A new formula for creative success: combining the chocolate with the peanut butter.*

One of the most exciting new frontiers in digital creativity is brought to you by something called APIs (application programming interfaces). To a technical person they mean one thing, but to a creative marketer they mean this: you can create an entirely new mashup simply by combining your content with someone else’s. Granted lots of people have taken advantage of Google Earth, or embedded the code for a YouTube video, but the big one was CNN and Facebook allowing you to share the inauguration ceremonies with all of your friends, even though you might have been physically isolated in your cubicle. With streaming video on one side of your screen and your friends’ real time comments on the other, you had the modern day version of a “collective experience” made possible not by either CNN.com or Facebook, but only by putting the two together. You were doing something and were aware of everyone else doing it at the same time. A perfect example of the fastest growing movement in marketing: content strategy. It may be that from now on the most interesting media experiences that any of us create are achieved by simply putting the chocolate and peanut butter together. Which means it’s time for all of us – not just the technology folks – to learn what’s possible and start thinking this way.

* must admit that I stole this phrase from my friend Michael Ancevic

Helping kids learn to read, write and create is a good thing.

Years ago I had the pleasure of working with Jacques D’Amboise, the great New York City ballet dancer who performed under Balanchine. When his performing days were over, D’Amboise started an organization called National Dance Institute. D’Amboise believed that the arts had a unique power to engage and motivate young kids toward excellence. Initially he was met with skepticism. How many inner city boys would want to learn to dance? Three decades later, however, NDI transforms the lives of 35,000 New York City public school kids every year, teaching them the art, discipline and joy of dance.

While NDI never successfully expanded beyond New York City, it created a model that in some ways is now being replicated by David Eggers and friends. Eggers founded a group known as 826 Valencia in San Francisco to tutor young students in writing and literacy. Now 826 is national, a family of seven nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing at seven locations across the country. Its belief is simply that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

Check out 826 Valencia, the original chapter, or the newer Boston chapter. You can get involved as a volunteer, a tutor or take advantage of programs created for adult writers.

Yousuf Karsh: Portraits of Greatness

Yousuf Karsh is one of my favorite portrait photographers. Yet until last week I had only seen his images in books and online, never in an actual exhibit. Fortunately I caught the last day of Portraits of Greatness at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It’s now moving to the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a great show whether your interest is in photography or in the monumental subjects. Everyone who was anyone -- Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, Nikita Khrushchev, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Albert Einstein, Fidel Castro, Mohammed Ali, and Jacqueline Kennedy – wanted to sit for Karsh. My two favorite stories: He refused to photograph George W. Bush, not because of political reasons but because George W. said he didn’t care what the image was long as Karsh was the man who pushed the shutter release. Such a comment showed no understanding, respect or appreciation for Karsh’s technique and the time it took to know and capture the essence of his subjects. The second is how he achieved the expression on Churchill’s face in the image above. At the last moment, Karsh plucked Churchill’s cigar from his lips, resulting in this stern expression. Two other things are worth noting for anyone constantly looking for inspiration. Karsh got his idea for controlling light by studying Rembrandt portraits on exhibit in Boston museums during his two years apprenticing in that city between 1928 and 1930. There he realized that the artist could control how light affected a subject. A year later he joined the Ottawa Little Theater, and the spectacle of stage lighting helped him learn how to achieve the intense moods that define his images. They remind us that, among other things, we all need constant exposure to new sources of inspiration if we’re to make something great.

What ever happened to the big bucket of Legos?

Remember when the only Legos you could buy came in a big bucket filled with the little plastic bricks? No diagrams, no instructions, just an unwritten invitation to use your imagination and create. Now it’s all about Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Mars Mission. Sure, these perfectly choreographed components are cool, but they’re really just about following directions. Legos without diagrams encourage kids to invent something on their own. Take the instructions way and a kid has to envision a structure and then try and build it. She’s forced to take chances. She encounters failure. She starts over. And, of course, eventually she discovers what’s possible and experiences that little rush that comes from making something original. Who needs licensed Legos to teach kids conformity? We have schools to do that. Maybe it’s time to bring back the blocks.

Recently Googled, “I am not creative.”

“I’m not creative.” It’s a line I’ve heard hundreds of times. From clients, account executives, strangers on an airplane. For some reason they actually believe it’s beyond them to conceive a clever idea, write an ad, compose a story, or create a piece of art. Recently I Googled the actual quote, “I am not a creative person.” It generated thousands of results. Parents, teachers, scientists among them. The fact is we’re all creative. Or at least until about the third grade, when they make us surrender our crayons. From that point on parents, educators, and the rest of society teach us to conform, discourage us from being different and instead urge us to fit in. Sure some of us resist, but a lot us stop taking chances, fearing rejection or worse, failure. Of course it’s never too late to get your creativity back or help someone else jumpstart theirs. There are hundreds of ways to go about it. But here are a couple you can link to right from this page. The first is Hugh MacLeod’s How to be Creative manifesto. The second, oneword, is a simple little exercise that will get you started thinking, writing and taking chances. Which is what you used to do with those crayons, remember.

Social Networking: Discovery and Inspiration

One fascinating thing about social networking – Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, etc. – isn’t simply how it lets us connect with each other but how it lets us feed each other’s imagination. It’s never been easier to share ideas, insights, opinions and perspectives. We can open each other’s minds with everything from images, to sound bites, to content we might never find on our own. It even offers us a new way to collaborate. Use it the right way, follow the most interesting people, and you save a lot of time, stay more current, get introduced to new subjects of interest, and maybe even become a little smarter. For example I just found this. It's a sketchbook, sent in random order between four artists, two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast. Each artist had five days to complete an image and send it off to one of the other three for a visual response. A very cool project that I discovered using Stumbleupon, and one that gives me all kinds of ideas for similar based projects that could be done entirely online, in the social networking space that turned me onto it in the first place.

Animation the good old fashioned way

I first saw this film in the early 1990's and immediately hired Daniel Greaves, the academy award winning creator and director of Manipulation to do a series of TV commercials for my client Veryfine. The spots aren't quite as charming as this short film, but if I can find them in the next week or two I'll add to this post. In those days computer animation was in its infancy. This was done the old fashioned way, manually, by hand, a cell at a time.