July 20, 2009

Inspirational Nuggets of Information

Cory Doctorow offers up some great advice for writing in the age of distraction.

While his article is aimed at writers, his advice applies equally to animators and illustrators - and all freelancers for that matter. Here’s what he says:

  • Work every day
  • Don’t be too precious about it
  • Stop in the middle of an idea, not between ideas
  • Don’t research until you need to
  • Close all messaging software


  • Design Sponge is kicking off a new video web-series - Design by the Book. Kind of a Project Runway but with a bunch of Williamsburg designers. And instead of the Parsons School of Fashion, it’s set in (drum roll) the NY Public Library.
    The first episode is up and it’s got interviews with a bunch of interesting people. Notably:
    Mike Perry (5:00) - an illustrator/font-designer and author of Hand Job: A Catalog of Type.
    Julia Rothman (6:40) - a designer of beautiful patterns - [Via Drawn]


    In this awesome post, Jillian Tamaki answers the question every artist dreads, Where do you get your ideas? She also points to this Frank Stockton article about inspiration. Both are great reads for any artist.

    Andrew over at puppetvision has some interesting advise on a recent blog post regarding Linear Income vs. Passive Income. In a nutshell, Linear is the regular old, paid-by-the-hour thing (or in animation; paid by-the-scene or by-the-second), Passive Income is the concept of creating one product, a podcast, writing an article, creating a book, or illustrating designs to sell on Cafepress. Whether it's through the selling of large volumes of something in which you created the one time, and thus keep generating income because of that work, or generating higher volume of profits based upon that written material, or recorded item, than this (of course) can generate far more cash for the freelance artist from home, read it here, it might peek your interest, and make you think about how you can make a website, book, podcast, something that can generate revenue through online advertising, or by the selling of large volumes of your work.

    One last bit of cool info is Nate William's Methodology For Creating New Ideas.

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