A Decade of Creative Thinking
For over a decade, Srini Rao has made it his business to change the way people think about creativity. For his podcast, The Unmistakable Creative, he’s interviewed more than 600 authors, astrophysicists, small business owners, and even bank robbers (!) in order to better understand and demystify the process of realizing even your most ambitious creative goals.
So what has he learned? Creativity comes in a range of packages, and you probably have a lot more creative blood coursing through your veins than you give yourself credit for. It’s just a matter of learning how to get it pumping.
Creative Minds Think Outside the Frame
If that sounds familiar, it might be because it’s a core belief at ImageThink as well: “Creative” isn’t a profession or occupation, it’s a problem-solving mindset, dependent on rigorously asking better questions to get more original answers.
That similar philosophy recently led to a conversation between The Unmistakable Creative and ImageThink Founder and CEO Nora Herting on the power of visuals to help reframe and ask better questions and arrive at more creative answers. Nora and Srini discussed the neuroscience behind visual communication, carving out a space for yourself, and the delicate balance between a mission-driven mindset and an adaptive business strategy, especially in a post COVID-19 world.
The discussion naturally turned to creative process, and to the way a graphic recorder actually works. As an entrepreneur and business owner, Srini has long appreciated the values of visuals and design thinking, but like many of ImageThink’s own clients, does not consider himself an artist. He’s a voracious reader and podcast producer, two formats that rely on the narrative word to convey ideas and land concepts.
Illustrating the Point
So how do you illustrate the power of visuals on a narrative, audio-only medium? Well, the best idea we could think of was to illustrate the episode! ImageThink Senior Graphic Recorder Arielle Rothenberg listened through Nora and Srini’s conversation and recorded their conversation as illustrated notes.
By sharing our visual in the episode description, Srini was able to leverage the infographic’s power to help The Unmistakable Creative’s audience really focus on and internalize the key discussion points. A beautiful and thoughtfully designed piece of art, the graphic serves as a promotional tool for the episode and the podcast as a whole. We can even animate the illustration and sync it to the podcast, thus creating a real time animated video out of an existing piece of content, adding more potential distribution channels and widening its reach.
In other words, an asset like the one above can help make Nora’s episode of The Unmistakable Creative stick in the minds of existing listeners and stand out to new potential audiences. Who says that podcasts can’t use a little visual flare?
