happiness is...

I've been really enjoying catching up on some of the Creative Mornings Melbourne video series, so I thought I'd mention another recent one that provided me with quite a bit of food for thought. Designer/Illustrator and 'multi-disciplinary' maestro, Beci Orpin, spoke about happiness and creativity in this lovely video.

Beci speaks with lots of examples from her life about what keeps her happy, and links this all very closely to her ability to maintain a work life driven by design. She mentions the following happiness points important to her:

+ her sketchbooks
+ making mistakes
+ riding her bike
+ breaking the rules
+ having her cats around
+ diversity
+ finding inspiration
+ community
+ running your own race

Two things I found quite wonderful to hear her speak about were 1. making mistakes, and 2. running your own race. Beci shares a very honest tale of what she feels was probably a business 'mistake' earlier on in her designer career. I found it refreshing to hear how she viewed this and the learning she drew from it. It would be easy to write something like this off as a failure and dwell on it unproductively for ages. Instead, she used the experience to figure out what she is better at and used this to propel her forward into other design adventures.

The second point, about running your own race, was communicated simply, but holds a powerful message. Beci talks about not getting caught up in what your creative peers are doing and measuring your progress against this. Feeling envious, jaded or ripped off 'is a really big waste of energy', she says. Which is so true when you think about it. And turning your thinking around to see it like this totally changes your perspective from being a negative one to being positive. So run your own race is her main message here.

What brings you happiness in your creative world? Enjoy the video!

the new image economy

Recently I watched this fascinating and inspiring talk by the very talented Lucy Feagins from The Design Files as part of the Creative Mornings Melbourne series.

What I loved is the way Lucy talks about something she calls 'the new image economy'. She does in the context of the publishing industry having been thrown on its head of late and talks about what this means for image makers, and how they might make this topsy-turvy space work for them, rather than against them. As well as describing the way the image making industry works in publishing (both print and online) she argues how the new image economy enables image makers to 'be in the driver's seat' and wrest control, despite appearances to the contrary with the proliferation of images on the internet.

The main take-home message raises quite a few questions regarding traditional ideas about intellectual property, something image makers have had a hard time hanging onto over the last 5-10 years, particularly on the internet. Lucy speaks about this issue in relation to her super-popular blog, The Design Files. I was intrigued by the different phases she says she has traveled through to reach a space where she says she has become 'quite zen' about it all, understanding as she does that the image economy has a way of paying back, even when her images are pinned on say, Pinterest, or re-blogged. It's an interesting notion, one with much value and enormous dollops of generosity. And one I think I like very much.

See what you think. Go watch the whole talk now.

Thanks to Erin Wilson's blog for helping me find the video in the first place.