What happens is that a pattern is recognised and evolved. The basic
pattern is learned, either in a school, a studio, from media or from
winning entries in recent ad awards. There is very little new under the
sun, just sometimes, someone manages to see things in a different light.
In the past month or so, I have posted a number of times on reading and writing. One of the things that I noticed as I was putting the posts together is my reliance on books to help my writing along. This left me with a mild sense of shame until I stopped to think about it.
In ad studios, where creativity is almost the entire focus, there is a huge urge to create 'something from nothing', to craft something entirely new from scratch. This leads to frustrated creatives and frustrated clients. In reality, advertising creativity is little more than a progressive evolution: ads follow other ads, and a little bit is added along the way (forgive the alliteration).
What happens is that a pattern is recognised and evolved. The basic pattern is learned, either in a school, a studio, from media or from winning entries in recent ad awards. There is very little new under the sun, just sometimes, someone manages to see things in a different light.
The same applies to fine art. For instance (my favourite example), Picasso spent years doing excellent anatomical sketches. From this, he began to recognise the planes of the human body and their geometrical possibilities. This led to cubism.
Creativity consists of two phases: learning and evolution.
If creativity was a thing that created new things from scratch, new cars would involve reinvention of the engine and new books would reinvent language, grammar and plots. The alien of the science fiction genre would quite likely be an impossible construct with not even a tenuous means to connect it to the protagonist's reality, and the monster in horror would be entirely incomprehensible.
The end result has to be recognisable, so development on existing knowledge and practices has to be the way to go. (And, the books are just great.)
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