Creativity for Sale Podcast - Episode S1 E59

How to future-proof your creativity with life-long learning - Tony Harmer

Mon, 26 Aug 2024

"The future for the next 10 years is going to be more things that are truly immersive. And by that, I mean you're actually physically involved in them." - Tony Harmer Tony Harmer, an experienced creative professional and educator, discusses the evolution of creative software, learning methods, and the future of creativity. He emphasizes the importance of mastering tools while maintaining a balance between digital and analog practices. Tony shares insights on adapting to technological changes, the value of continuous learning, and the need for authentic creativity beyond trends.



Show Notes Transcript

"The future for the next 10 years is going to be more things that are truly immersive. And by that, I mean you're actually physically involved in them." - Tony Harmer 

Tony Harmer, an experienced creative professional and educator, discusses the evolution of creative software, learning methods, and the future of creativity. He emphasizes the importance of mastering tools while maintaining a balance between digital and analog practices. Tony shares insights on adapting to technological changes, the value of continuous learning, and the need for authentic creativity beyond trends.

Takeaways:

  • Master your tools, but don't let them limit your creativity
  • Learn something new every day, even if just for 15 minutes
  • Try new things outside your comfort zone to spark creativity
  • Balance digital work with analog practices like drawing
  • Be prepared for future technologies like AR and 3D
  • Don't just follow trends - create unique, meaningful work
  • Take breaks from screens to avoid digital fatigue
  • Share your knowledge and experience with others
  • Stay open to new methods, but value traditional skills too
  • Focus on creating rather than just consuming


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Radim Malinic: Hey, Tony, it's nice to have you on my show. How are you doing today?

Tony Harmer: No, I'm doing really well, Radim. Thank you very much for having me on.

Radim Malinic: I've been looking forward to, our conversation for a while. I was especially pleased to see you come up in my diary this morning. I was like, oh, right.I wanna talk about learning and industry standard ways of learning sort of software and features, because obviously 

are slightly ahead of me on your,live journey, and now we're both about ahead of the novices and rookies in the industry. And I feel like when we were coming through the ranks, there was always the industry way of using something, you know, like there was industry way of using QuarkXPress.

There was industry way of using Photoshop, like how we layer files, how we navigate in order to the features and how we do certain adjustments. Whereas, Now, would you agree things are a little bit more, not [00:03:00] gung ho, but less sort of less policed or less, do whatever you want. that's the best way to say it.

How would you describe it?

Tony Harmer: first of all,I love the way that you just said a little bit further on in life's journey than you are, which is a great way of saying, you're an old guy , but I love it. but anyway, yeah, I do agree that it is a little bit like that, but that's. That's partly on the vendors.

The vendors don't really invest in learning material anymore. A lot of the vendors, the ones that I work with anyway,

So, is a bit more gung ho, but that's because the people with enough experience to actually write the content. are either not writing it or are writing it for someone other than the vendor.

Radim Malinic: just so we can clarify, when you say vendor, you mean

Tony Harmer: whoever makes the software. Sorry. there's maybe my terms.

Radim Malinic: No, so for example, like the vendor would be, let's say Adobe,

Tony Harmer: Adobe. Yeah. Or Microsoft or whoever insert name of company here. Yeah. Sorry. That in the industry, that's the way they're referred to as the vendor, the people who [00:04:00] actually sell the software or sell. Do you know, I ought to clarify that. Sell the license to use the software. Cause this is a common misconception.

And it became, subscription based things started to surface around about 2012 with Adobe 2013. and that lots of people kicked off and said, I want to own it. You've never owned a software product. You've owned a license to operate it. And a license can be revoked at any time, just to point that out.

So just for clarity. a license to operate it, which is what you do with a subscription on a month by month basis. Your license is renewed for you to continue using it. That's how it works. It's,from a legal point of view, but anyway, as companies grow and as younger people who are the customers of tomorrow need to start using that stuff, a lot of those people end up working [00:05:00] at the companies because they've got a voice that younger people can relate to, but what they don't have is they no longer have the people with the experience to dive down into, the details of the product.

So that sort of makes sense it does make sense. Yeah, we'll talk about more, about the people creating and even the materials because what you described and it almost seemed like a universal paradoxical problem because you've got a software which is so interactive, so visual, so Sort of enhancing productivity, yet you kind of need a manual to navigate it, which is fine, but obviously we know that, let's say we established the word vendors, what they've done, they try to be more interactive.

Radim Malinic: So you've got a home screen where you can see what's happening and what was the tutorials, but sometimes the break barrier, it can be so daunting like that, like, how do you go from. Even A to B, because let's liken it to 

Tony Harmer: learning a language or playing an instrument, you can get Somewhere with a [00:06:00] handful of words of handful of chords, you can do the basics, but the next step to be from like from rookie to be a slightly advanced or intermediate, that takes time that actually takes time and finessing and sometimes nerves.

Radim Malinic: you can press every single key, you can try every single feature to no return because you actually need different ingredients to, put things together. Because if you press a filter on a basic picture, it, it just might not do as, as much as an effect as you would use it, as a retouch who would, use the effect of some completely magnificent results.

And it's almost like, how do we go. And this might be a godly question, like, how do we go actually sort ofdeciphering, how do we get these people that they can actually accelerate their progress much, much quicker? What is your view on that?

Tony Harmer: Well, so most things can be if you're gonna say you could know more. learn all of Photoshop in a week, then you could learn all of Kung Fu. Kung Fu is one of my favorite analogies for Photoshop.[00:07:00] 

Radim Malinic: Okay.

Tony Harmer: Because, and I've said this for years and years, partly because I went to a martial arts academy for quite a time, when I was younger and much fitter.

Kind of wish I hadn't let that go. But anyway, in Kung Fu, there are various different ways of achieving a particular result. Okay? The result you should use is the one that you know, the one that you've practiced. And do that. And if you're in that situation again, you need to, and you found that to be an inelegant way of doing it, then you need to learn another technique.

The situation that you're in, the technique that you use is the right one for you. And I've always used that and said, you know, you can use whatever way you get to the end product that you choose to use. There are almost always quicker ways to do it. There are almost always more elegant ways to do it.

but use what you know at the time. And that's the thing. Now here's, if I [00:08:00] may, this is part of the problem that we have at the moment is that we get people who have a moderate amount of knowledge, let's choose my favorite product, Illustrator, right? They have a moderate amount of knowledge in Illustrator.

They've been making great work in Illustrator, which is perfectly valid, but then they decide they're going to produce a course from which will hopefully advance their knowledge from. And then they discover that there's a whole other world that they yet don't know, you know, the people who are teaching the course, and then they have to go back on where the, you know, do you see what I mean?

it's a descending spiral.

Radim Malinic: I think what you're describing, I think it's a great analogy about it takes time. Obviously, you find your own ways to do things. I think if it's if you're in a singular sort of module, like you're creating your own work and you don't necessarily collaborate with people, you can do that all day long.

Tony Harmer: But as soon as it comes to handing over [00:09:00] files, to someone across the town, across the globe, then things become a little bit more complicated because As someone from my experience who had to deliver Photoshop files, you know,Yeah.

Radim Malinic: I was always trying to work out like, what is the best way to give it to people so they can make a sense of it if they need to make change and, finding ways of always tinkering with it.

And I was like, okay, this process could be potentially helpful, like more usable, more flexible. Because you want to work in an undistractable way. So things can be reversed if someone needs to change that, but that comes with collaboration. So yes, what you described, you can be working in Illustrator your own way for 20 years, and then you show it, then you show it to somebody else and realize,How do we do this? What have you done here? How can I undo this? Because I always say, like, if you have fun, just open someone else's InDesign file and be like, what have you done, like what's going on here? And. I appreciate that obviously people use tools differently. That's why we get progress in life.

That's where we get [00:10:00] advancements in creativity and technology. But like, is it even possible instill some sort of ground rules that

this should be done this way, that should be done that way, is that even possible?

Tony Harmer: it's well, I believe it is, in my own, illustrator courses, I think I've cracked almost the right way of,delivering that. over the, number of years that I've been producing those courses, which are, by the way, the ones that Illustrator engineers use when they join the team to learn about the product.

 which is engineers don't sit at university and go Oh, I want to go and work on Adobe or, Are they unknown? Unlikely to, I'm not gonna say they're not. They're unlikely to say, oh, I can't wait to get out of university and go and work on Adobe Illustrator. Engineers are problem solvers.

They'll go wherever they'll see a job ad Yeah, that says, come and work for Adobe as an engineer. And they'll go there and they'll think, I don't know anything about Illustrator, so they have to learn to start off with. So I believe there is a way that you can structure it. Also, as somebody who has worked evidentially as a workflow expert, used to use that term [00:11:00] very loosely, right.

I do believe there is a way that you can build on, you can get the basic platform established, then you can start to build on that platform.

 you used to play hockey, didn't you? 

But you, you would know yourself, right?

That from lots of sporting activities,

good fundamentals, same with Kung Fu, good fundamentals enable you to develop. more quickly and more efficiently. And by the way, just quick side note, quick sidebar on something you said a moment ago, going back to the Kung Fu analogy, a quote, master unquote, can learn something from somebody who's only been using the product for an hour.

It's entirely possible to do that.

Radim Malinic: I think it was Rick Rubin who was laboring the quote about the game of Go, that there was a computer that, that used the things in a totally different way. I absolutely believe, that if you give someone something to, more or less break it, they will show you the ways that you never intended to, to be used in that way.

So that makes [00:12:00] sense. However, if you gave someone a car and said, drive that car in any way you want,

That's not going to really end up well, right? So I think I'm just,

Tony Harmer: it's not, it's unlikely, isn't it really?

Radim Malinic: and I don't really want to be laboring this sort of conservative way of we should have a baseline from which we start.

But

all about the collaboration and interchange of files and, because yes, sometimes you can open someone else's file and go, Oh my word, this is a clever way of doing this. I didn't know this, you know, even after many, 20 years, I didn't know that you can use it that way. So sometimes there is ways, and we'll talk about your courses in a second, because I've learned from watching a few hours of your videos

every month, like things that I didn't know for the last 20 years.

but I just feel. Yes, I think we need that sort of naive, riotous behavior when we start with the project, with the software and go, yes,let's find out what we can do with it. But I just wonder, can we. even think and educate [00:13:00] or instigate a sort of this education that, you know what, there is rules that if you build your files in the same way, then you can actually be more experimental.

and as you say, like to have people that not to have the vendors who are like necessarily the talent who'll be able to write the books and the books then seem almost sometimes quite inaccessible because, they come out every other year because. If the speed that Adobe, for example, is bringing out new features, you don't have time to even change the pages or print them fast enough.

So where do we even go from trying to get the basics right. And then to be on top of every single new feature.

Tony Harmer: Well, one of the things that if you're going to do something that, going back to being based on needs, if you find that you're in a situation where you're going to be producing a file, which is going to be sent across to other people for a intended output, be that digital or print or whatever. If you can talk to the people who.

Produce stuff for that particular output in the first place. many, many years ago now, I used to go and sit with people who worked in artwork and departments [00:14:00] in printers and learn from them mainly by sending them really bad files and just go and sit and watch how they fixed it,because they were the people who sat and read manuals.

There weren't any courses when I started out in this, there were only. inch and a half thick books that took a while to wade through that also, every 18 months they changed then. And by the time you got the new manual printed and distributed, as it was six months of that 18 month cycle had already evaporated, It's a difficult thing. Now, you would like to think that on,I'm going to use Adobe as an example here, right? But they are far and away, not the worst example of this, far and away. and they are in many ways pretty good, but even Adobe, if you want help on learning a particular thing, sometimes.[00:15:00] 

It requires quite some effort on your part to go through their own thing to find it because increasingly what they, the way they, that they, and I think this, I think they've picked this up from Microsoft to do this a lot. They decide to produce a short video. on a particular thing. So I'm just trying to think of a, so using LivePaint.

I'm, I have no idea if in Illustrator, I have no idea if this is actually the case on the Adobe website. There's a thing called HelpX, which is their resource for all of their applications. And you'll know when you're in that, because that's part of the URL that you've gone to, it will say helpx.

adobe. com, la la la.So let's just say you want to use Live, I've heard LivePaint is a really cool feature in Illustrator, and it will save you loads of time when you think you want to use it, because it's a great interactive way to color up.things that you've basically drawn the outlines for.

And you go to the Adobe website and you've got a video that says, Make a live paint object. And then switch to the live paint [00:16:00] bucket. And then you can see the live paint bucket filling different sectors inside. Your illustration, which is great, but the video on its own doesn't do the trick because there are loads of tiny things around that will save you time.

Yeah, there'll be no mention in the video of if you want to sample a color from something else on the artboard, you can hold down the option key just as you would in Photoshop. and pick up that color. So there's none of that, there would be none of that in there. It would just be like, make a live paint object do that.

And people are actually smarter than that. I think they're doing young people a disservice by saying, young people learn best by video. Which is probably true, but I think by oversimplifying it, it's a difficult balance because you've got to make it accessible to that audience, but also they do need a level of detail.

So my answer to that would be make three more videos. So you've [00:17:00] got three, four levels to go through,

Radim Malinic: I think you made the right point about that you need to make some effort on your part because essentially when you get to needing to work out how to use a live paint, you actually shouldn't need to know how you have using the basics because I'm sorry for the description about, age, but

Tony Harmer: no, I love it. 

Radim Malinic: I'm still in the game.

When I was at the beginning, which was 24 years ago, I bought, I don't know, Illustrator 8, 7, I bought a book and I just wanted to know what key presses what, because I grew up, I had, I grew up in a time where, you were judged as a designer, like how noisy is your keyboard when you work, like you're pressing the keys and you're working like this is like, there was no hands in a pocket, get your hands out and I start hammering the keyboard, press all the shortcuts.

And that was like a sign of are you a good designer? Because. It speeds up your workflow.

So what I did, we almost had a keyboard shortcut Olympics with a, colleague of mine.

It was like, look, I just found a new shortcut for this. I found a new shortcut for that. And I [00:18:00] know from memory, like shift and not command shift F10 is for stroke. And I thought, I might got it right today, for effects palettes, like, you know, you're these things that just, they exist.

And I just thought always, you don't want to be going into the menus all the time, because I've Whopping big Wacom, and I don't want to be dragging my Wacom all day and all the way to menus and going down because to me, especially from the keyboard, like we use of software is it's like an instrument.

You don't want to be looking like, where is the note C? Where's the chord? Like, where do I look on my guitar? Or where do I look on the keyboard? Like you basically want to play it intuitively, like you want to make it as a second nature. And I think that's still instrumental part of actually mastering the basics because when it comes to solving a problem.

You know, you suggest to go to HelpX, I just type in something in YouTube, something comes up and you go like, there's five different options. By the time you've seen all five of them, you realize everyone's wrong in a way. 

how do we win? what I've been.deciphering here is my past of being gung ho in the usage of software, especially, working on my own [00:19:00] as an illustrator. And then, and I got to work with retouchers

And it totally changed my life because obviously the files for campaigns have to be so militantly likeorganized and everything has to be in the right place. And they gave me the file and they just started breaking it up within a minute. I took the guy, initially it took the guy about half an hour to fix it because I was like moving things up and down.

Cause I was just like, we'd have a keyboard ninja to use your analogy just to go up and down. It's like, what have you done? stop, cause I'm adding my elements and pieces. It's like, no, no, no, no.there's a rule to do this. There's a rule to do that. Imean, I've never become a clean.

a designer or illustrator, like always, you clean up at the end, but it's more about like, okay, now I know there's a time to hand stuff over. But I think my labor is a way of explaining this. That was the, we've started with the basics and we adding on top. Whereas if you end up at the gates of the Disneyland, which what the software is now, you go, Oh my word, like, when would you press first?

because [00:20:00] you can get a course and someone else says, you did that way, you do it this way. I think that's the nature of creativity that everyone's got their own way. And it's just can we ever have one way of suggesting that we can all agree on? Or sometimes it comes to me quite impossible.

So I want to talk about your educational side 

how did you end up with where you are right now? Obviously sharing the principles of software and creativity. And yeah, what was, what journey has it been so far?

Tony Harmer: Okay. there are several strands that kind of pull together at a certain point. as I was in part of my own learning journey and learning is something I commit to and still commit to every day for at least 15 minutes. Every single day. There is never a day that I don't do that.

Sometimes I might go down rabbit hole and end up there all day, if I've got the time to do it. Other times it might just be the 15 minutes, but never less than 15 minutes. So I wanted to learn more. I wanted to become more efficient. I didn't want my files to be [00:21:00] garbage when they got, mainly it was for print back then.

At the beginning of this journey. I didn't want my files to be garbage, so I had an immediate need to learn. And then it became the point where when I worked with other agencies and other people, because I was freelance for like a long, long time, I became The term used is the Adobe Guy. There's a kind of an in joke at Adobe, actually, this is before I was at Adobe, but there's a, there's an Adobe Guy in everybody's organization.

And by that, there is a man or woman who knows Adobe. a lot about a particular tool or set of tools because I've invested in it. And so I just developed thiscrazy skillset and found myself spending a lot of time talking to other people and helping them do stuff. And someone said, you should be a trainer.

you should do that. And so I went and got myself, a teaching [00:22:00] certification, because I wanted, I'm very particular about doing things. I want to do them properly. It's a double edged sword. It is both a gift and a curse at the same time sometimes, but I want to do it properly. So I went and qualified as a teacher, which taught me things about delivering because it's not just about being able to use a tool.

It's about being able to explain it to someone else and about having a structure that works for people. 

 I've got 2. 2 million active learners. My Illustrator training is the default training for Adobe, for the United States Army, for Honeywell, for loads of other places. Wacky organizations you'd never expect to be using Illustrator, but they do.

 So let me unpick, LinkedIn, educational programs and training because you mentioned it's used by, you know, US Army and Honeywell, like you would never even think of that in the first place. How does Army need Adobe Illustrator?[00:23:00] 

Well, every arm, every, every branch of the government, the uses has to communicate and the British army is no different. The British army has a communications unit, that does all of their photography. Well, used to, I don't know about now. Does all their photography, all of their layout, all of that stuff.

also they have to produce things for people who are serving in those forces that you might not want third party vendors to be involved in. So, there are a number of things that you might get in an instructional guide from the military. just sticking with that example for a moment, that yeah, they have a special unit who already understand the language used in that particular service.

And yeah, they have to draw stuff same as lots of other people do, but they can't farm it out to an agency.

Radim Malinic: so they're all learning from your tools. They're all using.

So

that's [00:24:00] incredible. I mean, obviously they come into the right source because as I said earlier, like the way you use Illustrator with the wealth of your knowledge and experience, you're unlocking potential debt. Makes the software even richer and more, more deeper in a way, because if you use it your way, in your, let's say in a rookie way or in a sort of chaotic writer's way, then you always will find a ceiling, obviously you'll find a wall at the sort of,quite famously once said, I found the backend of the Photoshop and I couldn't,couldn't use it in any different way because I got everything out of it.

Wow. Oh, they've followed my own rules and my own sort of way of using things, whereas I wasn't necessarily thinking like, okay,what else can I do for you? Because there was, there's so much more to do with it. But, is it lack of curiosity sometimes that people don't progress, or how would you encourage someone to actually send and look out for this education and look out for these tips and tricks that you, provide?

Tony Harmer: Try it. Yeah. I mean. So here's one of the common misconceptions people have about how good they are with a particular [00:25:00] product. Is, in my experience, normally based on one self imposed metric, right? How quick they do whatever it is they are doing every day. Yeah, what you should, and for example, if your job is to prepare small digital ads for, I don't know, microphones, for example, yeah, you'll know, you'll be bringing the microphone image in, you'll know how to cut the microphone image out of the background, you'll know how to set the type, you perhaps created styles to do all of that stuff.

And so you're, getting faster and faster at doing it and you don't really have to think about it. You've got tons and tons of muscle memory. So you think you're all ace at doing whatever product you're doing it in, and it's not until you branch outside of that, you suddenly realize not as ace as I thought it was.

You'll work like that, think you're really good at it, so yeah, it's [00:26:00] a lack of curiosity, I guess,in that way, rather than it's, it, it is. and also just accepting the first answer that you see. Now you said about watching four or five videos, which is a good approach to take.

to learning something. I can give you a really good example. So when I was doing workflow analysis, which I still do as a consultant, but when that was part of my job at Adobe, I would go out and see how people were working and then suggest ways that they could Work a bit quicker it's always for the benefit of the company that's hiring me to do that ultimately, right?

Because there'll be more profitable and whatever, if you're getting more throughput out, but that's not the angle I take it. So I take it from two angles, one really good for a company and there's nothing wrong with making your company more profitable. That's why you've got a job there,it's in your own interest if you like working there.

to make them profitable.but also if you're a freelancer, it's in your own interest to get [00:27:00] things done as quickly and as efficiently and as accurately as possible, because that way you spend less time fixing stuff afterwards. And more importantly than that, from the point of view of If you're the originator of a piece of work rather than just an artwork, you get extra time to be more critical about what you've just done before you hand the job off, that you've bought yourself that time by doing it.

I can give you one very quick example of that. Years ago, and we're talking about seven, eight years ago, there was a video on YouTube. I watch, I buy other people's courses. I want to see how they're teaching things. I watch. YouTube content from loads of different people because I want to see how they're teaching things.

And I watched a 20 minute, video about producing an icon based on an old style telephone. those ones that used to pick up and put to your ear, that sort of thing with a [00:28:00] cable coming out the bottom of it. It was drawing a telephone and it took 20 minutes to draw this telephone icon. I made a video and did it in under a minute, exactly the same thing, just as a thing, really to just, it wasn't about demonstrating how clever I was at drawing telephone icons, not really something that comes up in my day to day.

The point was, the understanding I had of the tools, made it so that I could draw that, with 19 minutes to spare.

Radim Malinic: But it goes to that famous saying that, you can draw it in 30 seconds because it's taken you 30 years to learn how to draw in 30 seconds. I think we fast less,we produce less options and go straight to the answer. Whereas what you've actually quite interestingly said that as a freelancer, you want to be working faster, that reinforces my point of knowing your shortcuts, knowing your sort of the base level of things.

But I think it also works as a double edged sword becauseyou can be working [00:29:00] faster

Tony Harmer: and therefore you've got a few hours spare. So instead of finishing early, you just spend more time on revisions. You spend more time on, doubting yourself. do I need to change this? Do I need to do that?

Radim Malinic: Do I add this? Do I take this out? Because sometimes

we have never ending recipes. 

Yeah, that's, if,

if,

if you have your mise en place, if you had your little bowls of ingredients, you put them together, You're not going to think, shall I add chocolate in my omelette? You know, should I do this? You know, like not necessarily.

Whereas if there's a designer, like I definitely need to add chocolate to my omelette. because, we need to find out whether that will come out. so I think sometimes being speedy and efficient actually makes

for devil's work because

Tony Harmer: Possibly. Yeah.

Radim Malinic: I always say that creativity is an untamed beast, unless you've got limitations time wise, project wise or something, you will never finish on time.

Like we are never finished because you're like, we can always, see if that chocolate will fit in the omelette one day or not. So I think this is our problem because yeah, mastering the basics can sometimes be a challenge. produce too much of a sort of efficiency [00:30:00] and take us somewhere, where we don't really want to be.

So yeah, who knows what was the right sort of method to all of this, becauseit's subjective because especially if you're in a company and you work faster. You're going to get more work. I had a team of people who worked really well and they were like, what's next? I'm like, spend three days on this.

You've got time,don't give it to me in three hours because you've done something. Spend three days, bash it around, like, have a little, like, just see what you can do with it. Because we sometimes complain, we don't have enough time to do the work. And sometimes when we have too much time, you're like, I'm actually done.

But it's about. Taking the wheel and see like, okay, it's always going to be a wheel, but I can reinvent it in some way that it just, it spins nicer. It swooshes better. like we can always find something in these little things because, we can't bullshit the physics, we can't bullshit the reality, but we can always redress it in the way that It will spin in some way and somewhere nicer that we never thought we could do with it.

Tony Harmer: So I think we need rioters. We need, we need the wheel [00:31:00] as a sort of baseline and we need the riots to see what we can do with it. But as with every riot, sooner or later, you will need a bit of a rule to see where you're going with the riot. Yeah.

Radim Malinic: because otherwise it's six year olds playing football, it's just like everyone's running in the same direction.

No one's really winning, you know,but

Tony Harmer: I mean, I personally, I like, so I think confidence in the software is a good thing to build because, You're quite right. You do, it isn't just about getting it done in, quicker and moving on to the next thing. Sometimes it's about getting the basic structure as you think it should be right, but doing that quickly, leaving it alone for a little while, leaving it on screen, go and have a cup of tea, have a walk, do whatever.

Then come back and look at it again. And if you've worked, if you're able to work on it quickly and confidently, and you see something that you think, what would happen if I did this? That's where versions come in and you create [00:32:00] versions, and then you've got that exploration. But what you're not doing is thinking of the idea, but then spending the entire allocated time doing it, just in building it the first time out.

that's how I see that the need to build confidence in a software doing it.

Radim Malinic: think that's a good keyword, confidence. I was lecturing at university in Staffordshire yesterday, and it's that same age old story of the university is not teaching us how to use this properly. The university is not doing this to us. But I always use John Mayer as an example of a musician who went to Berkeley for about seven minutes, I think.

Tony Harmer: Same as me.

Radim Malinic: I mean, literally he just,

yeah, cause he realized, I can only learn this much, you know, I can do this, I can see this through this clinic, I can do this, but he went away and I think over the Christmas period, he wrote Four or five key songs that started his career, but he's still till this today, like he does guitar tutorials, [00:33:00] like he's learning from other people, he's picking up techniques.

It's a constant journey of actually being able to step on that stage, show up for work and sit down and go, you know what? Anyone can look over my shoulder. I don't mind because I know what I'm doing here because you speak to any designers like, Oh, I don't really, people like looking over my shoulder.

Hey, because it's a lack of confidence. it's more about, you Being ready for what's thrown at us, because you can have your own pigeonhole style, you can have a signature style and you don't deviate,

Whereas if you're a generalist you want to be that design ninja, like you want to be versatile and ready, because if you're creating broadsolutions for people. You need to know the ideas, how you can get somewhere, because you might not always have the full path, but you're like, okay, this is where I start.

Tony Harmer: I used to use an analogy like that, It's not necessary to know how the, let's go with the, let's go petrol head and say combustion engine, right? It's not necessary to know how the internal combustion engine works in order to [00:34:00] drive a car.

However, knowing how it sounds helps you to understand that you're using it properly. If the engine noise is super, super loud, the car is overheating and eventually is kaput. It's because you've been driving everywhere in first gear. And just not understanding that little thing between the gearbox and the combustion engine helps with that.

Radim Malinic: So I used to use a similar analogy myself. You don't need to know, it's helpful if you do. That's very true. where do you see future of, so obviously you've been doing your LinkedIn learning for 10 years, more than one or two things about, how far we've come in the last decade. Where do you think this thing will be even heading in the next 10 years? Because generative AI, all of these tools, like what I call tools on steroids, like everything's developing so much faster because

it's almost like when you think about the history of digital memory.

When someone told me 20, 25 years ago, they had a computer with [00:35:00] two gig memory, it was like, wow, you, you're a champion,

whereas two

whereas two gig memory is like, it's just,

Tony Harmer: Now it's 128 gig.

it's just like, I mean, I, my computer's got two terabytes, Yeah.

Radim Malinic: but I mean, the chips are getting smaller. 

 obviously like we're developing faster.

So what, for example, generative AI it's getting better every six months or every six weeks. So we're making progresses, which are unheard of. We sometimes, I feel like. We struggled even to compute in our own heads and digest it. And for processing, like what is going on? Like how quickly is it changing?

Because as opposed to celebrating, most of us, most of our peers and contemporaries are panicking about the livelihoods, like we will be replaced. But no, you can't replace the talent because you can't replace the clients. So, I mean, is this, are we going to then see machines doing work for one another?

You know, like what's going to happen. So prediction for the next.I was going to say 10 years, but it sounds like more like the next 10 minutes. What's going to,

Tony Harmer: Sometimes it does what you would hope is, is that,I mean, generative AI, by the way, is not a solution. Yeah. Yeah. It isn't the [00:36:00] solution nor should it be a solution, right? It should be something that helps you be more creative and take some of the, I don't like the term drudgery. It is used that takes the drudgery out of doing it.

Drudgery to me is going down into the cold dark earth and fetching back coal. that's, Definitely drudgery. Drudgery is doing, washing up after Christmas dinner or whatever, or some feast, that's kind of drudgery.but anyway, it takes, the labor out, out of stuff. So I would hope that it just takes creativity forward, because it's not really about how we're working now.

That's the thing we should be looking at, what's the future for how we work now? The future is on what surfaces we will be working. And I don't mean by that, whether you'll be working on a Wacom tablet with a stylus. A surface, the definition of a surface in the way that I'm using it at the moment, is, for example, with print, [00:37:00] paper is a surface, right?

With digital, the screen that you're looking at, And it through is a surface. And of course we've got things like the Apple vision pro and headset things. They're an entirely different surface. So more and more we're going, I think the future for the next 10 years. is going to be more things that are truly immersive.

And by that, I mean you're actually physically involved in them. I think that's the next challenge. So if somebody would say to me at the moment, what should I learn? Yeah. Once I've got all of my, like my desktop skills to where I want them to be, in Illustrator, Photoshop, because those things won't go away.

They'll still need, they'll still need those. What should I learn on top of that to future proof myself? 20 years ago, I would have said, learn the web, learn some structural markup and then learn some CSS. So you know how to correctly style things in a [00:38:00] connected way. Then, start to learn, one thing, another, but 3d is a good thing to learn right now.

Even at a base level. Working in a 3D environment and AR is a good thing to work in if you're working in video, you definitely want to be looking at panoramic video, 360 degree video, all of those things. Those are the things to look at because those are the surfaces that are going to evolve.

Radim Malinic: So it's interesting that you picked up for example, AI and video. Cause I always try to see it like through the eyes of the two visions from my own view and a presumed point of view of a consumer. So you have. People like, let's say my wife or my children, or, the people that you see on a high street, how often will they come across, immersive 360 AR videos, like we, we create and sometimes tools.

And especially when I think of VR headsets and that kind of stuff, I just. We cannot really replace or change, wholesale change our [00:39:00] experiences because we're not going to be sat in our rooms watching a bit of movies on our headsets for three, four hours. So, you know, have walking around in house. I mean,everyone sort of says that, well, everyone has been voices about Vision Pro being something remarkable, but.

Have we created too much too fast? Because I find myself doing lectures on mindfulness. Paraphrasing Des Bishop's joke about the fact that when you and I were growing up, we were mindful most of our lives because we didn't have a cable service in our pocket, 

Tony Harmer: we didn't have the nudge to pull the phone out.

Radim Malinic: And now it's okay, so You know, here's your goggles and here's your, you know, 17 different screens and you can watch a movie and that's basically a recipe for a head fart, you've got literally I've got 27 in screen. I used to have two screens. I've scaled down to one because it was just too much.

It was like, I found myself overwhelmed, overworked, never finished, and it's we create in tools that have the bright potential, but I think we always default slightly closer to our baselines, just like we did with Kindles and [00:40:00] internet, that kind of stuff. Like nothing has killed the initial things we have created because we have, I don't know, we get in tapes back, we get in vinyl back, we get on things that actually felt physically something when you have time to spend with it.

That makes sense rather than having fricking ginormous 

windows in the middle of a Starbucks. I'm like, what's going on?

Tony Harmer: I,

I'm sure that people who produce those things like Apple would love us, would love a future where we're all sat there all day eating Cheetos and watching everything through a headset. But you, so what you are describing there is the pushback or the backwash from these things. And it,you are a great person in a great person in a lot of ways, but especially your drive at the moment in.

being mindful about what we're doing. Everybody thought that by now, everybody that I knew in the industry 10 years ago, thought that by now, paper would be a thing of the past largely. There would be no more bookshops in airports. There would be no more magazines around. We would be consuming [00:41:00] things entirely on tablets.

 and that's great. We'll produce all this stuff to do all these things. And what they didn't realize is that we would get to the point. which I think we're arriving at now, where we are screen weary by the end of the day. and being immersed in these environments all the time is not good for us.

We kind of work that out, I think, for ourselves. So we are pushing back. Print is on its way back. We already know that vinyl has been on its way back up for a number of years. everybody wants vinyl now because it's got character. It's not clinical 48 kilohertz or 44. 8 kilohertz because it's slightly different for a, deviant CD or whatever else, or for streamed audio.

But it's not all of that stuff all the time. Vinyl has character. Print books, magazines are on the way back up. You can buy subscriptions for print and digital. And from what I've heard from the people I know in work in that area, they've gotten a really surprising demand [00:42:00] for print copies. Especially in visual arts, you want to sit and soak it up without it glowing into your face with a load of harmful blue light.

So there is a backwash against it. So maybe right now, because it's a buzz thing and because they need to sell units in order push it forward.

Radim Malinic: I think.

I

 think it's the share price that drives the sort of so called invention. Yeah. Because of money, like I was stagnating and I spoke to Rufus a few weeks ago about, Adobe and Sensei and that kind of stuff. And do you have to keep up? because they already had an AI in so many different ways in their product and didn't necessarily, promote it in a way they didn't label it AI and then fell out, potentially.

from my opinion, I feel like they need to catch up. But. When you talked about vinyl, I've seen a great joke about I got into vinyl because of the price and the inconvenience. You know, it's just like, it takes space. I buy five, six books a month, and then I have to give away five, five or six books a month.

But. It's like [00:43:00] you can share your ideas so much quicker. You can actually, that's the reason why I'm still in doing books. And I'll be doing another four or five books in the very short near future, because this is the time to do it now. Because even though, we have to branch out and people like, we have to branch out like a different formats.

We do audio books and Kindle and that kind of stuff, because you get, The old school designer saying, Oh, I would never buy a design book on Kindle. You know what? There's such a market for Kindle. You'd never believe audio books are selling, and it's like, you have to give people something that they would associate with.

some people prefer podcasts. Some people are Apple podcasts. Some people never listened to podcasts. They prefer them to listen to them on YouTube. Like we have democratized the ways how we can create content. get stuff that feels right for us, like some people will never listen to music on YouTube.

some people only listen to music on YouTube and it's just okay, this is great. Obviously we don't have the one sort of one track little highway going, here's your podcast, [00:44:00] here's your this, Robbie Sutherland was good and doing a good analogy about it, like how We don't get internet and a mobile phone and I think a landline or something from one company because we don't believe that anyone can do it well, so you don't get your BT mobile and a BT broadband, you do it from different companies because you feel, there's one person for one thing and they should do it in a particular way.

So I think, When you sort of consider it, like, okay, so let's make software for people. We're like, where do we start?

Tony Harmer: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Radim Malinic: and for example, I know from conversation with Matthias Schulte about like how, for example, in Germany it was massive pushback against the subscription model, they wanted to own stuff.

Yet, as you said, they never really owned it. They only own the license, but it's a perception that you just, you relabel something and you break out the payments. And all of a sudden people don't want it. It's just like, how do we get everyone happy? And you can't do this, you know, like how? And I think we started talking about education.

I think we ended up on the sort of, there's no societal issues. 

Tony Harmer: we're 

Radim Malinic: where are we going [00:45:00] to, the state of humanity, like, where do we go 

with this? 

Tony Harmer: Yeah. But that's 'cause we both kind of lean that way. Right. To be honest, we 

 I adopt the philosophy that I give to other people, which is do things that you don't normally do. So watch TV that you don't normally watch. Listen to music that you don't normally listen to. Eat food. Eat. that you wouldn't normally eat or have never eaten before. All of these things go into this great big melting pot, just behind our eyes and above and around our ears.

And that's how creativity works. It's different inputs. At the moment. I've got two things that I'm doing at the moment. The first thing I'm doing is a daily project. So my photography and my editing skills have dropped a little bit by the wayside. And so I wanted to get back into that game. It's my photography that needed more work than anything else, because I'm a very capable editor.

But I'm doing it in an application I don't normally use. So I started doing everything in [00:46:00] Lightroom, whereas before I would have got Photoshop to do the heavy lifting for me. And I'm publishing that every day on my Instagram and on my YouTube channel. So there's little like 15 second reel that shows the beginning and the end.

what I did, and how the final image I achieved. So I'm doing that at the moment, but the other thing I'm doing, because as you know, I started out in fine art before graphics, is I've gone back to life class. So on Thursday evenings, I go to life class and I stand there and I draw with various different things.

At the moment we're drawing with sticks, like actual twigs and ink on newsprint and doing two minute. Draw it three minute and then, so we start out five, then three, then two minute drawings. And the two minute drawings are what, where the good stuff is, because that's when you're actually starting to really think about what is the essence of this gesture.

How quickly can I catch it? Oh, and, kitchen roll. Using kitchen roll as well [00:47:00] as, so kitchen roll to block in really quickly and quickly capture a structure. And that's a good thing to do on several levels. Firstly, doing something creative. Secondly, You're with other people who are part of your tribe.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly,

Radim Malinic: if you

Tony Harmer: for two and a half hours, which is the length of our sessions,

Radim Malinic: to

Tony Harmer: there are no phones.

Radim Malinic: Yeah, I

Tony Harmer: No screens,

Radim Malinic: we've

Tony Harmer: no

Radim Malinic: lots of

Tony Harmer: talk. The only thing you can hear is the scratching of something on something. So in this particular case, twigs on paper. And your mind is absorbed completely in working out those relationships.

 I've cancelled flights. before and rearranged flights. I did it two weeks ago when I was working in Ireland. I actually cancelled my flight and rebooked it for the day before because I realised I'd [00:48:00] be late for life class and that is my story.

Radim Malinic: It sounds

Tony Harmer: There you go.

Radim Malinic: like a meditative class, but you've said so many interesting things in this part because we feel that when we get older, our creativity gets a little bit less,

you know, buoyant, right?

Exactly. Or sometimes you have to make money out of it, right? Whereas, eating different food, listening to different music, different all of this stuff. When you flip the canvas, my children are creative powerhouses, but they watch the same telly, they watch the same cartoons, over and over again, they don't want to eat any different food that they eat, know, they like their Seven Songs, so I'm thinking like, oh, they're incredibly creative, and I'm like, Using Ken Robinson's examples of how creativity is,it's so rife and in our early ages, but we actually don't have the variety in other places because we're still working out of the world.

So we, we feel unchallenged in certain ways, but challenged by what we can't control because the creativity in early lives, we [00:49:00] can control, like you just, you've got space to do anything you want as long as you want, because in the 15 minutes of your activity, your parents will be cleaning up for three hours, but you know what?

You had good time. Whereas. The things they can't control, they maybe sometimes be rebel against, I don't want to eat this food. This isn't exactly me. I don't like this music, whatever it is that, show me what maybe I might be interested. Whereas once we sort of mastered it, we in control, somehow we lose the control of creativity.

Sometimes we think like, well, I'm not good at this. You know, the number of clients I've ever had that said, Oh, you know what? You're a creative one. You can draw it. I'm like, I'm terrible at drawing. I never attempted. I used to like, really, in my younger age, I was very good at, classes and art, but I haven't been practicing this.

I've been fully sort ofdigitized. And obviously my, work is more about problem solving and sharing a different way. But I think we have Discourage people from actually saying, you know, well, I don't care if I drove with twigs on a kitchen paper, I don't care if I'm doing this becauseit's about sharing of the [00:50:00] idea, but we have created a world that it's, it judges itself on minute by minute basis.

 we've got scores for everything. The number of apps that tell you, Oh, this month you've done this much and this one. I'm like, why do I need. summary of everything, it's because

Tony Harmer: Yeah.

Radim Malinic: somehow did, some sort of, some people love it. Some, I just think, I think it's pointless because I feel like, especially when you talk about a mobile phones at a wave moment, when the creativity happens.

I thought about it the other day, like. We got mobile phones because we wanted to make phone calls outside, right? Why do we use them in house? Why do we use them indoors? Of course you need to make a phone call, but I've literally told myself, I'm going to just take my phone and literally use it only outside, like at home.

I've got a computer screen. I don't have to pick up my phone. I don't have to do this because everything lives on this ecosystem. But, Your classes and your sort of connections with creativity, I think fantastic way to actually be back to, be mindful and leave in a cable service

Tony Harmer: Yeah.

Radim Malinic: in [00:51:00] the pod somewhere.

So I think that's pretty good. I think, I mean, you can tell people what they should be doing, but they need to come to it themselves. So I think conversation like these kind of helped me also realize that, maybe I needed, something outside, my zone, I go on long, long distance cycles, as fast as, as far as possible.

And you've worked so many things out because, you have to focus on other things anddisconnecting from all of the ecosystems is the best thing ever. But, I kind of feel like we, talk about it in the last 15, 15 years, pretty much. The phones have arrived, like we had definitely toxic relationship with the work and how work was conducted.

Like the, mental health of sort of emotional intelligence wasn't necessarily a thing in the workplace. Whereas now it is, obviously we're making the right strides, but

it's also because we've made everything a lot more busy in our lives. Would you agree?

Tony Harmer: Yeah. I think we have, but we're filling our own glass in that regard in a lot of the time and also we're expect the thing is with the immediacy [00:52:00] of the way things come out. You And also the language used around the work we do is sometimes harmful. so our cousins who work in marketing, They've got a job to do, and we have to market ourselves as creatives and the products we make.

We do have to do that, and they have to market another thing. But what reallygrinds my gears. It's my family guy moment. What really grinds my gears. is when they mention about things being on trend. And part of the anarcho person that I started out in life as, the minute I hear something that say it's on trend, I just think, fuck that.

I'm not going to do that. It's the last thing I'm going to do. And by the way, you've just become one of a very small number of people that have actually got me to use a profanity in a recording, not my normal thing, but that is essentially what that is, because that's [00:53:00] how I think about it. Trends are useful for selling things, but if you are producing work just to go along with that trend, to paraphrase David Bowie, you're not working at it.

You're not working at it. You need to break and remix those moulds. Don't just build work because it's trendy. Build work that sometimes upsets people.

Radim Malinic: When you think about work on trend, it's just you've convinced enough people to convince themselves that they should be doing what you've just created. I think that's what it is because someone's come up with an idea and if enough people have seen it, they will go and do this. So sometimes, especially with let's say illustrator trends or like certain ways of illustration, We've been doing things 20 years ago, which then caught up 10 years later and it became a trend.

And it was like, we did that, but maybe we haven't shown it to enough people, or maybe they've just discovered it. 

 it makes for an outlier to be so [00:54:00] much harder to be creative because, it just, things are so much easier. 

Tony Harmer: but then you've got amazing people like Tina Tooley. And if you look at what she does and how she goes about doing it, I just think that woman is remarkable. in what she does. in fact one of my most prized possessions is a small hemispherical

Piece of plastic really or glass that she used a whole load of them placed on a piece of glass with a screen Underneath it. and a camera above it and she balanced this glass on books She went through various different books off of her shelf until she got this thing perfectly level and then you had this illusion where things were going along And creating these weird patterns underneath side note One of my awards from Adobe is a glass globe on a sort of a pyramid kind of shaped, I [00:55:00] mean it's got no point on it, the pyramids cut off at the top, but a globe on this sort of pyramid thing.

All out of glass, and I've got one of those that sits in the bottom left hand corner of my telly, downstairs in my living room, it's there, and it gives, as the screen is presenting different images to me, I can sometimes just sit there, and look at this globe, and I immediately think of Tina Tooley. who goes in this process that she does and it's so analog in so many ways but the results that she pulls forward from it she is remarkable

and

Radim Malinic: So you made me think of something. 

 that, summarizes the whole conversation that we've had today. The reason why Tina Tooley stuff hasn't become a trend per se is because it's hard to do. don't have to press a button. You don't have to click a few things. you can't buy it off creative market or [00:56:00] download as a template.

You have to go out and make it happen. And I think this is the difference that separates a true creative to someone who just wants to be on trend accepted, because we have to, satisfy our egos and insecurity sometimes, so it's I think it's a great example of. Of someone who has created something which will stay true or not her own for a while, even though she teaches this at the workshops is because it's hard to make.

And I think this is something that, that's her baseline. She's working on her little clicks and tricks of how to do it. So

Tony,

thank you.

 thank you very much for your time. I enjoyed your analogies about Kung Fu and 

your teaching, your courses, your daily activities. I think I enjoyed the sticks on the kitchen paper, I think the most today.

Tony Harmer: So.good.

Radim Malinic: I also want to say thank you for all the opportunities that you've given me, you know, over

Tony Harmer: Oh, man.

Radim Malinic: through Adobe and, you know, through your channels and stuff, 

Tony Harmer: Well, you're another Bowie. 

Radim Malinic: thank you. That's a nice compliment.

 Tony, thank you so much. I'm really enjoying this

Tony Harmer: Me too.

Radim Malinic: in one way or another very time soon.

Tony Harmer: Fabulous. Thanks, [00:57:00] Radim.

Radim Malinic: Thank you for listening to this episode of Creativity for Sale podcast. The show was produced and presented by me, Radek Malanich. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by

Mackay from Seven Million Bikes Podcasts.

 Theme music was written and produced by Robert Summerfield. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the podcast, please subscribe and leave a rating or review.

 To get your own action plan on how to start and grow a life changing creative business. You can get a copy of the Creativity for Sale book via the links in show notes. burning, and until next time, I'm Radim Malinich, your guide through this exploration of passion, creativity, innovation, and the boundless potential within us all. [00:58:00] 






Radim Malinic

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