Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Creative Bones
    Creative Bones
    Creative Bones
    Ebook73 pages44 minutes

    Creative Bones

    By Guy Bommarito

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Creative Bones is a "how-to" book with the single-minded purpose of knocking the creative process off its mystical reserved-for-people-with-more-talent-in-their-pinky-fingers-than-the-rest-of-us-have-in-our-entire-bodies perch and making it accessible to anyone with half a mind to pursue better answers to pretty much every question out there. It's a book for people who make their living in a creative field but don't have a clue how they do what they do and could clearly benefit from having a little bit of that knowledge. It's for people who are always being told how creative they are and would love to take their talent to the next level. And it's for people who have no desire to create anything more elaborate than breakfast, but who live in a world where they are constantly being asked to think outside the box and would really like to know how to do that besides "working harder." Creative Bones is not another one of those books that tells stories about how other people came up with their big ideas that all end with "and then the answer came to him/her from out of nowhere." It's actual how-you-do-it, it-works-like-this information that anybody can understand and use. It's also occasionally funny.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuy Bommarito
    Release dateApr 11, 2014
    ISBN9781310274923
    Creative Bones
    Author

    Guy Bommarito

    Guy Bommarito is a freelance writer, creative director and speaker. He has led creative departments in major advertising agencies from Chicago to San Francisco. However, he is probably best known for his tenure at GSD&M in Austin, Texas, where, as executive creative director, he took the agency to its first honors in the ANDY Awards, Cannes Lions, Communication Arts Advertising Annual, D&AD, the Art Directors Club of New York, the One Show and the Radio Mercury Awards. While there, Guy was named to Adweek magazine's Creative All-Star teams twice, including once as most valuable player, and Graphis magazine named GSD&M one of the ten most creative agencies in the world. In addition, he's taught advertising creativity and campaigns courses at the University of Texas and the Chicago Portfolio School. One of a select group of professionals invited to judge Communication Arts magazine's prestigious advertising annual twice, he lives with one beautiful wife and three amazing daughters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Related to Creative Bones

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How To Be CREATIVE

      Apr 1, 2021

      How To Be CREATIVE
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Fantastic Idea

      Aug 6, 2020

      A Fantastic Idea
      6 min read

    • Article

      Planting Seeds

      Jan 4, 2024

      Planting Seeds
      6 min read

    • Article

      Twelve Ways to Create Space to Write No Matter Where You Are

      Dec 14, 2022

      1. Turn your mind inside out. One of my favorite discoveries has been dry-erase paint. I fully painted two of my office walls, and it’s where I do my first project outlines. The temporariness of it gives me permission to be messy and the space to con

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Quest For The Edge

      Jun 14, 2021

      A friend of mine is the marketing director of a California winery. One day, she called to ask if I’d be willing to help create brands and write labels for the bottles. “Why me?” “We’re seeing a trend toward consumers wanting stories,” she said. “They

      10 min read

    • Article

      Show up FOR YO U R WRITING

      Jun 1, 2023

      Show up FOR YO U R WRITING
      3 min read

    • Article

      When Workshop Is Hard

      Aug 16, 2023

      I’VE spent a lot of time thinking about the egos of writers. We live in a culture suffused with therapeutic language that has shifted its meaning with broad usage, and ego is a good example. In its original sense, it was value-neutral, meaning only t

      5 min read

    • Article

      As A Matter Of Fact…

      Nov 5, 2020

      As A Matter Of Fact…
      6 min read

    • Article

      Stick A Fork In It

      Oct 17, 2020

      Stick A Fork In It
      4 min read

    • Article

      21 for 2021

      Jan 7, 2021

      21 for 2021
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Word Game

      Apr 6, 2023

      The Word Game
      6 min read

    • Article

      All Together Now

      Sep 18, 2019

      All Together Now
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lost And Found: Bewilderment As An Invitation To Transformation

      Nov 10, 2021

      — When I get lost while driving in the Hudson Valley — which is often — I usually welcome seeing a new place. When one of my two young daughters asks me a thought-stopping question (“Papa, are we indigenous people anywhere on the planet?” “Papa, do o

      8 min read

    • Article

      Off The Path

      Feb 13, 2023

      Off The Path
      7 min read

    • Article

      Unleash Your Expression

      Oct 10, 2018

      Words JESSICA LEE Humans are inherently creative beings with a desire to create, innovate and inspire. Yet many people don’t engage with their creative side because fear gets in the way. The truth is it takes courage to create. At the heart of any cr

      7 min read

    • Article

      Elizabeth Kolbert

      Mar 29, 2021

      Elizabeth Kolbert
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Power of 'Onlyness'

      May 1, 2018

      How do you define ‘onlyness’? The word actually doesn’t appear in the English dictionary, but I would argue that it should. Simply put, it means that anyone’s — and quite possibly everyone’s — ideas matter. The genesis of the word starts with the fac

      7 min read

    • Article

      Cultivating Creativity

      Apr 9, 2021

      Cultivating Creativity
      2 min read

    • Article

      Imagination AND YOU

      Oct 5, 2023

      Having built the foundations of our writing approach over the previous several issues, I fully intended this month to begin looking at the nuts and bolts of creative writing – structure, dialogue, description, etc. But as I began to write, something

      6 min read

    • Article

      Gigi Will Know

      Feb 27, 2021

      What is the most helpful book – or even top three books – you would most recommend to fiction writers to improve their craft? —LURKING IN THE SHELVES Dear Lurking, I don’t love books dedicated entirely to craft. I find some of them obscure and pedant

      3 min read

    • Article

      Numbers Add Up

      Jun 2, 2022

      Numbers Add Up
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Machine

      Oct 10, 2021

      Hey, man. I wasn’t sure exactly how to start this. I needed to write this letter—the details are such that they have to be written down—but I’m not much of a prose stylist, so you’ll just have to bear with me. And I do hope you’ll forgive this; I kno

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Creative Bones

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Creative Bones - Guy Bommarito

      Introduction

      An advertising agency I worked for moved to new offices not long after I joined them. As might be expected, one of our first tasks was determining what to put on the walls. Along with the usual suspects — corporate graphics, work samples, awards — was the thought to take one wall and do something fun with it.

      One suggestion everybody seemed to like was the idea of producing a series of custom-designed skateboard decks. The boards could be hung in two rows of ten down the main hallway, providing an entertaining counterpoint to the company signage and client logos in the lobby.

      To broaden ownership of the project, everyone in the agency was invited to come up with ideas for designs.

      A few weeks into the project, I ran into one of our IT guys in the elevator. He asked how submissions were coming. I happily responded that everyone from the creative department to accounting appeared to be contributing to the cause. Then, he said something that hit me as if I was hearing it for the first time, even though I’d heard it a thousand times before. I’d love to participate, he said, but I don’t have a creative bone in my body.

      This time, for some reason, the statement stuck in my gut.

      Here’s the deal. Some people tap into creativity effortlessly. Others, don’t. Yet, everyone can create to some level. The problem is, creativity comes with a mystique that leaves most people with the mistaken impression that only a chosen few have the gift for it.

      Worse, people not only perceive creativity as something beyond their pay scales, they go about their lives literally avoiding, negating and discounting creative thinking, all for the very best of reasons — reason being chief among them.

      So to get things started, tattoo this on your favorite body part:

      Creativity has less to do with who you are than what you do.

      Creative thinking is simply a way of looking at things, a way of solving problems, a way of coming up with thoughts that never occurs to (or is outright rejected by) most people because it’s too silly, irrational or counterintuitive.

      To further complicate matters, common definitions that rely on words like imagination and originality for illumination do little to clarify. Perhaps a better way to understand creativity is to think of it like this:

      Creativity is nonsense that leads to a breakthrough.

      Completely illogical. Frustratingly capricious. Contrary to common sense. Creativity, unlike most subjects, defies rational comprehension. As a result, it has proven uncharacteristically challenging for everyone from academics to artists to decipher in a meaningful way. (While creativity has been painstakingly analyzed, documented and discussed, right down to which hemisphere of the brain does what, few studies provide a useful guide to actually creating anything.)

      It takes me back to something I learned when I was teaching a course on creativity at the University of Texas. Academia is exceptionally good at taking things apart, identifying every molecule and drawing conclusions. However, dissection and analysis are, at best, starting points to new and fresh — which explains why the talent for breaking down a poem or a novel isn’t routinely reverse-engineered into acclaimed poetry and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1