Creating Creativity

The buzz right now in the creative community is the new Adobe Creative Suite that was officially announced yesterday via a live event and webcast. Let me tell you, it is a designer’s wet dream. As I have been watching this product rollout I am completely geeking out... this is the kind of stuff that designers go nuts over, but if I showed it to someone outside the industry they would simply smile and nod.

In a nutshell, not only does each element of CS3 have gobs of cool new features that allow ideas to be better implemented, but the entire suite of programs are better integrated to allow for a smoother, quicker workflow, not to mention the ability to do do things that were once either not possible or extremely difficult.

The big question is, can a software suite (a really damn expensive software suite at that) make a person more creative? Can Creative Suite’s new features make me a better designer?

In a way, yes, but despite having all of these features a designer has to have talent. These amazing graphics applications can help breed creativity, but in the end it doesn’t matter if a person knows the software back and forth... if they do not know how to apply the software, it is a moot point.

A great artist is a great artist no matter what tools he has available. Before Photoshop and Illustrator and Quark XPress and all of the other graphic design software out there in the world, there was letterpress. Before letterpress there was copperplate. And so on and so forth. If you look at pieces of art and design made before the advent of computer graphics, there are still some amazing works that were created with the kind of imagination that transcends technology. Toulouse-Lautrec, Frank Lloyd-Wright, Andy Warhol... these guys didn't have Adobe Creative Suite 3. In fact, it could be argued that not having these amazing innovations can be a good thing.

When I started drawing and painting and creating, I did not have a computer loaded with Photoshop. Actually, Photoshop didnt exist. I used the tools that I had to exercise my mind and become a better artist. I had a foundation of learning how art works that allowed me to expand upon that in my later years. In high school, when I picked up Photoshop for the first time I was able to use that foundation in art and design. Once I learned the tools and how they all worked, I could then take that knowledge and apply it to my process.

Chances are most of the people who will be able to afford this awesome new software suite will be people who have some sort of design or art background. And most likely this awesome new software suite will not make them more creative. Rather, it will allow them to harness the full potential of their creativity and allow them to make the ideas in their brains reality. I am one of these people, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am!