Surf’s Up: March 31, 2008

An e-book on creative workplace coaching, tips for turning your burg into the next creative hot spot, and musings on how to market two distinctly different lines of creative output are this week’s hyperlink treasures.

1. Mark McGuinness at Wishful Thinking has produced a lovely e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams. It’s available as a PDF download and is a nice overview of business coaching for creative teams in the workplace.

Mark provides plenty of ammo for those seeking to advocate for coaching’s unique performance enhancing features in industries where continuous innovation is a must.  The e-book is a compilation and revision of Mark’s blog series on business coaching.

2. DT over at Design Sojourn recently shared the results of a community discussion at SPARKCon, a creative conference for artists in the Southeastern United States, about the top 10 ways to nurture a thriving creative community.

The list is wide-ranging, with environment-building suggestions such as “Increase focus on green spaces that allows people to enjoy the environment” and “Develop safer pedestrian and bicycle activity to encourage people to explore,” to more practical ideas for cultivating creative community, such as “Develop an information hub to publicly promote all creative activities from new patents to gallery shows” and “Regularly exhibit and celebrate home grown talent of all kinds in public projects.”

While I believe one doesn’t have to live in a creative mecca to do good work, creative hubs promote cross-pollination of ideas, which is a huge boost to innovation. The SPARKCon folks are to be saluted for taking a proactive approach to promoting creative success, rather than lamenting lack of government or public support, etc.
3. Deanna at Artist, Emerging poses an interesting question for visual artists (as well as the rest of us who juggle multiple creative projects): how to market two different bodies of work to what is essentially a single marketplace (in her case, gallery owners).

She notes that until recently, her bodies of work (paintings and artist’s books) didn’t compete for gallery attention, because the books were mostly entered into contests. However, with the advent of a new series of paintings on a different topic than her previous set, she has been faced with how to approach galleries. She has so far taken the route of alerting existing clients to her new body of work, but also seeking new galleries as potential targets for those paintings.

Her strategy, in line with a number of other art marketing experts, seems sound. As a writer, it’s possible to load one’s portfolio down with too many different types of work when pitching editors.

I know from my work as an editor that apart from any questions I might have about an author’s ability to cover so many topics well, there’s just the overwhelm factor. You want to leave a clear impression in your potential patron/gallery owner/client/agent/editor’s mind (“She has done a wonderful series on X”), and when that person has been presented with a number of competing bodies of work from one person, that top-of-mind reference may be slower in coming.