Time To Dream. Creative Diary.

I'm sitting writing this post in a little cafe in Edinburgh with a pretty decent coffee before heading to a meeting with a potential new client. It's always an exciting time when someone contacts us to say they might be interested in working with us. That initial email or phone call never stops being a delight to receive, especially when it's something that you would love to work on. And this project is falls in category for sure.

Will it come to fruition? Who knows!

These things are always a bit of a lottery. And as we stopped taking part in the more traditional pitch processes a few years back (I might do a separate post on that soon) it's pretty much left to whether the potential client feels like we would be a good fit, and if the chemistry feels right. For that's a very important component in delivering great creative work, for us at least.

So for now this new piece of work remains a dream, and it's important to have those.

I was listening to a podcast a couple of days ago where someone was talking about the importance of dreaming, and not only that but the importance of dreaming big. The quote went something like:

'Never dream small. Your dreams are free so why would you ever put any restrictions on them.'

Do you ever catch yourself dreaming but then end up putting restrictions on them because of the practicalities required to bring them to life. For me, I'd have to say I probably do that quite a lot, but until I heard that in the podcast it wasn't something I was truly conscious of.

When we started the studio the dream seemed so big as to be impossible. Start a studio. Run your own business. Work with your best mate. Create great work. That all sounded very exciting but we had no idea how to start - and it turned out it was as simple as sending one email. And everything flowed from there.

Obviously there was a lot more to it than that. A lot of hard work and all that kind of stuff. But in reality it really was that simple to get things moving which is often the case before we allow our mad minds to conjure up all sorts of reasons why things might not work out - our brains are pretty good at that aren't they!

Most times, when we're working on projects we have restrictions built into the brief. How much time to we have. What budget do we have for our time. What money do we have for other folk to help us bring ideas to life. What are the internal and external challenges that we might need to navigate. Things like that. And we love these challenges, it's very fulfilling to flex your creative muscles on such things. Indeed, these restrictions give us the ideal framework to create.

But what about when you're thinking about the future. When you're trying to envisage things that are exciting enough to get you out of bed and plough through the challenging times in order to make some progress on a bigger vision. As I mentioned in an earlier post, when you really enjoy the work you do and it's nicely challenging and fulfilling it's so easy just to get caught up in that - working within the restrictions you have to create the best work you possibly can and moving from one project to the next.

However as we start to imagine what the next few years might look like for the studio, I'm thinking that maybe it's time to forget about restrictions. Time for less 'What is' and a lot more 'What if'. So that's just what we'll do over the rest of this year and when we're back after a festive break.

It's time to recharge the studio after the crazy covid period.

It's time to dream. It's time to dream big.

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Graeme's writing this little creative diary as we celebrate running Jamhot for 15 years and look towards what the future of our creative & design studio holds. We're writing these for our own amusement, but if you do find yourself reading along then a big hello to you.