Perhaps more interesting is to understand what creativity is not. Murilo Gun has an interesting idea about this: “People start from the wrong premise that creativity is always creating 100% new things”, when, in fact, “…creativity is often combining things that already exist.”
To begin with, we’ve chosen two words, two concepts… they don’t have to be the same: on the contrary, it’s even better if they are very different. From there, we establish links between these elements. This is Gianni Rodari’s proposal, something he called the “fantastic binomial”.
It is not an uncommon activity, our mind performs it frequently. There are even examples of this in existing creative works. Let’s go to them. We took two words: “whale”; “revenge”. They could be combined like this:
“A man loses his leg during a whale attack and chases the animal, seeking revenge.” Here is a short summary of the book: *“Moby D…”**, by *Herman Melville. But it is possible to combine the words: “whale”; “revenge” in a different arrangement:
“A fisherman mistakenly kills a female orca. She was pregnant and the calf also dies. The male orca chases the fisherman, seeking revenge.” This is the plot of “Orca”, a film from 1977. The word “whale” is present, because orcas are a species of whale…
We are not interested in making judgments about the two works and I do not see much use in looking for other examples: these will suffice. The essential thing is to answer this question: “How can I use this in my creative work?”
The immediate response would be, of course, to take two different words and try to put them together. This is the logical path…but not necessarily the best one. We, designers, work essentially with images and even for those who are not designers, this method might not work very well. So, instead of “words” I propose we take… “pictures”!
You should definitely have reference images on your computer. Select some of them and copy them to a separate folder. Do not choose ordinary images, but those that somehow awaken an emotion or something creative in you.
Thus, mere pictures of people smiling are all too common; images of people with different expressions on their faces will give better results. If you want, you can also include short animations, like gifs or small video clips.
Your next task is to take one of the images and compare it with the rest. For this you will need two image viewers or an image viewer and a video player (if you chose videos or animations as well as images).
The image below is an example of my work. I opened a gif animation (A) in Media Player Classic - HC, a video player and opened the other images in Faststone Image Viewer (B). Comparing the animation of the little tuba with the picture of the girl, I felt a possible connection between them.
I imagined the girl having that tense expression, due to the sound of the tuba, playing in the background. It would make a good mood animation. I put the two images in a separate folder… and started working on them. I separated the background of the girl’s image and made it the appropriate size. During the process, it occurred to me, among other ideas, to insert two images of the tuba in the background, in order to give it a greater impact. The result you can see here.
That was an example of humor…of course you can use it for other purposes: to generate an idea for an illustration, for a story you intend to write or some other creative task.