So many people think of the workplace as where you go to do as you’re tasked, clock out, and get paid. However, not only is being creative enjoyable, but it’s also a personality trait that businesses are increasingly looking for in applicants and among existing staff. Creative people are more receptive to feedback for improvement, are driven to iterate to find a solution, and tend to think differently. More people are looking to utilise their creative skills, such as by using the guide to improving the workplace, so we’re running through a few ways that these skills can be used, as well as some tools to help refine these abilities.
Exercising your flair for graphic design
Graphic design and, similarly, animation know-how are incredibly applicable skills across a great many industries. Whether it’s directly working on a product or building promotional campaigns, this creative skill is sought by many employers. One of the best tools for refining your graphic design skills is the Procreate app for iPad devices, which is wonderfully simple and intuitive to use, allowing you to easily see what level you’re working at right now. For the more active side of animation, the Unity platform continues to be essential for all forms of animators. Famed for its application in video games, it can also be used in manufacturing, film, animation, and engineering. Animations are always very useful visual applications for truly relaying your total vision, especially if it’s in 3D. The two certainly go hand-in-hand in the continually evolving, very fast-moving online casino scene, in which new titles ranging several themes and animation styles are released to the most prominent platforms regularly. Due to the rapid output of online slots, you get to exercise new ideas and styles regularly. But it’s not just slots that need graphic design and animation work, as roulette and other such table games have increasingly sophisticated appearances online, too. Needing novel graphic designs to catch the eye and exciting animations therein, the sector is always looking for creative designers to help make their releases stand out. While you can certainly utilise your eye for graphic design and animations at work, you could also make a new career or side hustle out of it, with graphic design being one of our top digital careers for remote work.
Getting creative can greatly help you to connect to your audience
They say that creative thinking can’t be taught, but programmes like the live online Cambridge Creativity Lab are trying to change that stance, teach how creativity helps innovation and how managers can cultivate creativity within their teams. Creative thinking can greatly help to advance your business when applied to the outward-facing facets of the offering, namely in PR, marketing, and the promotion of start-ups. Thinking outside of the box in all of these areas helps to keep the business to keep in the minds of those who engage with the programmes, be it through a pitch to investors or when trying to gain Facebook followers. In PR, creativity is primarily sought to establish the base concept and overall theme of a PR programme, with that base concept, then being worked towards with each piece of content across all platforms. For start-ups, coming up with a creative way to encourage engagement can be key to early success, with Neil Patel offering the example of Codecademy challenging people to learn code as a way for them to use their platform. Having advertised themselves as the best place to learn code, the challenge encouraged them to create an account with them, almost gamifying the experience. Marketing teams are always looking for novel ways to not just collect customer information but to also apply new methods for meeting those needs. This could come in the form of creating a more intuitive way for customers to give you their data. BETC Paris, the famously creative advertising company, teamed up with Ubisoft for the marketing of their new gaming IP, ‘The Division.’ To set the scene and raise awareness among gamers, BETC launched ‘Collapse,’ a mini-game simulation that demonstrated the apocalypse leading to the new game’s story.
Applying your creativity to craft the narrative
Similarly to how creativity can be applied to the original marketing process, it is also invited in the later stages of advertising. One key way in which creative minds are being pulled into advertising plans is for video creation. Hubspot finds that 86 per cent of businesses use videos as a marketing tool, and 93 per cent see video as integral to the strategy. Being able to craft modern videos that conform to all of the statistical preferences of viewers is one thing, but to stand out and find success, something creative should be presented. Providing value to customers through creative advertising results in brand recognition, which you can achieve by creating something relatable and intriguing. Naturally, having a grasp on storyboarding software will help you to put visuals to your creative thinking, and luckily, one of the top programs for this, Storyboarder, is free to download. In advertising, one creative idea can quickly allow you to mould enough of a story for the whole video slot. Old Spice’s 2010 advert drew from their finding that women mostly decide which body products men should buy, making it all about women wanting their man to smell a certain way. On the other hand, and thanks to advert slots not needing to be confined to expensive TV windows, you could try to go down the entended tale route that John Lewis crafts each year in its Christmas adverts.
If you’ve got a creative mind, you should look to utilise it professionally as there are plenty of employers looking to harness your skills to bolster their brands and campaigns.