Music production isn’t the only area in which smartphones and tablets can help those with no experience (or talent) push out something slick and professional. Here are the best apps for creating eye-catching works of art, whether or not you’ve ever put digital pen (or paintbrush) to virtual paper before.
If you're not taking a lunch break, your creativity is probably suffering. This might seem obvious, but now there's research to back it up. And it doesn't even matter what you eat, or if you eat at all; what's important is that you physically step away from your workspace to recharge.
In 1959 Issac Asimov wrote an essay on where new ideas come from. It wasn't found until fifty-five years later, when Arthur Obermayer, scientist and friend of Asimov, cleaned out some of his old files. It is as illuminating now as it was then.
We all have one of those projects sitting around unfinished that we know isn't that great. It's easy to abandon it, but as writer Steven Pressfield points out in Entrepreneur, sometimes, you just need to finish it to prove you can.
My newest science fiction novel, Lockstep, was recently serialized in Analog magazine. Reactions have been pretty favourable — except that I've managed to offend a small but vocal group of readers. They're outraged that I've written an SF story in which faster than light travel is impossible.
Inspiration is fickle and difficult. We all strive for those bright "Aha!" moments, whether we work in a creative or logical field. While it's not a process you can control entirely, there are ways to enable and encourage your brain to have more of those epiphanies when you understand how they work.
Bernhard Haux is a character technical director at Pixar studios. He has eight lessons that anyone wanting to be a creative person should read.
A new study has found that dim lighting may actually boost your creativity. But here's the best part. The test subjects' creativity was assessed by having them make up a science fiction story and draw aliens. Yes, really.
Adobe pulled the covers off its shiny new Creative Cloud earlier this month, but it's now finally available for you to get your grubby little hands on.
We've all heard stories of inspiration striking out of the blue. It seems as though the moment your mind wanders, ideas and answers spring out of the void. Sometimes you can think about a problem logically for hours, without getting anywhere — but as soon as you "zone out," a clever solution pops into your head.
People often describe creative thinking in the form of metaphors. We talk about "thinking outside the box," "putting two and two together," and "seeing both sides of the problem." But what if we could boost our creativity by taking these metaphors literally? We know our minds interact in all sorts of interesting ways…
This lecture may be from 1991, but the topic is timeless, the discussion is lucid, and it's all delivered by Basil Fawlty himself. Here's 36 minutes of John Cleese discussing the psychology of being creative. Listen to one of the funniest fellows alive talk seriously about how to become more creative, how to spitball…
If you're not already familiar with the Sagan Series, drop what you're doing and watch them at once, starting with this rousing first installment (warning, this will give you chills and/or make you cry).
Are you more creative when you're drunk? It's one of those soundbites that you're liable to hear a friend spout off somewhere between their fourth and fifth beer — a little factoid that might actually sound somewhat feasible if only there were a scientific study lying around to back it up.
When you're perusing your Facebook account, your brain might be fooling you into thinking you're doing something incredibly creative and productive that will improve your life. If only that were true!
Have you ever wondered how the hell spaceships get made? I mean, how does something like the six-legged ATHLETE rover go from an engineering fantasy into an actual working thing? Creativity? Technological know-how? Sure, you need plenty of that. But most of all: It takes the stones to dream up what no one ever…
This landscape may not look like that much - it's a solid B+ in middle school art, I'd say - but this might just be proof that its creator, a computer program named the Painting Fool, is a creative being.
Many of you are probably familiar with The Sagan Series, a collection of videos that pays tribute to the inspirational words of astrophysics-giant Carl Sagan. (And if you're not familiar with the series, you owe it to yourself to check it out immediately, starting with this emotionally stirring first installment).
For humans to thrive, we often need to come up with unexpected solutions to tricky problems. Yet people are often skeptical and dismissive of creative ideas...and the reason for that is found deep inside our minds.
