to focus, be more productive and make sure a solution will be functional and widely adopted. I have created an information architecture to categorize all of the content under a coherent and clear storytelling and then i started to create all of the content at depth.
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BRANDING: This brand is very special in many ways, it has to be the crown of all my work as a creative and the showcase and cover of years of research, the front page of my own way to work and methodology. This brand needed to be a tool for storytelling, it’s identity needed to work as a vehicle to grant order to the different concepts and structure, it had to be thought to work in a classroom screen, to be interactive and alive: always digital, therefore not limited to physical constraints. For this brand, the identity, colors and icons work together to tell a story, to generate a feeling of progress, to make content attractive and easy to grasp, exciting, fun, and good looking.
“It’s the first time i actually enjoy a history class”
IDENTITY: How to represent creativity in a single image that will be related with the ignition concept at the same time? It needed to represent my own definition of creativity which is: creativity is the ability to find solutions to problems using existing resources. this definition is scientifically shielded by evidence. In neurology terms: creativity is the conjugation of associative memory and abstract thinking. What does it mean? Abstract thinking is nothing more than our ability to see things that still does not exist using knowledge acquired from previous experiences. That’s why the better representation of abstract thinking for me is a spearhead.
ignición
The spearhead represents the beginning of modern human thinking: the creative ignition. During millions of years our ancestors used stones. But they used them as what they were: simple stones. At some point, we acquired a new mental device (abstract thinking) to see other possibilities inside that stone. For the first time we were able to see the spearhead inside the stone and to devise a plan to get it out of there marking the start of human creativity.
STYLING: I needed a vehicle to explain the most important principle about creativity: it is about using existing resources in different ways by breaking and mixing them: the more resources and experinces we have, the more creative we get. That’s explained through the history of human ideas. Creativity is exponential and that’s how we got from stone tools to digital code. Half the theoretical part of the course is explained through history: how making wine led to inventing the printing press? how that detonated many other ideas to bring us right to this moment? Could not find better way on how creativity works but through history itself. But there’s a problem, history is perceived as boring by most people. Well… make it look fun and attractive using design.
I collect ancient scientific illustrations, there’s where i found inspiration to define the course iconography. The type of content and the way i’d display this information allowed me to used this kind of complex iconography. All of this images mixed with a color palette helps to build a story and differentiate the modules content for this course.
“I love that every single slide of your class is a different design”
COLORS: How to make a neuroscience and history course attractive to creatives.? The color palette required to be vibrant, yet functional, able to keep the students interested but friendly for reading materials. I came up with this mix of high contrast and pastel colors which is dynamic and able to switch between high vibrancy and calm hues. Always good looking.
CONTENT: Eureka! (As Archimedes said around 2200 years ago. I’ve got an structure that made sense. But now what? it was time to turn all of this structure into real a 10 week course. Writing, editing, timing, testing, iterating, writing again, more iteration until i’ve found the sweet spot.
DIGITAL COURSE: After a year of teaching the course in the classroom, improving it and and see the results, i’ve decided it should be accessible to more people, so i turned it into an online course, available fro everyone. The same content of my lectures, condensed into a 3 hours course to be able to share it’s principles with anyone interested.
RESULTS: The enormous effort that this course represented has been worth it. In the last four years, I have had the opportunity to share my knowledge with more than 500 students. My course remains with a 4.7 out of 5 rating. Many of my students started my course in their beginnings in creativity and today they have received many of the most important awards in the world in design and advertising and I have received the most gratifying messages of my life from students letting me know that this course has changed their life and their career course. To know that this effort is helping to create better creatives and that their principles will accompany them for life is by far the most fulfilling project in my career.
