Free Book Giveaway of The Creative Process Illustrated

It's been a month since the last post (job hunting is tough in this economy) so I thought I'd make it worthwhile. Former UT Advertising teachers Glenn Griffin and Deb Morrison have written a groundbreaking book about the creative process.

To win a signed copy of The Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising's Big Ideas Are Born by W. Glenn Griffin and Deborah Morrison, 1) please leave a comment saying why you like this blog. 2) Be a facebook fan of The Ranch Blog. The winner will be randomly picked by me.

How did you choose whom to profile?
We collected nearly 80 of these drawings over a period of several years. When we found a publisher for the book, we worked with our editor to choose 30 that we thought were most representative of the varied and interesting submissions we’d received. It was a tough cut to make – so tough that the editor permitted us to include a few more as we started writing the manuscript. We really learned so much from every drawing.

What was the inspiration behind the title?
Our publisher actually proposed the title of the book! We’d always called the project “Pure Process” because it represented a study of personal creative thinking as opposed to the partner- or team-driven process that’s typical in advertising. The folks at HOW Books thought The Creative Process Illustrated would be more descriptive of the book’s content and make it more appealing to potential readers. We still love “Pure Process” (you can’t beat that alliteration!) but we like the new title, too. “Pure Process” lives on as the title of our website, so it’s still out there.



Both of you have extensive teaching experience about advertising and creativity and you have touched the lives of so many students. Why write a book now?
Wish we had some brilliant master plan to share with you (!), but the book just sort of happened in the right spot for both of us. Deborah had just finished a book called Idea Industry with Brett Robbs, a great colleague of ours at the University of Colorado – Boulder when we decided to write a new book proposal based on these process drawings we’d been collecting for the past several years and the insights we’d derived from them. We got a book contract in the Spring of 2009 and the rest is history!




Part of the Pure Process mantra is "...also about good stewardship of that process: doing good work, being responsible and revealing the industry as the force for positive change it is and can be." What are your thoughts about the post about a consumer who is appalled by advertising? '
That letter has made the rounds and a lot of people are talking about it, but why? Is there anything we didn’t already know in that letter? Of course there’s advertising out there that’s dumb. Of course some of it annoys people. And (of course) there are some cranky folks out there who won’t ever be happy with anything we do. We are big believers, however, that advertising CAN be smart, CAN engage people and actually do positive things for the world. Nope, we can’t tell you what went wrong with that sausage campaign, sir. But we do know that there are terrific people in our business who know about the “Brians” out there and don’t want to invite more criticism of the industry by doing bad work. Instead, they want to show people what advertising can do when it’s done well. We see lots of examples (thank goodness) of great work out there that gets lots of love from consumers for all the right reasons. That’s the kind of work we want to keep pushing our students to do.



How much sweat equity (hours spent writing, researching and interviewing) is in this book?
Hmmmm. Enough to make us ask two questions: (1) Why the hell did we sign up for this? (2) Okay, what’s the next book going to be about?
We figure that’s about right.