inspirationI’m keenly interested in this whole creativity, inspiration, and idea generation thing. I like the idea of turning my (and your) cognitive surplus into something good. You can probably tell this from my recent postings about Maslow’s hierarchy, including esteem and self-actualization, as well as Creative Infrastructure 2.0.

I’ve been scouring the Web for resources to learn more about the creative process, so I figured I should share them with you.

The main (and highly subjective) criteria that I used to evaluate these blogs are:

  1. They were obviously about creativity and idea development
  2. They’ve had new posts within the past month
  3. I liked what they had to say

So here they are:

Typical Choices (creativity and design blogs)

Improved Lives –This post in particular has a great link to a NY Times article about the creative process - The Creative Process Demystified.

Creative Something – Subscriber only, but great short articles. Kind of hard to give you a meaningful deep link, but we did cover them recently.

Creative Creativity – This blog bills itself as a daily guide to creativity and new ideas. I really enjoyed their article featuring Douglas Adams (the man who created The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy) quotes: Douglas Adams on Creativity and Inspiration.

Abundance Blog at MareLisa Online – Just starting to explore this one, but it looks like a fun combo of creativity and productivity. Sample post: Creative Thinking Techniques – The “Playful” Edition.

Accidental Creative – Accidental Creative is a consulting company that provides services to creative professionals. Although it’s not really focused on the amateur, there’s still good material there for anyone. Blog and podcast. Recommended post: The Straw-Man and the Burn Draft.

Lateral Action – Brian Clark, Mark McGuinness and contributors – great new blog for creative entrepreneurs – I highly recommend that you check out the Creative Rock Stars series.

Wishful Thinking - Mark McGuinness’s own blog about “inspiring creative professionals” - this article talks about motivating creative people.

Creative Sage Arts Blog – The artist blog of Catherine Hrudika of Creative Sage. I particularly enjoyed this article: Rotating Creative Crops.

LifeDev - This blog’s tagline is Empowering Creative People. Good article about using mind mapping software. They also have interviews with people about creativity that are worth checking out.

Productive Flourishing – this blog bills itself as productivity for creative people. I particularly like the Do You Have An Idea Garden post because it’s very similar to the Fields of Awe concept that I’ve been thinking about for months.

Creative Generalist – Broad thinking leads to brilliant ideas - you’ll get a wide variety of quotes, anecdotes, links, and more from this intriguing blog. You’re bound to find something to stimulate your thinking. I liked this short post in particular: Respect.

TED - “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.” I haven’t watched many of the short videos that have helped make TED famous, but the ones that I’ve seen have been great. TED videos are a great place to find inspiration and ideas. Here, you can see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speak about his famous “flow” concept.

Info Aesthetics – where form follows data. Big emphasis on design here. This article about lifeflow is great.

Smashing Magazine – I think Web designers, coders, etc. are often fans of this website. I’m not that familiar with the website, but the comic book geek in me was impressed with Showcase of Brilliant Comic Book Cover Art.

Get Fresh Minds – Ideas so fresh, they should be slapped (seriously, this is the blog’s tagline) – interesting review of Conversational Capital.

Greg Fraley, Author of Jack’s Notebook- Take a look at Creativity Gone Sour: Motrin, Mothers, and Twitter.

Atypical Choices (blogs about more than creativity)

These blogs and articles aren’t specifically about creativity and inspiration, but they often make me think differently. You can do searches within these blogs on ideas, creativity, and more:

Seth Godin’s blog – business, marketing, making change, you know?

Illuminated Mind – this is a personal development blog and it has some interesting ideas about creativity Embracing Creative ADD and Thinking Inside The Circle.

Write To Done – Great posts about writing. They have several posts about inspiration and idea generation.

Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog – Personal Development for Smart People (and a whole lot besides that) blog and forums.

How To Be a Better Improviser – the techniques in this article are worth checking out.

GapingVoid.com - Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. From Hugh MacLeod, the man who wrote How to be Creative: creative (and often humorous) cartoons and blog posts.

Hopefully the blogs that I linked to in this post will help inspire you to do bigger and better things. Do you have any favorites that you’d like to share with the rest of us?

PS: why not subscribe so you don’t miss any more creative goodness?





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