Ideas About Creating Ideas: Tips, tricks & principles to help you create great work every day.

Ideas About Creating Ideas is packed full of tricks, techniques and insight from a creative industry expert to help you create better work. Every page features a different working principle along with advice for all kinds of creative minds.

New to the creative industry?
See this book as a set of cheat codes to become a valuable creative thinker.

An experienced creative?
Use it as a refresher to reset and get some new ideas and perspectives to improve every day.

A freelance brain for hire?
Think of it as your creative partner and companion.

A creative director leading a team?
Learn a set of principles to help you and your team produce your best possible work.

A client who works with creative agencies?
Gain tips on how creative people think about and create work so you can partner with them to make great work for your brand.

Discover 73 practical tips that you can put into action every day, covering everything from improving your creative output and selling your ideas to overcoming creative barriers and keeping your mental health in check.

Introduction
If you could travel back in time 25 years and give yourself all the wisdom you’d accumulated during that period, what would you say? This was the spark that ignited the idea for this book and a question I was asked when I was a guest on a podcast to talk about my career as a creative in the advertising industry.

Wanting to make sure I had a suitable answer, I began writing down all the things I had learnt. In a few hours, I went from ‘I’m not sure’ to ‘here’s ten things’. The more I wrote, the more I remembered.

I also dug out some of my old notebooks where, if there was a problem I had or something not quite right in the agency I worked at, I’d write down ideas of how I’d overcome the issue (a useful habit I still have). In a few days I had over 50 insights.

This was feeling less like an answer to a question and more like a book. Sometimes ideas have a way of telling you what they need to be, so I decided to listen and write this book. You may be a student looking to get into the industry or perhaps you’re also a creative director, agency leader or responsible for inspiring a team of people. Whatever stage you’re at, I think there’s something in this book that can help you.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years: technology has sped things up and we demand ideas quicker; clients use data and algorithms to make safer choices, wanting to ensure ideas work before they buy them; and agencies have become more like corporate businesses by adopting open-plan working and combining smaller agencies into larger places of work. All of these changes mean we need to keep hold of and remind ourselves of what it takes to make great work.

Principles, pep talks, cheat codes — call them what you will, but in this book are 73 useful things I picked up along the way that have made a difference not just to my work, but also how I work. So much so, I still rely on them today.

They have helped me create award-winning campaigns, become a creative director before I reached 30 and even collaborate with one of my creative heroes, Prince.

There is a tip on every page of the book and it’s designed for you to dip in and out of when you need it. Think of it as a creative companion and guide to help navigate the daily challenges of creating work.

Try them. Keep what works. Improve on what doesn’t. Let me know how you get on (my contact details are in the back of the book) if you like. The most important thing is that you never stop creating and never let anything get in your way.

Oh, and if your creativity leads to making a time machine, take a copy of this book back for me.