Dennis Sherwood* poses the question: “Is creativity born or made?” If you’re born with it, does that mean that if you aren’t, you’re doomed never to be creative? I personally feel that we’re all born with creativity and then life’s course determines how or if we are able to cash in on it.  Like any skill, you have to keep practising it to get better.

I have worked in a classroom environment with preschoolers (3-4yr olds) and it always amazed me how even the most disruptive child settled down when there was a painting or ‘making’ activity going on (don’t we all get pleasure in creating or achieving something?). The industriousness and unhindered creative thinking would result in a splendid array of interpretations of a given project - even if there was an example to copy. A child’s imagination knows no boundaries, but the school curriculum kicks in and everyone has to start to conform.

When I was studying for my graphics degree I set a project for a class of 6 year olds at the school where my sister taught. It was a problem solving exercise: ‘invent a street cleaner’. I was so impressed by the creativity of these children – all of them – their cleaners did more that just clean streets, one enterprising child had a recycling unit on the back and a drinks dispenser on the side – how forward thinking was that back in 1984! I only hope later in life his lateral thinking was appreciated and rewarded. Luckily for the children at my sister’s school, creativity was nurtured as much as possible within the confines of the three Rs. It’s down to environment, nurture and personal drive to determine if the creative streak is fostered and comes to fruition.

Pablo Picasso:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

On we go into adulthood hopefully with some of our creativity and innovation skills still intact where once again, hopefully, it will be fostered and exploited in the workplace; and exactly how do you recognise creativity if you want to employ the trait? In some cases it’s pretty evident – in the arts related industries it’s generally measured by a qualification backed up by examples of work. In non-arts related industries it can be measured by past accomplishments and attitudes towards problem solving followed up with a product or service which is innovative and marketable, but if there’s not much of a track record then psychometric testing can be used – bearing in mind computer generated assessment may not capture the novelty of creative thinking when picking the perfect creative candidate for your organisation.

Once you’ve got your talent in the door, the next order of business is to do something with it; do you allow a free rein, then rein back in when the output goes beyond original? Too much harnessing of creativity defeats the object, after all that’s what you’re paying for. You have to allow some sort of freedom of expression to come up with exclusive approaches to a problem, and maybe not all solutions will work out. And here’s a thought, perhaps failure should be rewarded, not just success; reserve punishment for inaction.

Edward de Bono:
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Sustained success and growth is dependent upon the ability to innovate and exploit new ideas and new opportunities ahead of the competition, regardless of the sector you are in. But, as anyone who knows anything knows only too well, it is hard enough to get things done at all, let alone introduce a new way of doing things, no matter how good an idea may seem. A powerful concept can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognised but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. There are a lot of creative people in business and it’s more about identifying the best ideas and implementing them rather than generating endless supplies of them. Now that’s being creative.

Albert Einstein:
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Creativity is a process involving a mental and social process to generate new ideas or concepts, or a new association between existing ideas or concepts, and creative employees pioneer new technologies, new industries and power economic growth, but the process in which this happens tends to be chaotic and complex…

A. A. Milne:
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

… and the Brits aren’t too bad at this: Sir Tim Burners-Lee was credited for originally inventing the world wide web, Jonathan Ive was the principal designer of the iPod and has had the most impact on a company’s fortune, and 80 percent of the chips for mobile phones manufactured in the Far East are designed in the UK. Apparently, top innovators generate over 75 percent revenue from products not in existence five years ago. How creative is that?

We all seem to admire creativity as a culture, just as we admire education and goodness. We know all about the rewards (and the disorders) but too much of it and you might end up chopping off your ear or believing your own press and producing something so off the wall you’re almost certifiable. So I suggest when asked “How creative are you?”, the answer is: “Creative enough, thank you”.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

There are several websites out there measuring creativity, but here are a couple or so I found which might be of interest:

32 Traits of Creative People By Robert Alan Black.
http://www.creativity-portal.com/cca/alan-black/32-traits-creative-people.html

Dennis Sherwood – an unusual look at the uses of a rolling pin, but really it’s about a process which can be used to solve real problems, and generate new ideas in practical situations.
http://www.cul.co.uk/creative/how.htm

Creativity & Innovation (this is part of an educational assignment – who knows, I might be putting someone on a new career path (more about that in my next blog – square pegs, round holes…)
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/hs/rhim5200/htm_files/0029.htm

* Who is Dennis Sherwood? Dennis was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and is a Sloan Fellow, with distinction, of the London Business School. He was for 12 years a consulting partner in Deloitte Haskins + Sells, and, after their merger in the UK, Coopers & Lybrand; subsequently, he was an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and a Vice President of SRI Consulting.

This blog was written by Jackie Poate, Business Development, Cradduck Design Co.

A brand is a promise. When there is competition in the marketplace then it’s your brand that sets you apart from the rest. Your brand creates and maintains your reputation and reflects your customers’ experience of your organisation. A strong brand makes you stand out from the crowds.

Brands provoke an emotion. Take Boots for instance: when we think about Boots we think of trust; Virgin conjures up a personality – fun/innovative. Cadbury’s makes us of think of quality, the rich purple of the logo symbolises royalty (French Royalty used to use this exact shade of purple) Cadbury’s decided to trademark the colour and make it their own. Harley Davidson trademarked the sound of the deep-throated roar of the motorbike and soaking up endless miles of US blue-skied highway – companies become possessive about their brands.

Our loyalty beyond reason to brands has been neatly explained by Kevin Roberts from Saatchi and Saatchi in his book Lovemarks: “If a brand delivers the promise it earns a special place in the consumers’ hearts and minds. So whenever the market gets difficult listen to the customer and go back to the basics of branding”.

• define your brand values e.g. design excellence, trust, innovation, value for money, quality customer service.  Are you offering what your customers want? Are you matched? Once established, convey this message throughout the organisation, from your business card and website through to employee attitudes. Your employees are your brand ambassadors; do they reflect what you stand for?

• manage your brand – keep employees involved - give someone the responsibility for your brand strategy. Continually reinforce the message that what they do is important and explain why. Make sure they know that breaking the promises to customers that your brand makes - just once - can damage the brand and your business.

• review your brand – get regular feedback. Keep checking that what you promise will be delivered is. Stay relevant to your customers. Bear in mind people stay loyal to a brand, emotions are involved so any changes need to be made sensitively – think carefully about a rebrand.

• budget for your brand – a budget focuses the mind and forces you to prioritise. Budget for: design: logo, signage, business stationery or product packaging, your premises, advertising, time you’ll need to spend with employees to make sure they understand your brand, resources you’ll have to provide for employees to enable them to carry out what the brand promises, eg customer service costs, keeping your company website updated.

It’s evident then, that brand is more than the just the logo, it’s the core value of your business and what it means to your customers and suppliers and the attachment they have to it. So if anyone sees Shaun, the missing ORS sheep – please let us know.

This blog was written by Jackie Poate, Business Development, Cradduck Design Co.

OK, so here we are, teetering on the edge of the Festive Season, a New Year and a Global Recession (but not necessarily in that order) and what has 2008 brought us? Apart from 1 euro = 1 pound, the demise of Woollies, the collapse of the banking system and automotive industry as we know it, impending zero interest rates (can someone explain to me how that benefits people dependent on their savings to live?) and Doom and Gloom as Never Before.

Well it has brought us  down to earth with a bump, of course, but in spite of that there are loads of opportunities for design agencies like ours to do well in a recession. It works like this: in boom times, companies reinvent themselves and employ very expensive agencies to do it for them. It’s called rebranding. In tough times,  shrewd marketeers don’t stop spending or reinventing themselves, they just do it smarter - they use provincial agencies like Cradducks who can provide exactly the same, top quality design work but at a fraction of the cost of the big boys. They think sideways, along with us designers, to come up with leaner, meaner ideas and ways of getting more out of less.

For instance, one of our major clients has given up litho printing their 400 copies per month internal magazine and are doing it online instead, with a very limited digital print run to satisfy those who can’t cope with, or can’t access, the online version. That means a downturn in print, granted, but we continue to produce the magazine for them and have made it more interactive into the bargain.

So, is it the survival of the fittest? Yes, I guess it is and I certainly hope I won’t be sitting here in six months’ time eating my words - plenty of old, established names have already gone to the wall in this area in this industry and plenty more will go before we see Boom Time again. That means that we have to offer something they can’t, or couldn’t, and do it better. Which is where a few grey hairs come in handy: not only have we seen recession before (this is the third big one in my experience) but we have survived it and become stronger for it. We must carry on where others have left off, and we must provide what our clients want - to the brief, creatively produced, on time, on budget and with the minimum of amends.

So, to all our loyal customers, hang on in there as we intend to, and remember that in a recession it pays to market yourself even more than before. And to anyone wondering if we really can come up with the goods, pick up the phone and call me.

Happy New Year to you all.

David

To have a blog is one thing - but to have a blog that actually looks like your website is infinitely better, isn’t it? It’s taken a while but Stuart and David W got their heads together today and the result is a blog that actually fits within our brand. Well done, chaps.

All this leads on nicely to the gentle art of Consistency of Brand. In the days when a brand was a make of cornflakes or shoe polish and corporate identity was what has now become branding, it was always the inconsistency of logos, fonts, colours, styles that let most good identities down. Just because the methods have changed it doesn’t mean the problems have, though. What we now have is the same old problem - different promo items seem to have sprung from different places by different routes and with varying results.

End result - inconsistency.

Part of our job is to co-ordinate all those items - stationery, exhibition materials, literature, clothing, gifts, ads, website etc. so they all look as though they come from the same place.

It’s not really rocket science, more joined up thinking, but it does elude some people.

Next time you think ’should this flyer match that folder?’ the answer is probably ‘yes’.