I define creativity as ‘the expression of self’.
The greatest creative practitioners put a little bit of themselves into their work. Their beliefs, concerns, and ambitions.
So too your work should be an accumulation of your beliefs, personality, and experiences. Of course, if you’re working in the applied arts collaborating with a client has its challenges, but even so you need to set out some guiding principles.
So ask yourself:
What excites me?
What drives me?
Fail to figure out the answers to these questions and your work will be empty.
For me, it is all about irreverence and its power to challenge and question. Irreverence drives the work I like and the work I want to create. I believe it gives my creativity an energy and attention that makes it stand out. And, of course, getting noticed is a prerequisite of any good idea.
The danger is that irreverence can be too challenging. So that’s where humor comes in. If you express your irreverent idea with wit and a smile, you’ll soon find your audience much more accepting.
Now I don’t want you to panic at the thought that you’ve got to get a philosophy by lunchtime. And don’t Google ‘philosophy’ to see what comes up. Just be aware that you need to develop one. I just let my philosophy emerge. My work and the work I like gave me the answer.
Ultimately, if you don’t have a guiding philosophy underpinning your thinking and work then what you produce won’t touch people. It can’t. And that’s the most important task of any piece of creativity.