Creative Bulletin n.110

On Sunday afternoon Matteo got entangled in one of his heroic fury episodes and he locked himself in the house to redefine Sefirot’s management strategy. The result is that cluster of post-its you see attached behind the floor lamp; some of them are reminders and they’ll stay there for a long time, others are things to do and they’ll be soon thrown away 😉

🦊🦊🦊 What we’ve been up to this week

• Andrea is editing two products: BAD, our new Business-Aware Design tool (the booklet is ready!), and Edito, the tool to edit manuscripts, to which we added extra cards to increase usability and in-depth skills.
• We finally launched Fabula Advanced in English. We decided to keep the videos in Italian and add subtitles and…it’s going very well! We’re happy that our unusual choice is being appreciated ❤️
• Matteo is working on the lessons on Business-Aware Design he’ll teach at IAAD in Turin and he’s pretty happy about it. The class will teach creatives, designers, project managers and entrepreneurs how to handle a project while keeping focus also on business needs. We’ll make it available to Sefirot’s community as soon as it is possible 🚀

🍏🍏🍏 A non-methodology: to feel when something works!

A question we get often asked (and we ask ourselves too) when it comes to creativity is: «How do you know when something you’re working on is right? Whether it’s the idea, the cover, the logo, the naming.»

Premise. We operate in a creative and subjective world where there’s no room for mathematical equations. This means that there can’t be the perfect cover, a reasonably correct naming for a product or logo and colors that are the perfect sum of a set of values. Matteo discovered this hard truth during the first revision of a project at the Design faculty when his teacher told him: «Hmm… it doesn’t work, I don’t like it» and he thought: «Alright there’s no logic here… fuck».

Creative distress. A creative, so someone who works in a realm where subjectivity is the ruler is in constant distress because there’s no overall solution, there’s no universal truth nor just one point of view. Everything is possible, which is wonderful but… it’s also terrifying! 😅 So that first question comes back stronger: «How do I know if it’s working?»

Solution. You have to feel it. Not understand it, but feel it. It’s like falling in love, a piece falling in place, a light that finally floods the room. We look at the cover, we move a couple of elements here and there and… we feel that it’s right! We want to screenshot it and send it proudly to our friends and yell: «Look how cool it is!!!»

Same goes for naming, ideas, stories, novels – when it works, all of a sudden we have no more doubts, we feel that it’s right, it’s so right (and if someone says any different, we DON’T believe them 🔥), we feel like walking down the street and dance with random people to celebrate with them. It’s our truth which will never be someone else’s, but why should we care? We already established that we operate in a subjective world, right? 😉

🐈🐈🐈 What we’ve learned

Going back to the image up there, we were really surprised to find out how easy (almost banal) and effective what Matteo did on Sunday was. There were so many things that were not adding up when it came to business processes, work management and much more, and the pure thought left us with a piercing headache. At the end of the day it boiled down to writing a post-it about every aspect of Sefirot – online platform, customer care, logistics, new products development, new business operations and so on – like columns under which more post-its go stating things to do and possible issues.

🌈 Takeaway: when it’s too much to think about, map it!
Looking at it in its entirety, on a table, made it so easy: in ten minutes we knew how to solve problems and how to plan the work ahead. On Monday all it took were 5 phone calls and a job ad (yes, we are looking for a personal assistant based in Turin!) to get back on track.

We highly recommend it: post-its can save your life 😉

With ❤️,
Matteo and Andrea

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