Illustration Friday (creative outlets) at BCA4

Monday, 19 July 2010

At work, are you relaxed? Creative? Fulfilled? Finding time within work hours to pursue creative endeavours or self-development with the idea that it will feed back into your work and make you better at what you do.

Carol Green led this discussion at Barcamp Auckland 4 about using work time to do essential but non-billable experimentation and research. I was impressed at the way she shrugged off the computer failure that stopped her using her slideshow. Instead she just talked us through it and inspired the whole audience to share their experiences. Very Barcamp. Fortunately her presentation is available on her website. It looks great, and bonus points for using Gill Sans. (Or maybe not, if Eric Gill got it wrong.)

The idea or inspiration came from Illustration Friday and The Sketchbook Project, two attempts to give structure to these sorts of personal/non-billable projects. I thought this was most relevant to freelancers such as self-employed designers. I am none of these things, but I still got a lot out of the session. The main point I took away was that I now want to be a freelancer.

If I hadn’t gone to this session I would have gone to Vinyl Flashbacks: the glories of LP cover art, and how Steve Jobs nearly destroyed it presented by Peter McLennan. I saw his collection of LP sleeves later and they looked just stunning.

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