Being Creative is a lot of Fun/Work

It is hard sometimes to find the time to be creative. There are blog posts of course, and web sites, graphics, and creating new products, planning and executing new market strategies. Of course there are things within things, within things to do as well. Well, and of course there is the need to do some actual work that involves getting paid!

Let’s take creating an eBook as an example of how completing one creative product involves layers of work.

1. First, there must to be a concept. Sometimes the concept is the easiest part. But that’s only when someone has an idea that can kick off the whole process. At other times, being creative is the hardest part.

2. After the concept is chosen, content has to be content created and/or adapted. Aligning existing content with the concept is sometimes easy and at other times, it’s a creative process of its own to develop a nexus between the two.

3. Graphic elements must be created/found, selected, modified, and placed.

    a. A creative graphic idea may involve going out to take some photos, then processing the photos in a   graphic design, then placing the graphic design into whatever medium it was meant for.

    b. It may also involve development of original

4. Page design must be determined and sometimes a downloadable template will do, but this is still time-consuming to find just the right one for the project. Modifications may need to be made in order to make any particular template work for the project.

5. Next you have to assemble all of the content of the eBook and make sure it all fits, is visually appealing, and well-organized.

6. After you have it all nicely formatted, you then go through the editing process which can mean some formatting dilemmas as well!

7. Next the document must be rendered into a pdf format. Pdf files are preferred because they are small in memory and almost everyone with a computer has adobe reader so the files are easily downloaded or emailed.

8. Last and ongoing there is development of marketing tools to let people know it exists. Which involves a number of the steps above all over again.

Being creative is interesting and fun, but it’s also a lot of work! Not that much different than being a grant writer I guess.

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