Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant. • Hacker News Board

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#41

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 3:28 AM UTC

blankenship wrote: post #32

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

They're not art (typically) they're design—they exist to solve a problem. They're not all trash, sometimes they're rather brilliant solutions to selling a product or service or experience (of course they're still selling). Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.

Hm. Trash has a dozen meanings. I guess I would say, its trash in the use-once, disposable sense. Nobody thinks their ad is going to be timeless.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#42

Post by dissident » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 4:31 AM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #40

TomOfTTB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say Art isn't Art unless it's the highest form of art is silly. Is the work of a great comic book artist not art because it isn't Picasso?

A comic book is so far above an ad as to make the comparison silly.

That's absurd. Just because the motive of the advertisement is to sell you an idea, doesn't mean it isn't done creatively and artistically. In fact, advertisements tend to be most effective when they are extremely artistic and unique.

Art is supposed to be emotionally engaging. What does a comic book do better?

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#43

Post by Vandy_Travis » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 4:57 AM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41

blankenship wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not art (typically) they're design—they exist to solve a problem. They're not all trash, sometimes they're rather brilliant solutions to selling a product or service or experience (of course they're still selling). Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.

Hm. Trash has a dozen meanings. I guess I would say, its trash in the use-once, disposable sense. Nobody thinks their ad is going to be timeless.

I 100% agree, when you're talking about the ads that are aired a hundred times a day on syndicated television. Then again, the shows are terrible, so I suppose it's fitting that the ads match.

However, what about Apple's 1984 ad? Or the BMW mini-movie advertisements they ran about 6 years ago?

There are some incredibly cool concept ads out there. They usually are not the ones broadcast, but if you watch the end of the year awards for the industry, there are some very creative minds working there. (And creating some impressive work).

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#44

Post by InclinedPlane » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 5:20 AM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #17

InclinedPlane wrote: post #9

If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense. If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so. The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you sho…

Perhaps "trash" is going too far, even so I find it offensive that someone would put forward the notion that a work environment that is suitable for producing mildly creative advertisements should be the universal model for all creative work.

Advertisements are perhaps the shortest lived, least substantive, and least impactful creative works.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#45

Post by InclinedPlane » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 6:05 AM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #20

InclinedPlane wrote: post #9

If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense. If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so. The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

When it comes to producing amazing work, quantity beats quality. That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfect 1. In the end the quality will be higher. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_e...

This is how you build skill and artisanship but that's not the sum total of art. Is James Patterson the best writer of our age? He wrote 10 novels just in 2011 alone.

Shockingly there's more to art than a trite truism. If you want to acquire skill, go for quantity. But after that, if you want to become a master, if you want to impact people's lives in a way they appreciate and care about you'll need more than skill, you'll need inspiration.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#46

Post by klbarry » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 6:28 AM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #26

adorton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.

Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers. Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the indust…

The advertising business is blooming with new technologies, in all the fields you mentioned (just take a look at sample projects of any of the major agencies right now). Designers for websites, interactive ads display, apps, and much more. The pie has just gotten bigger with more technology, with new positions.

And believe me, the ad industry has known about brain science since the 1920s. Google "A Century of the Self" and Edward Bernays. And direct marketing has had astounding data mining capabilities for decades ("Being Direct" by Lester Wunderman is a good reference here).

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#47

Post by klbarry » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 6:30 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #18

Is this why the ad industry is getting eaten for lunch by Google/Facebook?

Considering this is obviously and forthrightly shown to be a very unusual method of managing employees in the first few paragraphs of the article, common sense would tell you that this could not be evidence for anything like that.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#48

Post by 6ren » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 8:32 AM UTC

My experience is that creative work is trial and error. Can try to put yourself in a position to have inspiration, but then your actual task is to catch it when it comes, and then figure out how the hell to make it work. If it doesn't, then try something else. By being immersed in the work, working it, you are more likely to have inspiration (Poincare worked like this). Sometimes you have inspirations that are solutions to a problem - sometimes you have inspirations of what a problem is, and that it would be really cool to solve it, and that a solution exists (just, not what it is).

Some writers have this attitude too, saying they keep fixed hours when they must be at the typewriter, whether they feel like it or not. [Note: this is successful writers, who publish regularly - some might call them hacks, like Stephen King. Hobbyist writers don't need this.] There's an old writer's saying that nicely sums this up:

  Inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#49

Post by dhx » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 9:39 AM UTC

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #7

I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services. Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, th…

Marketing: who is the client? what image are they trying to create? what are the target demographics? how much time do they have? how much money do they want to spend? which mediums should be targeted?

Those factors can change quickly depending on news and current affairs, someone beating you to an original idea, technological changes and business changes (mergers, new services/products becoming the focus).

Software development, by your metrics, is very similar. Instead of selling marketing people, you're selling programmers.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#50

Post by dhx » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 9:57 AM UTC

Is this a case of enforcing strict work hours and conditions as a "performance management" technique to ensure employees aren't slacking off? I imagine it is difficult to know whether someone in a creative job has actually performed as much work as they claim to have done.

The other plausible reason for strict work conditions that comes to mind is for highly collaborative jobs. Jobs where you're not paid to work on your own and produce result X, but rather, you're paid to be part of a team, continually bouncing ideas off each other to produce result Y. I guess it would be similar to pair programming -- with more than 2 people involved.

Other than the reasons above, I can't see much reason for forcing people to work in a strictly-enforced rule-based workplace. Have I missed something?