Hey ho!
Weekends are made to relax, enjoy life and truer words cannot be spoken when it comes to creating.
Once again, we had an extremely pleasant time prototyping, cutting and stitching for hours.
We've often been asked for our creative process, so I wanted to share it, in order to show how personal this actually path is.
Everybody has its own dynamic and when many people are involved, it tends to become as complex as it is exciting.
In our case, there are two of us:
Melanie is a sweet and astonishing mix of creativity, craziness and rationality. Like wild animals, her ideas can pop anywhere, at anytime and very unpredictably. As for me, I have an out-of-the-box approach as I really love to imagine common things in random places and at random moments.
Contrary to many objects creators, the first step in our creative process is not based on a need but more on a will, just like artists do :) We hear, read or see something that usually lights a bulb simultaneously in both of our minds. Then, we speak a lot about it, always laugh a lot and choose a way to present it in an original way.
To gather everything, we share a Google Docs, speak on dedicated Slack channels or write on colored sticky notes depending on the situation we are in at this precise moment.
- Google docs is like a "brain dump" thing
- Slack is random pile of information we don't want to lose and we'd like to share rapidly
- Colored sticky notes that we've been using for a couple of months is game changing. Have you heard about "Kanban flows"?
Kanban is a scheduling and project management technique used essentially in the tech industry. Wikipedia also says: "Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work". Sounds boring right? But actually, we find it pretty fun: we've picked colors and assigned each one to a type of product (green for notebooks, yellow for greetings cards, etc.). Then, on a big wall, we create columns: "Ideas Box", "Design", "Prototype", "Production" and "Promotion" and move notes from a column to another so that we have instant access to the creative flow. It helps us to:
- Instantly know the reasons why a project is stalling
- Sort projects we really want to achieve and the others (depending on the time they stay in certain columns for instance)
- Decorating a wall :)
The crazy thing about it is that when you think it's done, it's not really "done". Half of the process is based on creating and the other one - which is as thrilling in my opinion - is speaking about it, but that's another article we'll share with you soon! Cheers.
