For web designers (and really most anyone in our economy of knowledge work) creativity is our capital. Customers choose us to provide creative answers to their business challenges. With a steady stream of work coming in, staying at our creative peak is essential. Here at Element Fusion, we’re each constantly looking for ways to keep ourselves in that creative frame of mind. Organizationally, we want to provide an environment in which our designers and developers can thrive. I have written before about ways to break a creative block on an individual level, but sometimes it is helpful to take a step back and think about what we know about creativity and how we can use that knowledge.

Several years ago, Fast Company published a great article entitled The 6 Myths Of Creativity which detailed the results of an exhaustive study of creativity in the workplace. The article was written by Teresa Amabile, head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Creativity has been on my mind recently, and I found this article in some old bookmarks. It is full of great ideas that may change the way you think about creativity both in your personal workflow and in your organization. I’d recommend that you read the entire article when you have time, but I've summarized what I consider to be the highlights below.

1. Myth: creativity comes from creative types

The first myth is one of the most disappointing. It is unfortunate how many organizations compartmentalize creativity to the marketing and design departments. Creativity should be fostered by all workers at every level. Creativity isn’t just about aesthetics and design. Creativity is ideas. Novel ideas, inventive solutions, and out-of-the-box thinking can be useful in every part of your work, by every employee. Pixar, one of the most successful movie studios ever, regularly encourages creativity in every part of their business. Their Pixar University concept lets employees spend a few hours each week in on-campus classes, and this includes all employees. Receptionists might take a drawing class. Food services staff can learn about color theory. The idea is that the more everyone knows about what Pixar does, the better they will be. Creativity is everywhere.

2. Myth: money is a creativity motivator

The study concluded that money was rarely a motivation for most workers. Instead, feeling appreciated or valued and being challenged were more conducive to high creativity. Creative workers want to be deeply engaged, challenged at a level appropriate to their skills, and they want to work on projects that they care about and are interested in. Even if you’re a freelancer working from home, you should be working for more than just money. Seek out projects that are personally interesting to you — projects that are challenging that you can invest something of yourself in.

3. Myth: time pressure fuels creativity

The old adage that “I work best under pressure” was found to be unlikely by the study. While working at the last minute or under pressure of a deadline may remove some distractions and make you feel productive, you might not be doing your most creative work. I found this passage particularly enlightening:

People were the least creative when they were fighting the clock. In fact, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover — when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down not only on that day but the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem.

I often try to separate my work from “the clock." It isn’t uncommon to get stuck on a creative problem, and I have learned that trying to brow-beat a solution by simply forcing yourself to work on it or throwing more time into it never works. It is only after I take a break, work on something else, or take a walk that my mind is able to restore the calm and come up with something new. Countless times I have worked on a tough problem all afternoon only to have the obvious solution hit me in the car on the drive home.

4. Myth: fear forces breakthroughs

Here, the study challenges the "tortured artist" whose miserable existence is the fuel for creative expression (sorry, Dashboard Confessional). The study, which monitored the journals of a set of workers found overwhelmingly that creativity was more positively associated with happiness than sadness or anger. In fact, they were able to observe that workers were happiest when they had come up with a creative idea and that being happy one day often led to creativity on the next. This suggests a cycle where creativity fuels more creativity.

5. Myth: competition beats collaboration

Competition may be a motivator, but it might not promote the most creative solutions. When workers compete, their natural tendencies are to close up and keep ideas to themselves. Workers who collaborate share openly and this sharing can lead to discussion and ideas that the individuals might never arrive at alone. Agile development promotes the power of small, focused, and creative teams that shuck the restrictions of old business to work quickly, efficiently, and to focus on the customer in ways that individuals cannot.

6. Myth: a streamlined organization is a creative organization

The final result applies more to monolithic corporations than your typical web design shop, but the base conclusion remains the same: a negative, unstable, and fearful environment is a detriment to creativity. Workers only motivated to keep their jobs are not going to produce creative results.

We live in an interesting time where we are finding that many of the things we learned growing up about what constitutes hard work and productivity can be impediments to the very environments these “rules” proclaim to foster. We should all be looking at ways to encourage our own creativity and how we can encourage more creative thinking in every part of our businesses.

At Element Fusion, we are always looking for ways to foster creativity in our work. We’d love to hear about how you’re making your work and company more creative. Tell us about it in the comments.

Day three at SXSW greeted us with a massive thunderstorm and torrential rains. It was an adventure getting to the convention center without getting soaked. We saw another day of great content and filled a few more pages of notes. The day ended with the annual Nuclear Taco Night. For the uninitiated, Nuclear Tacos are an Austin staple and one of the spiciest things you'll ever eat. They look like a typical taco with ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream; but they taste like molten lava - the kind of spicy burn that continues to burn even after it reaches your stomach (Even several hours later - it's after 10:00 pm as I write this ;). They're definitely worth the hurt.

As before here are the programming highlights from today:

The Care and Feeding of Your Startup
This one leaned a bit more toward business than I would typically like, but it did address lots of issues regarding the motivation of creative workers and creating an effective corporate culture. In many ways this was the opposite view of Jason Fried's thoughts on the topic earlier in the week. That said, it did extend a recurring SXSW theme of creating passion inside your organization for your product. That's a lesson that can't be taught enough in my opinion.

Social Networking and Your Brand
This panel discussion concerned personal branding both in terms of self promotion and the caveats of sharing too much. It was interesting to see how large companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Apple encourage their employees to actively develop their online persona.

Monday Keynote: Frank Warren
Frank Warren is the founder of PostSecret, a community art project with roots in social networking both online and off. The project consists of post cards anonymously sent in revealing secrets by their authors. During the keynote, Warren shared many examples of the cards along with touching stories of community and changed lives. It was an inspirational hour that truly exemplified the power of community.

10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment
Presented by Adaptive Path, this panel explored they ways that creative industries (other than the web) foster the creative process and create an environment where creativity is at its most effective. There were lots of ideas here to take back to the office.

Core Conversation: Feeding the Creativity Beast
Our last session of the day was our first opportunity to explore the core conversations format which is new to SXSW this year. The core conversations consisted of four independent discussion groups happening simultaneously in one room. The popularity of this format made getting in close enough to hear a little tough, but the content was great and was a nice break from a standard presentation.

Tomorrow leaves us time for a few early morning panels, then it's back on the road to Oklahoma City.

The Element Fusion crew arrived in Austin, Texas this morning for the first full day of the SXSW Interactive Conference. The weather in Austin is warm and we jumped right into the fray along with 7,500 interactive conference attendees. Here is a quick look at what we saw today:

Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson
This was the opening keynote to kick off the conference. Jenkins and Johnson delivered a broad, intellectual look at social interaction in the web and society, the next generation and today's youth, and the social implications of the high tech world we live in. Lots of high-level ideas here, but maybe lacking in the tactical things we often expect from these sessions.

10 Things We've Learned at 37signals
Jason Fried delivered a practical, no-nonsense extension of 37signals' Getting Real in this compelling presentation. Fried discussed the truths, processes, and business philosophies the company has honed over nearly 4 years of developing their incredibly popular web applications. This was a must-see.

A General Theory of Creative Relativity
Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners, provided another great session immediately following Fried. Coudal's tongue-in-cheek theory explored the business of creativity and the ins-and-outs of idea generation. Thoughts about the source of inspiration, ways to find ideas when you don't feel creative, and how to foster a creative environment in the studio were presented in Jim's frank, self-deprecating, and humorous style. This is sure to be another highlight of the entire event.

After all of this inspiration, it was time for some authentic Austin Tex-Mex and to pour over the schedule for tomorrow's panels. We'll be back with more highlights tomorrow.

We've all experienced creative blocks from time to time. For designers, keeping productive is important and as you grow in your profession, you pick up simple techniques that help avoid blocks and keep the ideas flowing. Here are a few tips that I use to help keep creative:

1. Don't try to start from "nothing." Start your design process with some content so you have elements to work with. So often I see designers try to design “nothing." Not only does that make it tough on you and leave the potential for problems (oh wait I need to “fit” one more thing in there late in the design phase), but it’s the opposite of what design is all about: communication. We take someone else’s content, message, brand, etc. and visually communicate it. But you can’t do that if you don’t have those things in place. My early comps usually have just blocks of text and grey shapes. It’s a skeleton - an organization that is the foundation for the design. Then you add visual style to create tension and contrast and emphasis and feelings to support the brand. Not only is this a more pure approach, but it helps to have more elements to interact with on the page. Happy Cog's Jason Santa Maria wrote a great post a few years ago documenting a similar process.
2. Look around for inspiration. Hopefully you keep a sketchbook, Flickr set, or link list of designs that inspire you. If not, jump on one of the many CSS galleries and get a feel for what’s cool and maybe a few elements that spark an idea. Some good examples: www.cssburst.com, www.cssmania.com, www.cssimport.com, www.designsnack.com, and www.faveup.com. It's also sometimes helpful to look outside of your field. If you're designing a webpage, look at wallpaper samples, or billboards, or architecture. Design can take many forms but visual language is often very consistent. Many times another application might provide the spark of an idea that you need.
3. Keep looking around for inspiration. This might seem redundant, but sometimes you just have to keep digging until you finally hit it. I use Flickr a lot for inspiration. Sometimes I just browse random photos for colors that strike me and then sample out 3-4 for a base color scheme. Other color tools like Adobe's kuler and colorlovers are good places to start as well.
4. Fix elements that need help. Don’t be afraid to freshen up a logo or otherwise keep customers from bad decisions. They are coming to you for a professional design so don’t let bad content or a poorly thought out design brief bring you down.
5. Be realistic. Don’t feel like you have to create the most pure, isolated, brilliant concept the client has ever seen. It’s ok to borrow ideas. Aim for clean, professional, and attractive.
6. Know when to walk away. This one is sometimes the most effective. When you’re stuck, stop. Get away from it for awhile. Take a walk. Take a break. I often try to split my design comps over a few days just for this reason. Sometimes fresh eyes can lead to new directions.

One of the things about the internet that has always appealed to me is the powerful independent spirit that drives so much of the creative work being produced. When I first learned HTML it was a revelation to me that you could learn to make a webpage by visiting sites on the web for free. No books, classes, or anything proprietary involved. Amazing — especially in the field of graphic design where $1000 software packages are the norm. But on the web I could make a website using Windows Notepad.

Today the web is much different in many ways as massive data-driven websites deliver millions of pages of dynamically generated content distributed via XML streams and server sockets. Information moves seamlessly between mobile phones, desktop browsers, and database servers. But the things I learned in 1996 still apply today. I can still build a website from start to finish by myself with little to no cost save for my time. What’s more, in this day and age anyone can publish on the web. The rise of blogs and content management systems have ushered in an age where nearly anyone with the desire and basic computer or word-processing skills can create and maintain their own website. From high school students on MySpace.com to business owners everywhere, people are publishing on the web. And it is this leveling of the playing field where anyone can be a newspaper publisher, a sports reporter, a writer, an entertainer, or editorialist and have instant access to a worldwide audience no matter who they are that gives anyone the opportunity to really do something great. Technology levels the playing field.

A great example of this is My Date With Drew by filmmaker Brian Herzlinger who stars in his own documentary of his quest to score a date with actress Drew Barrymore. The film is a pretty entertaining exercise in the “six rules of separation” idea as an everyman tries to use his personal network (my friend has a friend, who has a friend, who…) to propose a date to his boyhood crush. But what really appealed to me was the inspirational story of a regular guy who did something amazing fueled only by his creativity and independent spirit. You see, the hitch is that Brian doesn’t really know anyone famous and only has an $1100 budget and a 30 day deadline to make his film. Yes, 30 days because he purchased a video camera on a credit card and needed to return it within the store’s 30 day return policy. And of course if he fails to score the date, he really doesn’t have a film. Without giving away too much, he is met with remarkable luck in his search but eventually reaches the limits of his network without reaching his goal.

That is where the internet comes in. Late in the process Brian sets up a website detailing his quest. Within days the site is overwhelmed with traffic as the link is passed from person to person across the web. Suddenly his personal network is worldwide. That is how he reaches Drew. That is how he made it happen. Weeks of phone calls and meetings and rejections were instantly forgotten as the power of the web took over. Without his website, Brain would have most certainly failed. But he wasn’t a geek or a programmer just a normal guy with an idea. In today’s internet anyone with an idea has the power to make it happen. Anyone with even a moderately priced computer and video camera can be a film maker or a publisher. Thanks to technology and the web any of us has a place on a worldwide stage. I think that is really fascinating. So where is your website?