Beautiful Constraints
Beautiful Constraints
“Give me the freedom of a tight brief”, David Ogilvy.
I often think back to the large easels in the life-drawing class. Each blank sheet ripe with endless possibilities. There was a time that they also represented personal failure. My first defining strokes kept failing to capture the pose, proportions, mood.
The teacher, in a last-ditch effort to coach her failing student, “Destroy the surface, pass the white paint, grab that black acrylic, is that a nail over there? Scratch up the surface. Get your hands dirty!”
Gazing at the destroyed surface, the instruction that changed everything. “Go ahead! Extract the figure from the noise”.
Fast forward 15 years.
The discomfort of a blank page, cursor stuck in one spot, blinking .
99 Ideas allude me; it might be ‘blank-canvas syndrome’ or ‘writer’s block’. I know these excuses don’t exist.
Where is the noise?
Realisation. I need to set the constraints, the formative strokes on the blank canvas. Specific parameters that, at first, seem to throttle creativity.
A cacophony of opportunities erupt! The act of attempting to ‘create ideas’ turns to ‘extracting ideas’, the most compelling, buried near the borders of the constraints.
Finally. Who sets these constraints? Who’s job is it? Mine.
