Tag: creativity

Pro-immigration or anti-immigration? It’s something that has been hitting the headlines in the UK since UKIP emerged from the dark recesses of middle earth, immigration has been flooding the minds and news reports of every British television channel, most of which, have a negative slant. This, my friends totally aggravates the living daylights out of me and for many reasons! In this post, I will try to discuss both the pros and cons of immigration but also how it affects a country’s productivity and creativity. Continue “Why being pro-immigration boosts a country’s creative powers”

Its no secret that over the last 5 years financially speaking it has been one of the toughest, if not the toughest periods in world economic history. It is for reasons such as this that makes people stop believing in their dreams and striving for the ‘perfect life’, this blog post discusses why you should keep believing in your dream and what you may encounter along your path.

1. You question if you are a dreamer, but you aren’t the only one

Everyone who is anyone has dreams. Whether it is becoming a musician or artist, running a successful enterprise or winning the lottery. Many people will try for a little while, maybe not do quite the right things to make a success of their chosen goal and so feel it is out of reach. The problem with most people who reach for the stars, including myself, want things now! As human beings we are not patient and

2. If you stop following your highest ideal what is the point?

When I reached the bottom of my barrel in life I was quite literally hanging by a thread…should I stay or should I go? Vast amounts of debt, no opportunity, lack luster relationship and a world that seemed very unjust.

I was so close to ending it all but was pulled back from the brink of the grim bloke’s hand by the love of my family. Being so close to death removed my fear of dying and reduced my fear of what others opinions of myself are. This gave me the drive and determination to become a professional creative, albeit inhouse but I was turning my life around.

The message here is what is the point of life if you give up on your dreams? One day WE WILL die, one day money, experience and the people around you WILL go. Will you look back on life and say you did all you could to follow the path of your dream whilst not hurting others as you go or will you look back and regret that you should have done more whilst you were young?

If I was 20 again I would tell my young self NOT to go to university and waste 30k on an over priced government educational scheme and instead teach myself web coding at a much young age, but hindt sight is a wonderful thing!

3. Others tell you that you can’t do it, do you believe them?

When you discuss your ideas with others they will laugh at you, they will tease you and torment you. They can’t see your vision and they are scared as hell to do anything that involves risking their livelihood, respect and to be quite honest, most people don’t know where to start or to find the time so see any venture as ‘unrealistic’.

You need to stop giving a shit (pardon my french ) what other people think about you and your ideas if you are to give your dream a go. If you listen to people’s opinions and value the wrong ones because your ego has been emotionally hurt then you are giving up on life! Yes as human beings we naturally want to be accepted but get used to being rejected because following your dream people WILL try to pull you back for fear of feeling you will do better than them.

4. People tell you that you are deluded

Once, I worked as a general builder, painting and decorating, labouring and apprentice plumbing. I was working for my father under his small business and I had a jolly good time and a lot of banter with the painters in particular! One of them was very very intelligent, read a lot of books and had so much knowledge should have probably been a lecturer, another was a couple of years older than me and a kind soul and the last one was Mr Pessimism , actually he probably would have won Mr Pessimism World had there been such a competition. Don’t get me wrong, he was a great guy and very kind but had given up on his dreams long ago and here I was dreaming!

He would tell me things such as ‘this may be the best time of your life you are having right now’ & ‘you won’t ever be rich John’ & ‘wake up!’ but I would always knock the comments back and let them go over my head, I won’t stop dreaming until they day my heart stops.

5. But I have no finances

This is the major stumbling block on people’s dreams.

If like me you have no finances because a) all your money was plowed into a very clever marketing ploy by government to get more money off its young citizens by telling them to get a degree ‘because thats what everyone does to get a better life’ ( what a lot of cow poop!) or b) a partner expected you to give everything you had to be able to live even though you had very little or c) you had a bit of a ‘oh im young! I want to live now’ attitude or d) all of the above, you feel as broke as a pauper, how can you fund your dream?

There are ways such as angel investors or even borrowing money from friends/family. Or if your dream isn’t business related and is to become a model or actor then look for modelling agencies, find the ones that don’t take a fee for taking your photographs, join starnow.co.uk and find those auditions. Unless YOU put yourself forward you may never be known about.

Plus, now that social media is around it makes it a lot to easier to network and link to people around the world who are in the industry you want to join or do business with! Start tweeting, google plussing, liking and generally having online conversations, you don’t know where they will lead!

6. Dreams drive you to gain a better life

Like I have already mentioned when you hit rock bottom when all hope is gone the dream can save you and drive you to attempt to reach the goal that seems so unreachable to all others. I nearly tried to talk a family member out of a dream she had because I didn’t think the business model was real, I felt it was a corporation exploiting people. Then I thought…who the hell am I to tell someone they can’t do something!? If they believe it and have studied the business idea in detail then go for it, one day we will be dead so at least lets try and live the life we want to have.

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Am I living my dream? In some ways, yes! I have managed to land a job where I am using my creative talents, I have learnt such a great deal from my current position, my MD has given me a lot of new information I never knew and I am ever so grateful to being given the opportunity by someone and for someone to see something in me after 5 years of struggling.

I met the most wonderful woman who became my wife whom I would never had met if it wasn’t for my employer.

My employment restored my belief that I had something to offer, that the world is mainly made up of good people and that my dream to achieve a ‘comfortable lifestyle’ can be achieved so for this alone I am always indebted to my employer, MigSolv the data centre experts. The things is, if I had given up on my dream and said ‘oh well, I couldn’t become an architect in my hometown I’ll just do anything’ in may 2008 then would I be a branding designer right now? Probably not.

Don’t stop believing!

For a while , I have been thinking about creating a shop where you can buy art prints of my paintings, photography & sketches as I have quite a few but they are hidden away in my own collection not seeing the light of day. I didn’t really know how to go about this but I knew there must be some website out there that will offer the ability to create and sell prints to the public.

DeviantArt Print Shop

DeviantArt is a social media platform for visual creatives to display their work & connect with people who like the same things as them. Not only this but they also provide a service for you to be able to sell your works! Fantastic place to start for any new young artist! Whether I will make any sales or not is yet to be seen but it does give a platform in order to do this fairly easily.

Prints Available

Below is the art works that are available for sale in various formats from mugs, coasters, small prints, canvases & photos.

[button color=”dark” url=”http://jawilsondesign.deviantart.com/prints/?utm_source=deviantart&utm_medium=userpage&utm_campaign=printstab” target=”_blank”]Vist JAWilsonDesign Shop[/button]

Soul Tree Enlightenment

Life Drawing

Norwich Cathedral

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Norwich Cathedral

Norwich Cathedral

More art work will be updated weekly to the shop so please check it our regularly or follow me on twitter to be notified of new works for sale.

I think with the recent publicity of Instagram’s new policy on who owns the copyright of the images you upload has started making many people wonder.. “should I use Instagram or not”?, particularly if you are uploading all your professional creative works to the social media platform, but I believe that Instagram does have its place in any designer’s app arsenal. It can actually be a really useful and beneficial tool to all creatives and here is why I think so.

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Raising Awareness

The benefit to any budding photographer, artist or graphic designer is obvious. It can show to others what you are capable of and also how you see the world. Creatives see the world in a slightly different way than a “normal” person, a lot of things have metaphors, they see composition in things that others wouldn’t batter an eyelid at and Instagram allows others to see into the world of our creative minds..i think that is a very powerful tool for all creatives, it definitely inspires us to create.

For fun

For me, being creative is a hell of a lot of fun and is on par with video games and high adrenaline sports. Just taking random photos of things you experience and things you see can be great to share with the world.

Inspiration catalogue

As a professional designer I am constantly thinking of how things can be designed, improved or made exciting and sometimes when you walk past somewhere something sparks inside you. Instagram can be a place to store all the things that inspire you and hash tagging each image will also make it easier to find. You may argue Facebook offers the same option but I believe using Instagram for this purpose is a much better app than Facebook for storing inspiration & ideas from general life.

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Don’t be daft

Don’t put images on Instagram that you have spent weeks creating, I don’t believe Instagram was made for that. Unless you are happy for others to lift your hard work and use it as their own or alternatively if you have already received payment for your creation then that is fine, it could even help you build a larger fan base.

Improving design composition

If you set your camera to have grid lines what you can do is really play with composition ( I will discuss this in the near future when I discuss the basics of photography ), this is useful for photography but can also be applied to other areas such as graphic design, web site design & painting. You will notice you really pay attention to how you layout your composition whenever you work and how important it is in creating excellent design.

Increase creativity

It also has the knock on effect of becoming more creative as you are constantly thinking how you might be able to catch the perfect image and seeing everything as a work of art rather than just passing your time through space and time. I highly recommend using it as much as possible to increase your imaginations power.

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Benefits outway the negatives

If you are concerned about copyright and who is using your images then don’t use instagram, if on the other hand you are happy for others to see life through your eyes and you want to improve your creative skills then instagram is probably one of the best apps out there right now. The world is a beautiful place, we should record it, share it and spread the positive things we experience, lets change our perceptions of reality together

So you are setting up a new business and you need a business card created that really stands out from the industry you are entering, how are you going to do that? Hire a designer to create a very abstract creative design? Well Vistaprint recently contacted me with some fantastic novel ideas you may not have considered..

Aboveis an infographic with 31 creative uses for business cards .

To see this in more clarity please visit my pintrest board here .

8 of the best ideas from the Vistaprint infographic I particularly like.

creative uses for business cards no 1

Meeting a potential client in person? Why not make them feel extra special with a special discount on the business card you give them? That may just close the deal if they were wavering about it..everyone likes to feel a little bit special.

creative uses for business cards no 2

Every single business in the modern age now uses social media to connect to its audience and if they don’t they should do. Make sure to put your social media id’s on your business card for a more personal and direct connection to your fans, customers & business partners.

creative uses for business cards no 3

Got a major event coming up in the future or one that you attend regularly? Make your Customers aware on your business card.

creative uses for business cards no 4

Giving your business card a 2nd purpose other than to give your details to the person receiving it may get the recipient using it more places. A bookmark is one idea, particularly good if you are a 2nd hand book shop. Just think about your product or service you are selling and convey it on your business card if possible.

creative uses for business cards no 5

Are you an event organiser? A holdiay rep or maybe a tour guide? Why not ask your customers to upload their pictures to a location online to share their experiences? Your customers view points are the most valuable thing to help promote more sales to others.

creative uses for business cards no 6

Making others feel good about themselves or seeing another smile can be very rewarding, why not send a little positive vibe out into the world. Just be careful not to use quotes as not every quote will agree with every personality. An example, “you are beautiful” could be great for a beautician or life coach.

creative uses for business cards no 7

Getring good feedback from your clients?Great! That will surely help give your potential customers a little more confidence in you. Before you do this make sure you get permission from your customers first, you don’t want to upset anyone.

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Loyalty is a rare thing to find these days with so many different companies desperate to win your business rewarding that loyalty with something special will make your customer feel special & give a positive impression of your company.

Want more ideas for business cards? Check out my pinterest board or alternatively use the contact button above and i can help design you a very unique and creative business card for your company.

Related articles across the web

• 20 Creative and Unique Business Card Templates
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Sometimes, just like writers, we visual designers get creative blocks and we need a wee bit of inspiration to get our sparks flying. No matter how much you try it just doesn’t come to you. In this blog I plan to give you three locations to get logo design inspiration from.

The first website I have stumbled across is : –

Logopond

Logopond is a place for designers of logos to show a little bit of what they can do and their particular style amongst others. I am not on this yet but you bet, I’ll be on here shortly!

Visit Logpond for logo design inspiration

 Salford Challenge

Salford Challenge is a website where two designers go head to head design a new brand then other designers vote for the one they think has the x factor. These guys have some really great design skills that are worth a viewing every now and then.

Visit Salford Challenge Site

The Great Outdoors

Sometimes we are over thinking things and a simple break and stroll in a park will put the sparks back in your mind. Relaxing and having fun is all a part of being creative. Don’t stress man! Reeeelaaaax.

As i find more locations to find inspiration for logos I will add more posts regarding this. Best of luck in finding that genuis idea.

Related articles across the web

• 15 Beautiful Logo Design Services
• 10 Mistakes Logo Designers Should Avoid
• High End Jewelry Logo Design
• Design Inspiration Sites