Creativity is an essential skill for geoanalysts. That’s right. I’m even writing an article about it for GISuser that will come out in the next month or so*. It’s a skill that can be acquired through deliberate and frequent practice.
Exercises that take very little time – such as doodles before a design meeting – help to activate the right-brain, but obviously so do larger endeavors. Indeed, it was such an endeavor that I undertook recently that I’m going to write about here.
After creating a nice little bit of map art for a friend’s birthday, I was pretty proud of myself. It’s a customized map, basically, but with a twist: I took the colors from a Warhol Monroe print and used them on the map, repeating it so that it had a quad look:
The effect was pretty neat so I tweeted it, got good reception, and then the business person in me thought “gee this would be cool if I could sell a few.” So then I got really excited about all the possibilities and started to plan how that could be accomplished.
Now, here’s something that anyone who’s ever had a “brilliant” idea in the past will understand: as soon as you start to research the brilliant idea you realize one or more of the following:
- Implementation difficult to impossible to achieve
- Someone’s already done it
- Nobody wants to buy it
- Marketing will be a time-suck
- It doesn’t fit in with anything else you do.
For me, in this particular instance of idea-implementation fever, number 4 was the big issue. (Okay, number 3 may also be a big issue but perhaps quite related to number 4!) I’m a GIS analyst. I need to stop trying to market hobby-type stuff. Those were the thoughts that came crashing into my head, ready to deliver the final blow to my mental idea-prep session.
I drew up this graphic to explain the situation to my husband in a more succinct manner…
My husband was (slightly) more upbeat than me and drew in some bumps along the “continue begrudgingly” line to show that enthusiasm tends to go up and down over time.
At any rate I decided not to let the “no no”s get the best of me (that’s a phrase I am stealing from the book “A Sense of Urgency,” which is a pretty decent management book). So today I implemented the concept within Etsy by creating my own shop. Go take a look if you get the chance!
*If I ever get it finished.
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