Every month, for about the cost of a pizza and an hour of time, the Dallas-based integrated marketing communications firm MasonBaronet stages what's become known around the office as a Creative Jam for its creative staff. These outings give the MasonBaronet team a chance to stretch their conceptual skills. There are two key goals to these meetings: build staff unity and gain new perceptions from creative exploration.

Creative Jams offers a relatively easy recipe for any creative team to follow: Choose a task or destination; establish a medium for participants to visualize or document their individual perceptions of the experience; then reunite all participants to share their perceptions with one another. “Usually, the Jams last 60 minutes including lunch,” says creative director Paul Jerde, who plans each outing. Some of MasonBaronet’s sessions require 40 minutes for traveling and eating, leaving just 20 minutes for the creative exercise. Others take 10 minutes for lunch and allow 50 minutes for discovery.

Jerde encourages that the creatives put more emphasis on the conceptual value of the idea than on its production or finished value. “The work has a grassroots feel to it,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be premeditated or finessed. It’s about letting go. We’re trying to capture that creative lightning, so the work isn’t polished, it’s pretty raw.”

Jerde says that he’s constantly studying and reading about creative exercises and techniques. “Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving” by Judith and Richard Wilde has been a recent source of inspiration for Creative Jams, but Jerde finds new themes almost everywhere. 

Here's one of the office's favorite Creative Jams; let it inspire you to try something new at your office:

Putting a stamp on it
Prompted by a home craft project with his son, Jerde brought sweet potatoes to the office and invited each participant to carve a personal mark into the tuber. They then transferred it onto paper using black acrylic paint.

Raising a few eyebrows, art director Sarah Treanor carefully carved a geometric silhouette of a rat’s face into her potato as her personal stamp. “I like exploring the forced connections between objects,” she says, noting that she has a pet rat but also appreciates how the stamp’s long nose can resemble an X-Acto knife or a marker tip. “The presentation and interpretation add more layers to the whole experience.”

Other Creative Jams for you to try:
Uncovering Type Everywhere
Piecing the Picture Together
Bringing Art to Life
Branding a Philosophy
Getting Back to Nature

Excerpted from "Making Jam" feature in June 2008 issue.