It all begins with your idea...
... and every successful result is inspired!
Every creative knows that inspiration can happen everywhere, when on a bus, when walking around a lake... even at work or while working! Eureka moments come during the pause between tasks or while exploring on your computer, and when you’re out about. When you are active, your active mind occupies your attention, and your subconscious mind is busy processing.
Mark J Maxam is a marketing educated designer, project manager and digital artist now residing in Austin Texas. The work in PRINTCRAFTING and DIGITALDESIGN is provided in order to display the range of my design and production experience. As for the words and essays, they are iterative, and an exercise in writing. I am more trying to tell about myself than sell myself, and have written to portray my philosophical point of view.
PRIMARY TOOLS: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign.
WEB DESIGN/DEV ENVIRONMENT: Webflow
RATES: Vary based upon discipline.
SLIDE SHOW: Modern Esoteric cover exploration.
In the immortal words of Wordsworth,
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
It’s not about the lizard brain or frontal cortex or lobes, it about the entire brain active and doing and thinking. Our brains are the ultimate multi-tasking device, but the brain’s hemispheres only work well if you rely on them properly. Think of it this way, when your brain is busy in an activity or in the environment, the left brain is way too entertained to try and rationalize its way out of every problem. Sure, left brains are good for learning and comprehension and calculation, but when you want creative problems solved effectively, the right brain has got to get involved.
“Occupying” the left-brain’s control seeking aspect in games of “fetch the stick” gets it figuratively off your back. This includes process work. These activities preoccupy the left’s “I'm in command” mechanism, thereby allowing the right brain to pick up the dialogue. During these times the right-side occasionally seeks interaction and involvement from the computational side, mines and processes the left’s treasure trove of data, and calculates through myriad possible solutions using wordplay, role playing and visualization. You could say it’s Pokémon Go on steroids as your brain integrates your experiences into role-playing solutions!
In this one area, one could say that the west coast dot-coms got it right. In addition to creating ideological refuges of Liberal demagoguery, they understood that solutions come from distractions — hence the ping-pong tables. It’s the hammer and nail analogy, except you replace the nail with a wet noodle. Creativity is more like a wet noodle than a nail.
The elusive nature of creativity requires the pull of inquiry, as opposed to the push of hard thought; the nature of design is more additive, and less, by nature, destructive. So, design begins with a premise, perhaps some production and material restraints, and a closely defined objective. These are the motivators that eke and pull out of the designer's mind a solution that satisfies the project's goals. Finally, much like these words are added one word after the other, design, as a process, is more like making a collage. Effective design, therefore, is layered by stimulus and observations made within the design, and the designer's, environment.
It could all be thought of as demagoguery, but that would be missing the point.
Inspiration has no ideology. Surely any creative expression can express ideology, but the creative spark, the inspired vision or verse, comes simply to anyone willing to find silence... and listen for it... and look within one’s mind's eye.
So while some could say that the idea at BRIGHTIDEADESIGN is to leverage our prejudice for visualizing, but that would be missing the point. It does means that we can work with you to: Brainstorm, Sketch, Explore, Dissect, Visualize and Compose solutions to your design problem.
It means that we know how to listen, and how to work with you to turn your idea into an inspired solution.
BRIGHTIDEADESIGN