When I found out her process for creating them, I was astonished. I assumed she was constructing them based on quotes from ancient philosophers or psychology textbooks or something, but it turns out they are all original ideas, products of a nifty sort of brainstorming session. Here is her describing it in an email:
I generally start out by brainstorming an emotion or adjective. Sometimes they fly into my head out of no where -- like sophistication this morning. note: I was shocked when I looked up that word in the dictionary, as I hadn't been thinking of sophisticated as "advanced" or "specialized" (as in a sophisticated knowledge of vector mathematics) rather more like wine & cheese. * grin *
Then ideas start streaming from there. Well, sophistication, could I also do redneck? ignorance? class? (as in classy) education? learning? intelligence? erudite? aptitude? inclination? (btw - that was a live stream of consciousness creation coming off my fingers, I will likely use a couple of those...)
And I put 20-50 words down and then start going through the list (on paper) and start creating triangles of words that compose the idea. Sometimes I think I get a great one and then I think of how it could be very wrong in some situations, so I try to bend it a bit. Often, I come up with great words to surround a concept and end up using that surrounding concept as a new center.
As far as inspiration, I try to hold myself to one a day... but generally, I brainstorm en mass, create en mass and then edit / color one a day. Perhaps 30% of the en mass creations have made it to production.
It’s a useful reminder that the formula for "brilliance" is practice plus good filters.
I am excited to see how the project evolves.
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If you like this stuff, you will probably also enjoy Indexed.
Possibly related:
-- Twitter Venn Diagrams
-- Best Venn Diagram Ever
