This is a short book on how to become more creative. How short? The shortest that I could make it. That is also the gist of the advice offered in the book itself: to find the smallest form of your creative idea that you can complete with the skills and resources you already have. There is a bunch of other advice, in fact 25 pithy essays of it. Those essays will help you get started, keep going, silence your inner critic, and get to the end of your creative endeavours. It took me about a week to write the book, but 50 years for me to understand and start to use the principles within. My hope is that your journey will be quicker.
The design feedback handbook
This book is about giving feedback on interactive digital design. It covers how to feedback, how to receive it, and what to do with it afterwards. The book provides me and ways of thinking that will make all forms of design feedback both more fruitful as v more satisfying. Design feedback, when done right, requires minimal effort yet disproportionate results. You are about to learn and refine a practice that will vastly in your skills as a designer as well as elevate the quality of all the work that you produce.
101 things they didn't teach you in design school
You are the "you" in "101 things they didn't teach you in design school", whether you are a professional designer or a student about to become one. They didn't teach these things in design school because they couldn't have been learned in design school anyway.
We feel strongly about these 101 essays accrued gradually from our hard-earned life experience. We want them to be genuinely useful and pragmatic in a positive way for you as well, in that they are do's rather than dont's. Sometimes they might be obvious in hindsight, sometimes unexpected or even provocative. At any rate, we believe they will have value for you.
Intimate imagination
The most powerful design tool that we have is imagination. How strange, then, that we never see it spoken or written about. After all, it is what allows us to explore design ideas and step into the minds of possible users to picture how they might react to, and act with, the things we design. It is what a designer uses to design.
Imagination is an essential skill, but rarely taught. The following example of imagination in action may help to explain its use.
Whatever the topic, if you really don't know what to do, start with the number three.
If you don't have a plan, divide the available time into thirds. The first third is for exploration, generating initial ideas, figuring out what to design. The second third is for doing the heavy lifting of developing the design. The final third is for refining the design towards a desired result.
Are you a writer with an idea that teaches, challenges, or sharpens the
craft of creative work? We are interested in concise, practical writing
that respects the reader's time and leaves them with something they can
use immediately.
If your voice is clear, your argument is grounded in lived experience,
and your manuscript aims to move design thinking forward, we would like
to hear from you. Bring us the strongest short form you can make, and
we can explore where it might grow from there.
Garden
The Garden is the experience laboratory of Omniphor Press, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges'
short story, "The Garden of Forking Paths". Herein Omniphor explores the many possible
worlds and paths of the reading and writing hyperspace.
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