A Whole New Mind and OneNote

I recently picked up Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. It was an enlightening and inspiring read and I've been singing its praises in the hallways at Big Huge. Pink, a former White House speechwriter for VP Gore, describes the business world as moving from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age. In order to prosper in this new world order he recommends nurturing your inner artist by pursuing right-brain creative thinking. He reasons that adding right-brain skills to your repertoire can give one the competitive edge in an environment where more and more left-brain centric tasks are being outsourced to India, Russia, China, etc... As a game artist I came away with a heightened appreciation of my profession as the fields of gaming and creative art/design were called out as areas of continued growth and high demand. And while on the subject of gaming, Pink noted that "a growing stack of research is showing that playing video games can sharpen many of the skills that are vital in the Conceptual Age".

A specific suggestion from the book describes how to foster right-brain thinking by creating an inspiration board. Pink explains that "each time you see something that you find compelling - a photo, a piece of fabric, the page of a magazine - tack it to the board. Before long, you'll start to seeing the connection between the images that will enliven and expand your work." At Big Huge we've been doing this in digital form for some time and refer to this collection of notes and reference imagery as Style Sheets (I've heard of other game companies refer to it as an Art Bible). It's a large image repository for the creative team to continually refer to, and an important tool that helps us maintain a singular vision and style. Over the past few years we've tried numerous Style Sheet authoring methods from Word to Wiki to HTML. Each method has had its own strengths and weaknesses. Lately we've moved our Style Sheet creation to OneNote. So far we've been EXTREMELY impressed with its ease of use and the ability for numerous team members to simultaneously create, organize and share information. It addresses nearly all of the weaknesses of the previously mentioned authoring tools - I recommend it highly (and sadly, I'm not receiving a kickback from Microsoft for this glowing praise). OneNote trial available here.

Lastly I'll offer up an additional book recommendation, which also happens to be my favorite art book of 2006... Revolution: The Art of Jon Foster. I'm a huge fan of his angular, off-balance compositions and rich palette of unusual yellows and greens. Along with the eye candy Foster throws in a good bit of behind-the-scenes technique and process description.