The Brief: What is Creativity?
The Ad Age Young Creatives Global Cover Competition called for unique and impactful visual depictions of today’s creative process, where the most impressive concept will be printed on the Ad Age Cannes Lion issue in 2017.
Design Concept
Inspired by the Creation of Adam, a sculpture of hand is built from crumpled and overlapping newspapers and magazine pieces to symbolize the fundamental part of today’s creative process. Magazines and newspapers were chosen over plain papers to indicate a current phenomenon – the creative processes nowadays are inspired by others’ creations, as well as other existing problems that are discovered from the media. The crumpled pieces also represented the initial process of creation, where different ideas were sketched and discarded. These discarded ideas contributed to the development of the final piece, symbolized by a growing sprout. This visual metaphor was chosen to indicate the originality and “freshness” of a creative outcome and the roots of the sprout were seen to be obtaining the “nutrients” required for its growth from the media and abandoned ideas.
Bits & Pieces of the Design Process
Initially I was planning to use a photo of my own hand in the composition, and this is evident in my initial tests on the layout. Later I decided that a hand sculpture constructed of materials that are playing important roles in the creative process would be adding more context to the design, so I proceeded by building the sculpture with florists' wire and unwanted materials.
The skeleton of the hand is basically composed of a plastic bottle and a piece of straw, while the use of florists' wire allowed me to individually adjust each of the "fingers" during photo shoot later on. Crumpled newspapers and magazine pages were then attached to the supporting structure, as they were two of the sources that had inspired me while assisting me in making informed design decisions in certain circumstances. The Instagram logo printed on one of the magazine pages was specially placed at a visible position to highlight the influences of social media in creative processes. Accessing other people's work and exchanging creative ideas has never been easier with the rise of social media. These inspirations we received either directly or indirectly will somehow nourish our future creations. The weeds on the other hand, were plucked from a footpath nearby.
