BrnDmp

Parallax revisited – 1 year of constraints

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. July marks the first year of the parallax series. To celebrate we look back on the past year and review our: favourite topic, favourite personal post, favourite post of the other and a review of the formats. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

Favourite topic

I wanted to say by far my favourite topic, but that’s a bit too much. So, my favourite topic was What on Earth is Remote Sensing?. After two years in a completely different field of work, I was 3 months or so working in my original field of Remote Sensing. That, in combination with the format, made the post really enjoyable to write.

The reason I withdrew myself from saying by far …, is that I also deeply enjoyed creating the clips for Kaizen versus Good Enough. That post might even be the start for a new category of posts I will do together with my wife on her blog.

Favourite post (Arjen)

This one is easy. That has to be my first attempt in this series: Planning your Career or the Boundary between Private and Professional life. At the time I just changed jobs so I gave this topic a lot of thought. It must also be my most spontaneous and emotional post.

Do nice things with nice people. Where, how and what you do is of minor, if of any, importance.

Favourite post (Hans)

Easy for me again: the six books that had the most influence on who I am today. Favourite, partly because Hans and I started with an almost identical disclaimer. Partly because I love reading and immediately ordered all the books from Hans’ list which I didn’t have. But I mostly liked this post  because I feel it has the most Hans in it. I like personality shining through in writing (is this English?) and this is Hans’ best example in my opninion.

Formats

Coming up with a new format every two months was part of the fun as well as seeing what Hans’ would come up with every other month. I still remember being full in moving from one house to another when Hans sent me this notice: ‘Order this book, the new parallax topic will be about the book’. I read the book in my sleeping bag in my new, unfinished house. The reason we introduced constraining formats was to induce the creative process. And that for sure worked out. Especially when you are limited to, say, 500 worrds, you are forced to be concise and say exactly what you want. It also induced the creative process in a more indirect way: you first have to be creative in coming up with a new format, then you have to be creative again to comply to format and come up with something decent. One format I would like to explore more is the one with guest authors. Maybe something with a dialog or, even better, polemy. Another thought is to include more alternative channels, like twitter, facebook or a post composed of only creative commons content from flickr. Well, shouldn’t spill all my ideas yet.

Hope the coming year of parallax posts will be as fruitful as the last and I will try to improve my English writing style. I enjoyed writing, I hope my 10 readers enjoyed reading (10, that is including the Googlebot. Hi there again, thanks for not giving me a Page Rank).