Staying Sharp (Creatively)

Use the #BreakfastFaceChallenge to help exercise your creativity and imagination every day.

Everyone's lives have been disrupted by the global pandemic. For Designers, Marketers, and Creative people of all stripes, the isolation and distancing needed during this time has proven to be very challenging. Creativity often thrives on in-person interaction with other people, trying things out just to get an impression, and being inspired by seeing other’s work. It’s tough to stay sharp when we’re physically separated in our daily lives.

How can we easily do something to exercise our creativity?

I'm betting you'd welcome something a bit more exciting than actually exercising in quarantine. I ordinarily do really serious and important design work most days (as you can see by this poster ;-)

Being physically detached from my team and coworkers makes me feel like I need to keep practicing my craft every day. You're only as good as your next deliverable, right?

I'm sure you can relate for whatever your creative pursuit is. Art and Science both require input, sharing, and feedback to be impactful. Creative problem solving exercises all those things.

#BreakfastFaceChallenge

Given all that, I've found a great way for me to practice up and stay sharp design-wise every morning - I answer the bell for a #BreakfastFaceChallenge.

It's simple - just make a fun and delicious face out of breakfast food to start the day off right for yourself or the family.

"Wilson" is my version of Tom Hank's companion in Cast Away. He was very attentive to my complaining about being out of orange juice. April 2020, NYC.

I started doing this many years ago to amuse myself, but now find it an incredibly useful exercise, not to mention alot of fun when you share your creations.

Try not to overthink it - just go with your instincts on this one. No place for treating your design as precious here. It's all about displaying your ingenuity, capturing emotion, and being silly. Go fast, don't be afraid to eat your components, and cheating is totally called for.

Rules? There's only one

The rules are simple - make a face out of breakfast food (only).

Should be edible - bonus points if someone insists on sharing a photo before you eat it. No time limits, although it is a best practice to make it, capture it, and still be able to eat it while its warm.

You really need to push yourself to utilize whatever is on hand in the fridge or laying around the kitchen. Don't go shopping! That's cheating.

Game Face

Solo is satisfying, teaming up is a fun activity, but head-to-head competition is really where it's at. Set a time limit if you are dueling - I'd try 10 minutes max. The trick is finding an impartial judge - almost never works out if you're not a cute kid.

Guess who won this head-to-head #BreakfastFaceChallenge - yup, always the cute one...

Design Tips

Some things I've learned over the years of doing this creativity exercise:

EGG ON YOUR FACE

Whether you scramble 'em or fry a few, eggs are the best foundational level for the face I've found. They give you some great options for overall shape, size, and color. Pro tip - make the eggs large enough to fill the interior of a plate, but so large that you don't have room to layer other items around them for hair, ears, etc. For an extra degree of difficulty, try using cereal as your face base. Reminds me of The Hulk.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Without question, the key to a successful face creation are the eyes. Same as with people. Eyes are what capture your immediate attention and convey emotion very well. My two favorites eye techniques are (1) frying two eggs with the yolks close together, and (2) slicing a strawberry into rounds. Super bonus is putting a blueberry or similar on each iris shape to be the pupil.

HAIR RAISING

I've had many failed experiments when it comes to hair. Cottage cheese doesn't work and frankly no one wants to eat that much cottage cheese. Longish banana slices had potential, but were a bit odd looking. The best ingredient I've found for hair is a half an avocado sliced width-wise and styled for a great hair day.

MOUTHING OFF

What a mouth on that one, am I right? This is a constant source of problems for the face creator. Mouths are big. They are really noticeable, so you want them to be good. I've yet to land on the perfect mouth design, but I do like trying to craft bacon into a mouth shape (but I generally end up nibbling away too much of because, well, it's bacon). A surefire way to make your face more lovable is using blueberries for a smile.

BY A NOSE

I have tried leaving the nose off many of my breakfast faces, but there’s something important about having one there. I don’t know what it is, but it’s clearly important. Just doesn’t look right without at least an attempt at the nose. Most times I’ll use a strawberry sliced in half vertically — orient it upside-down for anything in the cat or dog realm, or opposite for a people-looking one

EARS FOR FEARS

If there's one thing that almost never get right it's ears. Which is really tragic because ears can signal many types of animal faces immediately. Almost by accident, I realized that slicing a tomato half gave me really nicely shaped ears. And a completely random idea of using rye toast halves that were a bit skinny turned out to be a fox (I was going for a cat, but fox it is).

[ SECRET WEAPON ] GIVE 'EM THE EYEBROW

Animators and Artists learn pretty early that eyebrows hold the key to portraying emotion. They can be the simplest line or stroke, as long as they are the correct angle and shape. Getting eyebrows to show happiness, anger, or even confusion are your powerup to crush your competition. My go to eyebrows are made out of the curved part of a banana sliced length-wise.

Special Category - Pancakes

Most of the time I'll use many different textures and substances for the face creation to give it that dimensional feel. Occasionally, there's someone who wants to throw down with pancakes - and that's a whole other universe of #BreakfastFaceChallenge fun. You see, pancakes are MUCH easier to mold into whatever shape you want and solve the age old problem of creating a great head of hair.

There are many fun variations possible for this challenge - pancake only, pancake base with fruit on top, stacks of pancakes to make 3D modeled faces, etc. Don't let kids participate in this one - they'll decimate you. Better to just serve them the results.

Creativity Needs Practice

As fun as these #BreakfastFaceChallenge can be, it really does exercise your creativity. And like most design and creative pursuits from music, to videos, to art - it requires you putting in the time to practice. It's super hard to not repeat yourself each day doing this. I've had to switch it up to alternate between egg-based creations and cereal-based faces to keep from falling into patterns of thinking. That said, this is breakfast. Whatever you create is getting eaten. Game over.

I even took the time to fix up quick bowl of cereal just to say in shape...

Quarantine Therapy

I created #BreakfastFaceChallenge to have some fun, but turns out it's a great creativity workout. If you think this might be use or enjoyed seeing the creations, please share this post with your friends, family, and coworkers to brighten up their days just a bit. We can all use that these days. Thx!

Love to see what you come up with. Just tag it #BreakfastFaceChallenge

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About M. Pell

Bold, insightful, and uncompromising, M. Pell leads Design for The Microsoft Garage - the company’s worldwide innovation program for experimental projects and curiosity-fueled explorations. Acclaimed author and speaker, Pell is recognized as a thought leader in the fields of Smart Information, Data Viz, and Experiential Design. A lifelong Designer/Coder, Pell was one the inventors of Adobe Acrobat and PDF, an early pioneer of 3D interfaces, and has consistently been on the leading edge of design and innovation over his entire career in high-technology.

Find the latest on M. Pell at futuristic.com

Books by M.Pell - The Age of Smart Information and Envisioning Holograms

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