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You have to be willing to step into the unknown if you want to be creative.

The will to do things that haven’t been done before.

When we’re creating things that have not been done before, uncertainty is inevitable.

The willingness to stay in the question long enough for the dots to connect.

My inability to make decisions is frustrating, but it also allows me to stay in the question longer. I’m not rushing to find a quick fix but rather twisting and turning problems. I often find the need to go back and research some more. To make sure that the path I’ve decided to take is the right one. It wasn’t until I got more comfortable in my role as a designer (I wish I could say that my imposter syndrome went away, but it still surfaces in every project) that I discovered the benefit of this. When it comes to solving problems with creative solutions, we must first spend time figuring out the right problem to solve. Then make sure that the solution we propose is helping more than hurting.

It’s never too late to control your own fate

In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.

The idea of finding real edges, rather than eking out wins by grinding harder than everyone else, clicked for me when I started playing poker. Pros spent nearly as much time studying as they did playing, using solvers to seek out tiny mathematical advantages. I noticed a massive edge that was almost entirely ignored: physical reads, or tells.

Court rejection

Seek real (anonymous) feedback

Increase your surface area for luck

Assume everything is learnable

Learn to love the moat of low status

Don't work too hard!

A post about how I make mind maps.

Walk around. Pay attention. Take pictures.

Bill says there’s two ways to pay attention while you’re walking:

1. “Ambient noticing” — you’re just soaking in everything, taking in the big picture, and letting things come at you
2. “Purposeful attention” — you have a goal of seeking out specific things, such as colors, signs, sad chairs, etc.

Bill’s talk also made me think about the different ways we can pull meaning out of our collections of images, including at least:

1. Juxtaposition, by assembling a gallery of images in multiple next to each other
2. Addition, by way of annotation — adding text below or drawing directly on the image
3. Subtraction, cutting up the images, or removing elements (see: my de-signs, which Bill kindly mentions

A lot of people commenting think that removing nudity form the training is fine, as it just makes the model safe for work, but it actually hurts the generation of non-nude humans as well. Significantly. I use the f222 model as my main general-purpose model, because it generates better clothed humans than SD1.5. The f222 model is based off of extending SD1.5 to have more knowledge of nudity (so the total opposite of the direction SD2.0 went). This actually makes f222 better at making humans IN GENERAL. The f222 model knows a lot more about the shape of humans. It's not perfect, but what f222 needs is just even more body types and ugly folks, but it's not completely lacking in the ability to generate those either. It definitely does have a bias towards pretty people, but it is not near as overwhelming as some of the other models.

Here's a good one I use a lot:
https://stablediffusion.fr/artists [stablediffusion.fr]
Another example:
https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/e28a4f8d97724f14a784a538b8589e7d?v=ab624266c6a44413b42a6c57a41d828c [notion.site]

“Not a day without a line”, or in its latin version “Nulla dies sine linea”. It comes from the Ancient Greece painter Apelle (4th century BC), who was one of the most famous of his time.

It enables one to steadily build and strengthen one’s unique relationship with creativity. At the intersection between the art of habits (doing something regularly — every day here) and the habits of art (drawing or writing lines), I find this motto to empower core aspects of the relationship to drawing practice:

• Befriending creativity by focusing on regular process over outcome
• Improving one’s craft by focusing on quantity over quality
• Creating one’s very own art by weaving life and art
• Going to the essence of expressiveness in a single line

What I have come to realize is that the trough of despair isn’t just normal, it’s essential. The negative feelings you experience in the trough tell you whether the work you’re doing is hard or complex enough to deserve your full creative attention. Only challenges that don’t have easy answers require you to take the kinds of difficult creative leaps that lead to breakthroughs. Only work that requires you to push yourself to develop new skills—not just deploy the ones you already have—keeps you on the edge of your own learning curve and, therefore, reaching toward your full potential.

A lot of people think of creativity and discipline as opposites. But nothing could further from the truth… Many of the most creative people the world has ever known were surprisingly disciplined in…

1. Outline your creative work the day before
2. Create a warm-up ritual
3. Stop fighting your procrastination and validate it instead
4. Quarantine your busywork

The goal of mechanizing certain creative processes in problem solving is attainable, but not in the near future. The problem is to find workable computer procedures for evolving ``appropriate'' representations in given problem-solving situations. The answer may lie in the extension of ideas that were developed for some elementary theory-formation procedures.

You should draw.
Sometimes a problem seems too big or too abstract to fit into a neatly formatted list of requirements. It’s difficult to hold and pick apart a series of steps in your head. You want to connect ideas, follow many series of steps in different directions, while also considering constraints and stress cases. But your brain wants to follow one train of thought from beginning to end. Anything that looks like it’ll take you off track gets brushed aside, “We’ll come back to it.” You end up in a battle with your own mental capacity. You need to explore all sides of a problem while simultaneously looking for weak points. There comes a real concern of things slipping through the cracks because your brain can’t hold them all or remember them for long.
Visualizing problems on a canvas gets them out of your head and into the real world. You can put all the pieces in front of you so you — and everyone else — knows what you’re working with. Every time a new idea, challenge, or path comes up, make a note. You may not solve it at the same time, but it’s there, waiting until you’re ready. This frees up mental space to start challenging your ideas and working towards solutions that include everyone — instead of barrelling down one track to the obvious, happy-path conclusion.

Your team should draw.
Because whiteboards are part of our physical space, they can be gathering places. We sit together with our teams, but each facing our own personal, digital canvases: our monitors. Work is only shared when you as an individual feel it’s ready, or a colleague has asked you to share. When we work at the whiteboard, we share our work while we work .

Everyone should draw.
The whiteboard is not a canvas for designers, it’s a canvas for discussion.

Our brains are designed to worry, and they’re good at it.

They’re built to determine the next big thing to “fix.”

We were born to survive, which is to create.
Suffering dissolves when we focus on creating rather than feeling. Instead of being at the whim of how the world makes us feel, we focus on how we can create what we want from what exists.
Good and bad become irrelevant when the focus isn’t “What can I enjoy?” But, rather, “What can I create?”

“Almost everybody I know who does interesting, creative work went through a phase of years of where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t good as they wanted it to be… It is only by going through a volume of work will you close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions” — Ira Glass

Every month I reflect on ‘How I can be a better Designer’. I learned through my background in visual arts that you can train yourself to draw better in a shorter period of time (literally).
I experimented with this in the Summer of 2013. My goal then was to achieve realistic sketches of eyes that captured human emotion. To do this I gave myself a 30-minute time limit and these were the results…

1) 8–6–4–2 Rapid Prototype Method
The premise of this method is to sketch for 8 minutes, 6 minutes, 4 minutes and 2 minutes with quick 2 minute feedback sessions in between.

2) A Twist on the #DailyUI Challenge
Maybe you’re like me and you’ve received the congratulatory email on Day 100 🎉 with nothing to show for it. This was the simple twist I added to get myself started.

3) Solve a Problem you’ve encountered
Take a moment in your day-to-day to note down real world problems that you wish there were better solutions for. You might already a list or two or five. It’s time to solve that problem.

Here are some examples of the difference between consuming and creating:

• Refreshing your email inbox and reading the messages that you receive (consume) versus reaching out and getting in touch with people (create)
• Watching entertaining videos (consume) versus brainstorming ideas for a project you’re interested in (create)
• Listening to tutorials and reading guides (consume) versus taking notes and putting them into practice (create)

Ideas on a little slip of paper are cheap. They flow. There’s no cost to being wrong, so there’s no reason to self-edit. It’s easier to stay generative.

The minute you turn on the screen, you’re not generating. You’re editing.

Relatedly, the explanation may have to do with a tension between two kinds of thinking: what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation. When we face a new problem, we adults usually exploit the knowledge about the world we have acquired so far. We try to quickly find a pretty good solution that is close to the solutions we already have. On the other hand, exploration — trying something new — may lead us to a more unusual idea, a less obvious solution, a new piece of knowledge. But it may also mean that we waste time considering crazy possibilities that will never work, something both preschoolers and teenagers have been known to do.