On one such bonding session, I decided to “stumble” for the duration of “Ellen” and half of “Opera”. Hey, did you see the one where they found all these guys in Lowe’s and gave them complete makeovers? Amazing… (NOT!)

Anyway… Here are some interesting stumbles I came across. I edited out all the bad ones, or at least the ones I didn’t like. Some of the sites I listed here are creative and some are not. Most are at least entertaining or informative. If nothing else, it will illustrate my blue collar interests…

Great stumbles

Online Converter – Converts any type if measurement into something else. Very useful

14Brilliant Minimalist Ads

The most brilliant outdoor campaign ever

Fonts Used In Logos of Popular Websites

A Gazillion Resources For Web Design

40 Free High Quality Hand-drawn Fonts

Daughter dating application – Very funny

Web design tips

Norman Rockwell’s Photo Realism

Slide Clock (total waste of time) (get it…? )

17 Guerrilla Marketing Ideas for Your Website

Five Minute Upgrade – Making Your Design Pop

Ten best free applications that you probably didn’t know about

Quotes by Winston Churchill

TOP 100 funniest one-liners on the internet!

70 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials and Resources

David’s comprehensive motorcycle web index

Web designers heaven (links for web designers)

Web development resources

If you’re into motorcycles, ya gotta watch this guy ride…

Excuse form (funny / useful)

49 ways to build your brand using online marketing

Welcome to CSS Basics

Amazing photography Portfolio! )

So there you have it, one night’s stumbles, at least the good one, and Mama’s still happy!

If you have any good sites to add to the list, just leave them as comments!

The logic goes like this: Creativity and problem solving is all about making new combinations. The more stuff you have to work with, the more connections you can make. So people who systematically accumulate experiences are going to have more creative material to work with. People who play it safe and stick with the familiar will have bupkis.

But creativity calls for more than a bucket full of experiences. You need two more things.

The first thing is memory. Take your notebook and camera along wherever you go. They will encourage you to pay more attention to what you’re experiencing. A photo or sketch of squid pizza will make more of that experience available to build on later.

Second, you need some systematic way to mash ideas together. There’s a Mark Twain quote that says something about the spark of a new idea being like the marriage of two notions that, until their union, no one even perceived were dating. If you’re going to exploit your experiences to make new ideas, you need something equivalent to speed dating.

Not everyone has what it takes. To some minds, facts are separate bits of knowledge. Squid pizza is just squid pizza to them. To others, facts are links in a chain. Squid pizza for them is an illustration of some general law applying to a whole bunch of facts. These folks have metaphorical minds. For them, squid pizza can mean two things at the same time. These are the people you want to have on your team.

Don Moyer, dmoyer@ThoughtFormDesign.com

From the writer to the photographer we’ve lost it. Take an ad headline for example. There was a time not so long ago that good wasn’t good enough. Writers would take hours, days and sometimes weeks to craft a headline that may not be more than two words, but each little word was a big deal. Today writers are being taught that more is better; more content, more offers, more to choose from. There was a time when an agency would present one headline to a client, and everyone would dissect each word.

Today art directors can create a dozen flashy layouts in a day, all focused on the big idea of today’s reactionary creative; click here now, click this, click that. In the rush to see who can create the largest pile of ads in a day, we’ve lost the little things in design that made a difference. We would sweat every little detail of a layout, possibly because if you made a mistake creating the layout by hand, you would need another 8 hours to create it for the next mornings’ presentation. That reminds me how little sleep we had back then. Maybe less sleep will help create bigger ideas. Again, maybe less is more.

The photographer has changed from a creative addition to the process to a mechanical click on a keyboard. Lost are the little things that each photographer delivered. Sure those unique discoveries may have been chemically induced, some by the photographer himself and of course some in the lab. Little things like a photographer noticing a glimmer of light from an object, or the unexpected angle due to experimentation of a photographer during the process rarely happen.

Today’s clients expect photographers to create the largest amount of photos they can, believing that the larger the amount of clicks on the camera the bigger the creative. Then we stuff all of them on whatever the latest digital storage device is available; that can hold the largest amount of uninspiring photos it can. If a stock photograph does have any original characteristic it no longer becomes a photo used for one product or service, but it is used and abused by countless companies. Again, how big can the pile get for one photo?

Lets get back to thinking small and something big may happen.

Todd Patterson, Creative Director

Think Inc.