Not so long ago at Harmony, we made the Pocket Book of Creativity

From the Harmony website in 2012 about the project:

It began as a creative exercise turned into a beautiful piece of marketing that can be enjoyed by all. Sometimes creativity strikes when you least expect it, and at other times it appears to be beyond grasp.

Creativity is the cornerstone of Harmony’s work – it is where our clever, innovative solutions for all manner of requirements and challenges shine. We dare to be bold and create solutions for our customers to give them a unique edge in their markets.

We wanted to share our love and investment in creativity – to inspire our clients, potential customers and friends to make today different, and try something new, so the Pocket Book of Creativity was born – a guide to making sure today is different.

The process was simple – as a team we discussed how creative ideas were born, how great inventors found solutions to problems and how ideas could be dashed. The ideas tumbled onto paper to create our vision on why creativity is important.

The ideas were organised into stages of decision making, to ideas of how to induce deeper creativity, and then a set of the creative people we admire through history and across many different disciplines.
“Without ideas and creativity, we lose the ability to solve, evolve and inspire. Too often, we let the needs of the moment occupy our creative minds and forget to look beyond today, to step back and to allow the idea machine between our ears to move us forward.”

“If this pocket book does anything for you, let it be to give you time and inspiration for creativity. Enjoy.” – Company Director, Jason Higgins.

The Pocket Book was lovingly designed by Sarah Francis in her freelance capacity as Creatingle. As well as being a dear friend, Sarah is a brilliant and quirky designer and a great person to put together our ideas and text. Her design was inspirational and drew from our work and her interpretation of Harmony. We wanted the project to be different – to not instantly look like Harmony, so this outside input was invaluable.

The book was printed up by UK company Little Book who do different versions of their book layout, and supply many recognisable brands and events. As they send out samples to interested people, we found out that the Pocket Book of Creativity gets a regular outing in their set of samples. (Edit: Sarah went on to design some more for Autism West Midlands)

Little Book were considering their branding and asked for opinions on their old branding using red bubbles. I was surprised to discover that my comment about the bubbles had been selected as a winner of some champagne and bright red balloons on Valentines Day! Subsequently we were featured on the Little Book blog. I don’t remember ever winning a little competition like that, so it was a lovely surprise!