It occured to me today as I sat staring at a blank blog page and considering if I’ve had any interesting projects to talk about, that I never create anything (designs) for myself, for my own enjoyment only (though I do enjoy designing for clients).

Creativity for Leisure?
I actually find it very hard to be creative for myself….just for fun, which is probably why I rarely create anything of my own. I think it’s something to do with feeling like creation for ‘creations sake’ is pointless…I like to create things because they will be used otherwise the motivation to create them isn’t there because I can’t visualise their ‘purpose’.

I was rather like this at school as a youngster…I couldn’t quite visualise the point of learning the things I was learning, as in that I had no ‘direct and immediate’ application for them, and so didn’t really try very hard to learn them.

As a result my school grades are rather pitiful…but they do say that creatives tend to struggle with the narrow confines of the creatively oppressive UK school system that is geared towards one learning style only. But that’s another topic for another day!

Vanity Press
For the purpose of ‘me to look at and like them’ just doesn’t seem enough reason to create something. What I would like to do one day however is create a book of my works….my favourite works for clients. Something glossy like this below showcasing some nice works. I think they call it ‘vanity press’!

For those of you interested in self publishing
A very well priced platform for this is www.lulu.com - annoyingly US based for us in the UK, but a good service non the less. I have however discovered today that they now have a UK site and that this at least now quotes us in GBP rather than USD….they still ship from the US however and this means 5-20 days delivery….still not too shabby anyway.

I had something printed from Lulu once and was impressed by the quality and you quite frankly can’t beat the pricing and general offering. Believe me, I have searched …I do think this is geniunely the best print on demand service available for short runs and a great way to test your market.

For larger run self publishing there might be more cost effective self publishing services.

Self publishing has become exceptionally popular in recent years and that is surely entirely due to the relatively new technology of digital printing that has allowed us all to enjoy short run (small amounts printed) printing at low prices.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:46 pm and is filed under General Musings On Life, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.