Creating with Constraints (Broad Strokes FTW)
An Offline Camp passion talk
Being continuously creative can be overwhelming. It’s easy to spend endless hours adjusting the finer details without considering the bigger picture, and as a result be less efficient with your valuable time and energy. In my passion talk at Offline Camp Berlin, I explained how self-imposed constraints can force us see the bigger picture, ultimately strengthening our ability to put focus where it matters most in our creative work.
Over time, the experience of operating in limited capacity forces you to pay attention to the broader strokes long before you find yourself meticulously tweaking the finer details. This is good, as the broad strokes are the most important parts of your work. Narrowing your focus on minute detail too early greatly limits your vision, capacity, and ability to plan or estimate.
For experimentation, you can try imposing all sorts of limits on yourself: finish a concept within 1 hour, only use yellow and black, limit a song to 5 seconds, only use the C keys of 3 neighboring octaves. The limitation could even be a theme: “If a planet were ruled by snails, what would that sound like?
And if they were cruel rulers, controlling the flow of the spice for personal gain and obliterating the middle class, you might have to take care of a few snail bosses, too:
Experimenting with other mediums and limitations within them is quite useful as well. When doing so, what you learn about the medium and the creative process you use there can be applied to your overarching creative approach. Aside from the work being interesting in its own right, the experimentation helps you prepare for those moments where a limitation on your primary work would appear to make success impossible.
I would be lying if I didn’t say that it will feel counterproductive and “worse” than your usual work at first, but that experience is exactly the point. It will feel worse until you make those useful discoveries within the constraints. Perhaps not in an immediate or obvious way, your work will start to shape itself around the broad strokes, and this is exactly the big picture thinking you need.
So, don’t fight the limitations. Seek those weird pathways you’ll need to be successful through them and add them to your toolbox.
If you’re feeling inclined, you can find many of the random sounds I make on Soundcloud, and a small amount of my photo work has been posted to 500px here.
Editor’s Note: This passion talk is one of many shared at Offline Camp, where a small group of campers with diverse interests come together to discuss Offline First. We hope to see you at an upcoming event!
