Chuckin' a Curve Ball
How to keep your mind sharp with blunt obstacles.
Our minds can be temperamental assholes at times. In order to get some fresh and exciting ideas out of them we have to do a merry little dance to make sure we get the atmosphere just right.
Sometimes your mind wants you to wear comfy socks and listen to Barry Manilow, and other times it requires you to punch yourself in the groin while bungee jumping.
Unfortunately, we never quite know what mood our brain is going to be in before we sit down to think of ideas, so we’re never completely sure what level of ambience we should be setting for it. We can, however, combat this issue with some resistance training. Training that finds a nice balance between creating things with total freedom and creating things with tight restrictions.
Today, I want to talk to you about creating with restrictions. For those of you who like a little audio cuddle, my latest 10 minute verbal vomit is about this very thing which you can listen to below:
Creating with heavy restrictions is just as useful (maybe even more so) as giving yourself full creative freedom to play. Pretty much every major innovation in science and technology was created as a result of restricted time or budgets. It forces you to approach things in a way you’re not fully in control of, and my giddy aunt, is that exciting.
There are loads of ways you can set restrictions up for yourself to test how it changes your thinking.
Restrict the amount of words you can use
Confine yourself to using only one tool
Tie one hand behind your back
Set a 15 minute time limit
These will vary depending on your actual creative pursuit but if you need help thinking of some restrictions to put in your way, I’ve created a little helping hand for you.
As you know, I’m a graphic designer and the vast majority of you fine folks who have subscribed to this newsletter are also graphic designers. With this in mind I’ve created something called ‘The Curveballer’.
Think of it as the most annoying human you’ve ever worked with. No matter what you create, it’ll never be happy with it and it will always ask you to take it in a completely different direction. It’s essentially an incredibly irritating feedback generator.
Why would you put yourself through this kind of torture? Because you’re a creative athlete and this is your mind gym and that’s the best analogy I can currently come up with.
Here’s how it works. I have uploaded a generous amount of very aggravating feedback requests onto a custom GPT (yes, you’ll need a ChatGPT account for this). The idea is to create something for a personal project like a logo, poster, t-shirt design, etc. Then jump onto The Curveballer and ask it for feedback. You do this by simply typing the word “Go”. It will give you a very strange request which you then have to figure out how to implement without ruining your design.
I’ll show you what I mean on the video below
You can access The Curveballer here. Get involved, type “GO” in the prompt bar and see where the madness takes you. If you’re from another creative discipline and you’d like me to set up one of these for you, just let me know.
Finally, in case you missed it.
My inspiration for all of these curveballs and restrictions was the video below. I asked my wife to throw increasingly odd requests at me to test my creativity, my patience and ultimately… our marriage.
Test yourself this week by putting an incredibly inconvenient restriction in your way and let me know how you get on.
Toodle bye bye
Dave