Years ago I heard about the arrow in the Fed Ex logo which served as a subliminal message about moving forward. It was placed in the negative space in the word Ex and served as a powerful marketing tool.

Recently, I stopped at Starbucks and got a cup of coffee in this cup. Believe it or not, this is a rare sight for a Starbucks cup, there are no marks on it. It’s a blank slate. Almost immediately the white space registered as the negative space for me, space with tons of potential that reminded me of that Fed Ex arrow.
How much information is regularly running through our visual range that we don’t even notice.

In this cup I see the unseen. The possibilities in the circle of white in this plain cup are endless to me, like a porthole to another world. I don’t know what all the possibilities are necessarily but, I know they are there.
That’s what working with recycled materials does for me in general and I think it’s what happens for the creators who make things at the studio too, even if they arent aware of it. Go ahead, Look for the arrow…it’s out there somewhere.

For more on the power of negative spaces check out this article excerpt from The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May and start to notice the unseen.

Leafing through a back issue of National Geographic Magazine, I spotted this little blurb about snow goggles, a true nod to creativity. I imagine the story goes like this…
Imagine frozen landscapes with brilliantly bright white tundras as far as the eye can see. If you don’t have snow goggles in an environment like that, you most likely won’t have your eyesight either. So, what’s a guy without snow goggles to do?
He’d have to think fast (this is where we count on creativity to help us out). Using his limited travel resources, he’d fashion goggles out of duck tape!

I talk about creativity often and this National Geographic blurb makes a great example of what I think about it. Creativity is not just for artists, creatives, and crafters. It’s part of all of us, every day. We may not be faced with icy tundra’s to conquer but we have real life to manage and creativity is the best tool we’ve got.