Creative Thinking Hub

Creative thinking expert Jim Connolly, shares tips & resources to help you think more creatively.

It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better

I have been speaking with people a lot recently, about the idea of unique value. Unique value is about doing something that’s yours, which also has value.

It’s much more than merely being different.

The best art touches us

It leaves us different to the way we were when we discovered it. A 10% refinement to an existing idea is different.

However, it takes thought and application, to create something that’s both different and of unique value.

Apple’s Sir Jony Ive put it extremely well when he said, “It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”

The centuries-old art of food

Art of food

From at least as far back as the 1500’s, people have gone to great lengths to combine their love of art with their need for food.

Swans

A great example of this from the UK, is the way swans were used as part of dressing a meal. Swan meat apparently tasted terrible, so the swan would be used exclusively for presentation purposes. Whilst it sounds pretty disgusting today, it was common practice for the super-wealthy of centuries ago.

I was thinking of this earlier, when a TV chef was on the radio talking about, ‘this recent move to combine food and art’. I assume his cooking is far better than his historic knowledge.

I took the above photo last week in a recreated medieval kitchen, at Gainsborough Old Hall, Lincolnshire, England.

Simplicities are enormously complex

The best design and the most effective engineering have one thing in common… simplicity.

With such a value placed on simplicity, the question is; why is most design over-complicated? Why do we find too many options, too many buttons, too many moving parts?

The answer is that, paradoxically, simplicity is extremely challenging. As Richard O Moore said; “Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence “I love you”.

When designing anything, shoot for simplicity. Look to reduce.

Delay always breeds danger

Once it’s ready… it’s ready.

Whatever you are working on, comes with a use by date. Delay too long and you find that the idea you had has missed its moment.

Even the timeless classics, only garnered the initial interest that made them famous, because they were perfect for their time. Had their creators delayed, they would have had vastly less impact.

As Migual de Cervantes famously said:

“Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.”