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© 2002 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
I consider myself extremely fortunate that my day-to-day business activity can provide such a variety of experiences. Here is a typical case in point—call it two days in the life of a Windows-based publishing consultant.
First, it was an all-day meeting with a client who edits and produces Checkbook Magazine, a consumer-advocacy publication circulated in Washington DC and here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Checkbook is about to expand into five new markets, and Kevin Brasler, the editor, needs to explore the finer points of Ventura Publisher’s automation tools in a hurry. He came to two CorelWORLD conferences this year…smart man!
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Checkbook produces ambitious tables of information about local services, like all the auto repair shops in the Bay Area, or every plumber in DC. Ventura Publisher is unusually adept at tables, but the ones that Kevin needs to produce defy simple treatment. All of his data is held in a custom database that is too proprietary to be handled by Database Publisher, Ventura’s bundled recipemaker.
So Kevin wrote his own translator.
His script pumps out data from his database and surrounds it with the morass of Ventura markup codes that reside just below the surface of a table. He put in many hours studying the arcanery of z_tbl_beg, hgrid, vgutter, and C3,5,2,0. The result is a river of data that flows from a private database peacefully into Ventura.
I can’t quite use the colorful language Kevin employed to describe his own lack of talent in the arts. Suffice it to say he would be the first to admit he’s incapable of designing himself out of a paper bag. And why is that relevant? Because Kevin proves that you don’t have to be artistically-inclined to be creative. His database dance is one of the more ingenuous solutions I have seen.
One day later, I was hard at work on the CorelWORLD conference guide, distributed to each patron of the event. I was working on the material sent to us by Sharon George, an unassuming yet brilliant artist from San Diego who has joined our presenting team. She does not have what I would call natural talent for computing or for software. She trained with a brush in her hand, not a mouse or drawing tablet. If you asked her about Ventura’s table codes, she’d freak.
But when she needs to produce a realistic scene in Corel PHOTO-PAINT, she sniffs out the right tool like a bloodhound. And when she arrives at the tool, her instincts for experimentation are nothing short of breathtaking. For a piece depicting Egyptian gods and goddesses, she drew a simple ellipse, colored it white, and deftly morphed it into a galaxy of stars. Before long, she had a universe of galaxies.
This is why I love this community so much. You can find incredible talent and energy in such vastly diverse ways. Sharon George oozes artistic creativity from her pores. Her mind’s eye has 20-20 vision and she has become uncommonly adept at delivering her internal vision to the computer screen. Kevin looks at his data like one big golf course and figures out what type of club and swing he needs to get the ball to the hole. Is either one more creative than the other? I’m not going anywhere near that one.
If you were to poll a group of talented people—and it doesn’t even matter how you define “talented”—and ask them to define the core of creativity, I’ll bet you lunch I could guess what most of them would say. Most of them would say that at the core of good creation is problem-solving. They’ll tell you that good design is about how well you deal with trouble. Successful production is facing challenge and prevailing over it. Deft use of software is overcoming hurdles and automating tasks.
As an aging but still competitive athlete, I relish the problem-solving metaphor. My most satisfying wins on the tennis court have been when I have had to solve problems. When I get passed the first 10 times I approach the net and have to change strategy. Or when I have to figure out how to return a 125 mph serve. I too might not make it out of a paper bag with my conventional design skills, so I am grateful for other ways to flex the creative muscle.
If we were to put together a creative dream team, we would want to open up the definition of creative as wide as possible. It would consist of the person with extraordinary vision to bring shape to the overall task. Then people who could visualize designs and determine how to bring them to fruition. Talented page-layout specialists to incorporate designs into a larger document. Killer webmasters to place it on the web, not to mention a PDF expert or two for getting it to press. And a few script mavens to send data across an otherwise impassable electronic gorge.
Each of these people would exercise his or her own form of creativity, and one way or another, it would come down to how well they solve problems.
For the typical CorelDRAW user, there is another avenue for creativity, but this one needs a bit of explaining. Most DRAW users have come to their relationship with the software not from the arts, but from business. Most are not professional designers, they’re professional something-elses, and they need to use DRAW to succeed in that something else. Some of them would still be in that paper bag along with Kevin and me.
For these users, one of the most important parts of their expression with the software is to avoid showing the whole world that they are not professional designers. They need to restrain themselves; they need to focus intently on creating work that is, above all, not ghastly. Once they achieve that, they can earn adjectives such as tasteful, businesslike, smart, and maybe even handsome or attractive. But if they become too ambitious, they risk ending up back at ghastly.
You could argue that the challenges facing this group are steeper than for those who do have talent in the arts. The paper-bag group can’t just go on instinct; they can’t trust that their instincts will keep them safely away from ghastly. They must always keep a vigilant watch on the ghastly quotient as they proceed. This requires a level of creativity with which a professional designer is not as familiar.
Perhaps a member of the paper-bag group needs to be on the dream team. The effective business user with CorelDRAW or Ventura Publisher at the ready gets dialed in to the most effective way to deliver a message. Get in, get out, don’t distract with a bunch of junk, and show a focused sense of what is important. When you can’t get out of the paper bag, these become the primary objectives.
Come to think of it, those are pretty good objectives to never forget…
Copyright 2002, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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