Layout for Adventure Link Travel Agency Webstite

I just had an interesting conversation with the owner of Nemesis Romania which happens to be a personal friend of mine. He provides me with this awesome hosting for my site.

I showed him a design that I spent an entire night working on, only to find out that the client wanted me to do spec work. Basically to show him the work and then he decides if he gives me the project.

So I was whining about it and he stopped me and said.

Dude, stop being so money hungry!

Of course I was intrigued, because I am not like that and I was just upset to have lost a few hours of good sleep. And then he continues:

I lost countless hours and did a lot of FREE work for some of the big players here. Players like Vodafone, Orange, Romtelecom, RDS etc. Now their sales staff recognize me and recommends me to other big players. Only because I gave them discounts and worked under the market for a while.

Then I realized what he was trying to infer to me.

Your time is never lost. Somehow the hours you put into some project will get back to you as experience or a bigger project later from your portfolio.

And lastly he said:

Success comes to those who are to busy to think about it.

This will be the last time (hope so) that I whine about lost time put into work.

Global Trash Solutions

Creativity is the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

This quote belongs to Sir Ken Robinson. At first sight it’s pretty abstract and that’s because it is taken out of context.
I recently saw a couple of short, 20 minutes each, videos where Sir Ken Robinson talks about a revolution in the education system, creativity and intelligence. He says that in order to be creative, first, you have to allow yourself to make mistakes.

If you are not prepared to be wrong then you will not be creative.

I am 100% with his point of view. Lately I’ve been pretty busy creating 2 different brands at work and one for a personal client.
In all of these 3 projects I trashed so many drafts and sketches. Ideas come when you stop thinking strictly at the project at hand. I thought: “man, I have to think at this project and do all this research in order to finish it” and I was wrong.

Creativity hit me when I was looking at totally non related things.

For one of the projects I had to design a shopping registration form. While I was browsing for what other people did, I stopped to take a brake. I looked at the things I had on my desk and the stuff my co-workers had lying around and it finally hit me. I used graphic content that had nothing to do with the project at hand. But when I put the idea in photoshop, it took perfect shape for my project.

The same thing happened with all 3 of my projects.

Here are the links I talked about above:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Today I’m about to finish work for a personal client. It was quick work that brought in some much needed cash. Both me and the client were happy with the work done and how it turned out.
This is the second time the client asked work from me. In both cases I finished the work quickly and solved his problems. I am proud to say that I even made him save money with one of my ideas. Saved him a few hundred bucks.

In a few weeks I think I will finally be able to show what I’ve been working on these past few months.
To surprise you I even designed an application. This is a first and I am happy with how it looks.

I’ll post back soon.