phildini.dev
There’s No Place Like Homage for the Holidays
Update 2014-12-08: Pebble.Ink, the second Homage for the Holidays post, is up.
Update 2014-12-01: The first Homage for the Holidays project is up.
Over the summer, on my first trip to Portland, I read the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. If you do something that could remotely be considered creative, I highly recommend you check out the book, and his more recent Show Your Work.
Reading Steal Like an Artist, then returning to Portland for XOXO in September, helped drive home a lesson that my Game Design professors tried to teach me in college, but that I rejected: The best way to expand your creative horizons is to copy work you like, preferably with your own take on it.
When I was in school, I didn’t see the value in trying to copy what someone else had done. That didn’t sound ‘creative enough’ to me, partly from ignorance and partly from arrogance. Maybe more than partly from arrogance. It’s also 100% possible that I just didn’t care enough about games to try and emulate the ones that interested me.
So I graduated, started an engineering job, and was quickly exposed to the fact that those who are best at what they do often succeed because they’ve learned from the mistakes and successes of those who have come before them. And the best way to learn from someone is try and do what they’ve done.
I got a double helping of this when I tried to build my own Content Management System - basically a glorified blogging system - for The Adventures of Captain Quail, a webcomic run by myself and my incredibly talented artistic partner. I went into the project thinking that I’d have the whole thing together in a month, tops. A year later, there’s still more I want to fix about it. Did I need to build a CMS? Is mine any better that what else is out there? Probably not. But the lessons I learned in building it I’m not sure I could have learned any other way.
This is where I’ve learned the value of building things that are directly or indirectly influenced by others: You get a tiny insight into what they’ve gone through, and can use that to make your own work better. I think this was, in many ways, a subtheme of this year’s XOXO: That nobody produces great work in a vacuum, and the projects that seem most original or creative can be traced to specific influences from the creator’s life.
So, reading Auston Kleon’s book and going to XOXO and thinking about what I’ve discovered in the past year that really excites me, I’m embarking on a project I’m calling Homage for the Holidays. Every week, starting December 1st, I’ll release a new project directly inspired by something I’ve seen this year that I thought was awesome. I’ll be posting about them here, and right now the projects I’m planning to release will be available on the web. I’ll try to document everything that happens with them, and the source materials for all of them will be freely distributed online.
Most of the projects I’m planning will be collaborative by nature, and I would be thrilled and grateful if people wanted to work on them with me, but I’d also love to see other people run their own homages. Tell me about them, and I’ll link them here.
Thank you to everyone who’s provided me with inspiration this year. I hope I can spread that to other people this month.
See you on the 1st!