This website contains work done with the skills acquired in my first two years of school. However, there would be an update to this site with some more spectacular school projects in April 2010. Have a happy viewing!
Come summer 2010, when I graduate from college, my objective is to work as a motion graphics designer in a very good television station where my skills can be utilized and better developed.
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
Pixar’s customers always expect to see something new every time. This sounds downright scary to the Pixar’s executives, that how you know they are doing their jobs.
However, Pixar’s creative power lives in their leadership. Walt Disney believed that when continual change, or reinvention, is the norm in a company and technology and art are together, magical things happen. A lot of people look back at Disney’s early days and say stuffs like, “Look at the artists!” They don’t pay attention to his technological innovations. But he did the first sound in animation, the first color, the first compositing of animation with live action, and the first applications of xerography in animation production. He was always excited by technology.
At Pixar, they believe in the swirling interplay between art and technology and they constantly try to apply better technology at every stage of production. John say, “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”
Pixar, however, adhere to the following principles:
1. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without going through the “proper” channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their department, and it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised.
2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. They constantly show work in progress internally. They make a concerted effort to make it safe to criticize by inviting everyone attending these showings to email notes to the creative leaders that detailed what they liked and didn’t like and explain why.
3. Pixar must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community. They always encourage their technological artists to publish their research and participate in industry conferences. Though publishing may give away ideas, but it keeps Pixar connected with the academic community. This connection is worth far more than any ideas they may have revealed. It helps them attract exceptional talent and reinforces the belief throughout the company that people are more important than ideas.
Pixar also try to break down the walls between disciplines in other ways. One is a collection of in-house courses they offer, which they call Pixar University. It is responsible for training and cross-training people as they develop in their careers. But they also offer an array of optional classes that give people from different disciplines the opportunity to mix and appreciate what everyone does.
This was my cut an article from “Harvard Business Review” Volume 86 Number 9: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
