Creativity helpers

When deadlines are tight, almost everyone would love to have a secret application that can generate concepts and ideas more quickly and reliably than a design meeting can. No such application exists yet - which is a good thing, because it would put many creatives out of work. However, there's a wide selection of far simpler tools that can help organise your thoughts and feelings, clarify priorities and relationships, and give your creative subconscious something to work on.

These tools aren't a substitute for Adobe's Creative Suite. Most of them don't generate content for you, and it's important to understand that's not what they're designed to do. Instead, they help you create, share, talk about and map the ideas, concepts and elements that are important to a project. You can make this sharing and development process as abstract or as concrete as you want it to be. For example you might use a mind-mapping tool to summarise a set of brand associations, so that you can discuss which ones you want to highlight in a campaign, logo or website project. Alternatively, you could use some of the same tools to summarise and graph project roles, goals and outcomes.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq. 

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