I kid you not, but I’ll come back to that.

Day 1: Sunday morning. Here we are in Denver for the HOW Design Conference, and it’s so wonderfully warm here. We made the decision to expand our minds and probably end up feeling bad about ourselves with all of the super talent mulling in the halls, but what the hec, why not. It’s been a while since I did any sort of “continuing education” thing for myself and Cara is always along for a party. So we came.

9:00 am we stroll into a large room at the Conference Center, you  know the voyeuristic big blue bear peeping in the window? That’s the place. So for our first session of the week, we’re in this large room with a dozen or so round tables covered in paper and all these really fun toys, tape, pencils, markers, play-doh, tape, I love tape, and stuff. In walks this nun. He is about six feet plus and he rocks his habit. He’s making sure we are all behaving. I love this class already. It makes me want to giggle out loud but the room is sort of quiet at the moment. We grab a seat, meet our new best friend Aldo who hails from Vancouver, one of the coolest cities ever, and well, start drawing on the table. I really can’t help myself. Cara is over there building cairns and stuff, and sporting an ear to ear grin. Did we really pay a gazillion dollars to play with stuff. You bet we did, because that is just about exactly what Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee tell us what to do.

Somewhere along the way, our over mature brains have lost the ability to bust loose. I’m thinking this evolutionary process might have skipped over Cara and me, but I get it. We all get to be so successful, snicker snicker, by basically self editing which is exactly how we can’t open our tiny little brains to find the really BIG ideas. Or at least find the kernel of a big idea and let someone else run with it. We’re all Creative Directors! The truths we have learned:

1. Creativity is a habit

2. Think before you think

This class is about running a better brain storm session forever now to be called a brain squall, getting people to participate and doing what you are supposed to do in a brain squall- start throwing down some good ideas.

What I have found out is that all they are saying is all the same stuff I think, preach, and talk about sometimes incessantly.  But it feels great to have yet another way to reform these thoughts and communicate it to our clients. Its great to have more people like us out there.

Oh and Stefan was wearing a nun’s suit because he feels better in a dress…