Last month I wrote about idea fatigue and how, if not contained, your new ideas can rot away creativity. But what about when you work on other peoples ideas?

Creative freelancers, employees, contractors and consultants are all expected to take someone else’s idea and turn it into something tangible.

The key point here is how do you apply the same level of enthusiasm and passion that you give to your OWN ideas to an idea that is ‘alien’?

Truth is, you can’t. And this is very important because it gives you an opportunity to see the other side of the coin.

Your idea sucks

Think about the cynical nay-sayers and head shakers that often shoot down your own precious ideas (sob…) for a moment. This is how experienced and professional freelancers, employees, contractors and consultants should approach a new idea that is presented to them.

Your idea sucks Credit: akeeris

This brand of people are some of the most valuable you can meet because they offer a reality check. To be a good freelancer, employee, contractor or consultant then you simply have do this when working with other peoples ideas or the idea will most likely fail.

Sure, you may want the money that goes with the job and you probably want to be able to put your precious skills into action and get some experience – but you have to face the fact that as a paid hand you will never, ever have the same emotional connection with the idea as the person who originated it.

Caring about other peoples ideas

Thank about this example – did John Sculley really care about the ideas and vision that Steve Jobs had for Apple when he took the reigns as CEO? Evidence suggests not because he famously fired Jobs from Apple (the company Jobs founded). Sculley clearly didn’t not care about the future of the information age, he just wanted to sell more white boxes.

Credit startupquote.com

History tells us this was a big mistake because without Jobs’ vision/passion and leadership Apple almost went under. They became boring and bland – not at all like the innovative and expanding company we see today with Jobs’ back in the driving seat.

Don’t get trapped in someone else’s idea

Many years ago (…sigh…) I worked with two guys who wanted to start their own online business. The core idea wasn’t anything I believed in or was passionate about but I stayed silent, this was a big mistake.

I was a yes man for the first few weeks of the project and spent a lot of time working on the business idea designing concepts and developing a basic mock-up system for them to play around with.

At this stage the invoices were piling up but the product was junk and I knew it but still, said nothing.

Everyone loves a yes man Credit: photostock

Eventually after a month of work I made my opinions clear to the clients and they actually agreed that the idea wasn’t as strong as they had initially thought.

As it turns out they had been following my lead as the only creative/technical member of the trio and hoping that I and I alone would be able to mature the idea for them.

This was a disaster for me but a lesson well learned. I never got paid for the work and now I always make sure to vocalise my opinions and fears to a potential client before its too late.

Today, Friday the 13th of May 2011, at 13:00 I finally opened up the WonderThemes WordPress theme marketplace for open registration, yey!

Shipping my first major product

Over the past 12 months I’ve worked on WonderThemes in my free time so this is a major project to finally push into the real world. I really should be ready to party right now but over the past couple of days I’ve pulled far too many late night sessions leaving me a little drained and run-down but inside I’m dancing!!!

There were times when I didn’t think the project would ever be finished. The evolution of the site from its original conception to final product is quite a story, one I may tell one day, but not today, today I’m just glad its launched and SO happy everything has come together.

The summer of ’09

WonderThemes may seem like a new project as I’ve kept it under wraps for quite some time but its rooted WAY back in the summer of 2009 at my first ever WordCamp. In fact some of the illustration work like the mascot and landscape images were finalised way back in June last year – its taken that long to knit the other pieces together.

Under the bonnet

The entire system is built on a WordPress Multisite configuration hosted by the great guys at Site5 with a heavily modified e-Commernce package origionally develped by WPMUDev.

The bulk of the design and build work was done by yours truly with more specialised tasks such as the e-Commerce modifications and PayPal and the forum integration being farmed out a few valuable freelance consultants.

I’ve kept everything inside the WordPress-sphere where possible, even using the current version of the buggy/temperamental bbPress system for our support forums (thankfully the new more stable plug-in version is out soon).

In fact, and this is not a moan – just a fact, one of the major cause of delay was the constant upgrades to the WordPress core and the changes we had to keep up with. When I started building WonderThemes WPMU was still a separate product which I had little to no experience with and keeping track on top of this and its merger into the WordPress core was one of the major learning curves in the project development.

The hundreds of dedicated core contributors who develop WordPress deserve a lot of gratitude for their silent work on this project and I suspect many others.

BIG thanks to

Other than the vast team of WordPress developers I have a lot of people to thank for helping out on WonderThemes and also inspiring me to continue when I almost gave up:

Jonny Allbut - for being an inspiration to continue and a great sounding post. Jonny is the lead developer of the Wonderflux WordPress theme framework and my partner in the WonderThemes project. Although he has taken a back seat up to now we plan to move forward with some cool in-house themes as soon as the dust has settled.

Lee Willis - for developing the impossible and going the extra mile. Lee is the brains behind all of the e-Commerce and PayPal modifications in the WonderThemes system and a true gent.

Scott Jackson – for making my vision a reality. Scott is an expert illustrator and did the artwork on the WonderThemes site as well as my own avatar on this site.

Ryan Imel at WPCandy – for the extra push. Ryan has featured our little site a few times on WPCandy and its been a big boost to the project. His little unexpected kicks like featuring us in Theme Madness really helped.

Jordan Hatch – for giving a 2nd opinion. Jordan helped out with our support forum integration and is also stepping forward to be one of our first support team when the site matures. He’s done similar work before for WooThemes and is an expert coder and WordCamper.

The wife, AKA Mrs Jones (no website available) - for putting up with me without really knowing why. My wife doesn’t really understand the WonderThemes project, all she knows is I’ve been working hard and doing a lot of late nights and she’s been very understanding. She lets me know when its 2am and time for bed, she lets me know that I worked last weekend so this weekend I should have a couple of days off and she lets me know that even if nothing comes from all of this work everything will be OK. Out of everyone I thank her the most (sorry guys!).

If I’ve missed anyone, sorry, its been a rough week!

I love ideas. I come up with them all the time because its an addictive process. Coming up with new ideas makes me feel good, great in fact – its a wonderful release to take a few days or even weeks maturing an idea from early sketches and concepts into a plan to make the idea happen.

In this video Scott Belsky details exactly why this addiction is a trap. Most ideas never get to the ‘plan’ stage never mind the ‘doing’ stage. My vast collection of  notepads, journals, post-its and emails are testament to that.

The fact is that as enjoyable and addictive as the idea generation process is it kills productivity and sucks time. When it comes down to it, idea generation is simply another form of procrastination that eventually leads to ‘idea fatigue’.

Idea fatigue is like a bad hangover and is incredibly damaging to a creative mind because it can make the process of maturing new ideas feel cynical and painful.

So the next time a new ides springs to mind don’t throw everything at it. Simply make a note of it, jot down the key points and concepts and get back to work.

So I finally found a few spare hours between other projects to update the base6 design logo from the initial concepts that I touted a few weeks ago. The latest offering is:

This version has moved away from purely font-based and has been constructed from scratch using vectors. I frustratingly spent around 6 hours in PhotoShop trying to get the ‘S’ to look right before moving over to FireWorks which had it sussed in a couple of hours.

This is actually proving to be a really challenging and is probably one of the most thought out and all-consuming projects I have done for a long time. This is a massive difference from the the existing base6 branding which took just a couple of days.

The Process (its killing me!)

This design process has reminded me that doing design work with yourself as the client is awful. With only your own mind as a critic and source for feedback you can quickly go insane.

The version above is actually version 7 of a set that I’d worked though using different ideas for the lettering. At one point I even planned to have the ’6′ as a hand drawn ‘squiggle’ with a rocket flying out of the top but after spending an evening toiling over it I gave up on that idea.

I hope you like the new concept. This should be 99% of the final design. I just need to take a step back now and digest it before moving into colours and website layout.