xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
16th January 2007

7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output

“After my last article on experiencing creativity, there was a question in the resulting forum discussion about how to enter this highly creative flow state, the state where you lose all sense of time, your ego vanishes, and you become one with the task in front of you. Is this peak creative state a rare chance event, or can it be achieved consistently?”

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16th January 2007

One Year of Stock Photography!

“I started to work with Stock agencies in January 2006. The year went pretty well and this is a review of 9 stock place where you can sell your work. The revenue per picture greatly depend on your portfolio content; mine was travel oriented and then I started to focus on stock images such as every day objects isolated on white background. Also I’d like to emphasize that I believe Microstock and Regular Stock are two different markets with different customers. I would never sell my ‘better’ (or I should say my ‘rarest’) pictures with micro for just a quarter. I sell newly taken “microstock oriented” (i.e everyday object on white background) or travel shots that did not meet Alamy technical requirements (due to lower resolution). If you check my portfolio with Alamy and with any Micro Stock you’ll see what I mean. I obviously prefer to sell a unique picture for a decent amount of money, but I also enjoy getting paid for my ‘not as rare’ pictures.”

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16th January 2007

Taking personas too far

“I don’t have to tell you that at Cooper, we love personas—how could we not?—and we’re glad to see continued excitement about them. That said, although personas are essential design tools, we think some people may be losing sight of the fact that they’re just tools, and tools with a specific purpose, at that. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of gold-plated hammers—unnecessarily elaborate communication about personas—and some fundamental misunderstandings about the relationships among research, personas, and scenarios.”

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