Open Source Creativity

It’s been a busy time lately, what with Robin’s law school graduation and whatnot, so I’ve admittedly been lacking in the writing department. This subject has been in my idea hopper since the beginning of May, so I figured that this would be a perfect place to get back into the action.

The idea of open source creativity is one that I’ve held for quite some time, and now that I have sufficient time and distance away from the genesis of the idea, I’ll share it with you.

I used to work with a creative director who was (is) terribly paranoid about giving away trade secrets or any type of creative advantage to competitors. Now, if any of the things that he worried about were truly proprietary processes or special trade secrets that would be one thing… albeit very tinfoil hat-ish. But, all these “secrets” he was worried about giving away easily fell under Mark Cuban’s Knowledge Advantage. If you don’t feel like reading the accompanying post, basically all this meant is that anything he was scared about losing control of was freely obtainable information in the first place. It just so happened that others in our area didn’t obtain that information as voraciously as I do.

Case in point: I had an old colleague IM me to refresh his memory on how to add alpha channels into a Photoshop document. This CD got all freaky on me because I was “giving a competitor trade secrets and an unfair advantage.”

Whatever.

Fact is, the process of adding alpha channels is not proprietary information. It’s in the user’s manual, which my old colleague could have easily looked up but knew that I could immediately tell him in less time than it would take for him to look up.

The point of my rambling is this: Don’t be afraid to support your fellow creatives and give bits of advice here and there. It only helps to make us all better. Even the very act of sharing a tehnique or idea helps reinforce it in your own mind and makes you stronger at doing what it is that you already did well.

Very soon, I will practice what I preach by giving you a little Flash technique I cooked up recently… I’m just waiting for a proper burn-in time to make sure that it works as advertised.

When it comes to ideas instead of techniques, recently I read an article on copying creative ideas (and damn it if I don’t have the link anymore), and it basically said that even if someone were to copy your idea you can be safe in knowing that only in the very rarest cases is their copy better or more innovative than your original version. So, feel free to share your ideas. No matter what, your original one will still be the best in its own way.

The biggest irony of all? The tinfoil hat CD’s favorite creative M.O. was to take pop culture references or spots from AdCritic and either spoof them or let them “heavily influence” his own creative. Hmmm…