Akbar Bartholemew and the Giraffe On His T-Shirt
Akbar Bartholomew had a file open but the ideas weren't coming. So he turned to the giraffe on his t-shirt. "Giraffeonmytshirt," said Akbar, "Where does inspiration come from?"
The giraffe paused in his chewing and declared:
"This is good, my friend," said Akbar. "And it feels true. But I need something more concrete. And, uh, helpful."
"Okay, what's the best advice you've ever gotten on making stuff?"
"Well, back in 2000, this, uh, friend of mine was working at a world famous magazine for teen girls" (the giraffe interrupted with a brief snort, which Akbar chose to ignore) "and lamenting a slump in creativity, that he was going through, he decided to have a chat about it with a freelance designer named Rob Giampietro."
"And what did this Rob say?"
"His advice was to just make projects out of everything I do, er, my friend does," said Akbar. "For example, this Rob guy, he said he once decided to take 66 pictures of route 66. Which is just cooler and more inspiring than trying to take, I don't know, say, 7 pictures of Route 66, right?"
"And where", said the giraffe (after releasing a slight whimper at having been relegated to mere frame story filler), "is this Rob now?"
"He's a partner in a cool little design firm called Giampietro and Smith
"Lovely. How about regular folks, who might not be such hardcore design-heads? Hobbyists and, you know, just folks who want to make stuff?" asked the giraffe.
"Okay, well, my friend Tori said she wanted to get better at photography. So she decided to take a self-portrait every day."
"For like 5 days or something?" asked the giraffe, again with a snort.
"For 365, actually," Akbar said.
"Which, I assume, is burning her out pretty quick?"
“Actually if you compare her recent photos...
...with her earliest ones - you can see that she's actually getting more inspired as the project pushes her along.
"Well," said the giraffe, "That's two examples. One more and you'll have enough for a formulaic bit of journalism. Have another?"
"Okay, well that friend of mine of the aforementioned not-so-manly previous job? Well, he likes to mix projects together. Like, when he wanted to learn a bit of final cut, he mixed it with a sibling-collabo Father's Day project:
Happy Father's Delay: Hip hop! Puppets! Procrastination! from Kid Ethnic (aka Saleem) on Vimeo.
... and when he first started playing with recording on a Mac, he mixed it with his friend’s love of alpacas. That sort of stuff."
"A poor choice of animal," said the giraffe. "But not a bad idea. Maybe you could use it for this piece your working on? Like make it both an article and a short story or something like that?"
"Yeah," said Akbar. "But that sounds like a lot of work. I'd rather sit around wait for some magical mythical animal to come along and whisper ideas in my ear."
"Good luck with that plan," said the giraffe. "But I must say, it sounds pretty lame to me."
comments
Saleem, this is inspiring.
Ooh! I totally just thought of one! What if you took an ordinary household object, like, say, a lightbulb, and some ordinary symbols, like, say, letters of the alphabet ("F" and "U" being the most common examples) and combined the two into something entirely new, like, say, an online magazine logo? That would be AWESOME. You should try it.
Oh. Right. Sorry. You've been there, done that.
That notwithstanding, the logo speaks of inspiration, too. As do the Giraffeonyourshirt and you.