Think Creative

This is the first of hopefully many debates inside the Creative Thinking arena. You can participate or view the outcomes as they unfold. Please contribute, as most people have an opinion and it would be good to hear it. I have moved the discussion here as it has the opportunity to create a wall of discussion. When leaving comments please add your name. You don't need to have an account, simply choose "Name/URL" and supply your FaceBook ID as the name. Couldn't be easier! First subject in this two weeks will be 'censorship'. For many years as a youthful creative I was always an advocate of non-censorship. Remembering the hidden religious control of the British Board of Censors as they deemed things inappropriate due to their middle class, church going attitudes. I thought that there was nothing wrong with showing things that were viewable in real life, in the confines of adverts, films and television shows. However, as I have grown older and a little wiser I ...

Advertising and graphics have a power above all else. The expression "a picture speaks a thousand words" is testament to the fact that the visual form is a strong method to get a message across. In fact since we climbed from the trees and tried very desperately to communicate, one of the first things we did was to make marks on walls and in sand. These pictograms eventually turned to the multitude of alphabets we now use around the world, with some confusion between races. However, the visual form is in-all-tense-and-purpose a universal tool. Something that can be recognised from one mind to another, the world over. This in one sense makes it a very powerful tool, but at the same time makes it a very powerful weapon. What ad men have been argued at is not having is morality. Whether that is true or not is another debate, what they do have is the obligation to sell the product that is placed in front of them. To this end they could be faced with dealing with some very hard a...

The last part of the debate was giving discussion into possible causes to why censorship occurs. How it started, and who possibly even started it. What this second part of the discussion will talk about, is the idea that preemptive censorship can control design even as much as the censoring bodies cause to released matter. The idea that in some respects censorship can aid in delivering the market force required to selling a product more that the actual clever, or not so clever advert itself. In my youth I remember the release of a song by a group called 'Frankie Goes to Hollywood', the songs title was "Relax". The censoring bodies ( as we know from the previous post were dominated by religious activists ) deemed the lyrics of the song too suggestive and sexually derived, and therefore banned the song to be aired on radio or television. This did a remarkable thing. It made the curiosity of the record buying audience curious. Therefore, the record shot to number one a...

The last theme in this two week stretch. Thanks for all who have viewed, if not commented. Thanks to Panagiotis for his contribution. Strange thing is I see him in class, and therefore could have had this debate off the computer, but never mind. For the final subject I wanted to start the notion of 'to what levels would a piece of graphics go' to sell its message. I am a great admirer of the author Marshall McLuhan and his book 'Understanding Media'. If you are interested in Creative and Lateral Thinking with relationship to the medias then this is a book you should read. Several of the chapters he talks in have many aspects to the values of the visual medias and in particular he talks on the 'medium is the message'. This whole philosophy is a little deep and hard to add to a short blog post, but basically it is the notion that our society has devised ( consciously or subconsciously ) the methods by which a combination of words and structures have moved from t...

This is an immensely large subject full of debate on so many levels, that it will be hard to cover all of them. What would be the best approach is to skim the surface of the main points and mix it with some historic flavouring, in an attempt to make some discursive approach to the post. What must be made as a point at the beginning of this post, in conclusion to the last, is that one of the worst types of censorship, is that of self-censorship. Not stating one's opinion based on some fear or lack of knowledge is not the best approach to creating communication. It may be clear that I may not know what I am talking about in some of my posts, but with a little supportive research and a desire to say what I think, I put in words a viewpoint. After all, this is what I can do and is a right of all individuals, to have an opinion. Not saying something can possibly take away a viewpoint or piece of knowledge that could help in the argument, help an individual understand or even just give...