Visual puns

“Visual puns” are readily available on a wide range of websites, and are a great way to get a group’s (or your own) creative juices flowing. As a group exercise, you might download a bunch of samples and either print them out or put them on a screen as part of a Power Point presentation. See if the whole group or partner pairs within the group can guess what they represent, and perhaps give a small prize to those who guess the most correctly – or come up with the most creative interpretations.

A variation on this theme is to show a few examples and then design your own visual illustrations of the phrase with simple drawings or Photoshop manipulations. This can be stimulating as both an individual or group exercise. It can also be stimulating to compare your thinking to others’ ideas. For example, shown here are two versions of a visual pun for “Ipod.”

Think about other words or phrases that might be interpreted in multiple ways: watch dog, quarter horse, eye ball . . .

Here are a few visual pun websites to get you started:
http://www.dvsd.org/dvworld/computergraphics/visual%20puns.html,
http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=7550 and http://www.visualpuns.net/

The good of complaining

One creative idea that appeals to my perverse side is to write a Complaint Song and/or form a Complaint Choir. While I am generally an advocate for looking on the bright side, the husband of the husband/wife team credited with founding the Complaint Choir movement says singing out your pet peeves and sense of injustice is cathartic, and helps you to bond with others who share your frustration. No reports have come in on whether Complaint Choirs have resolved any of the issues they have addressed (ranging from the high price of beer to global warming) but they have exercised creative juices, had a few laughs and made some beautiful music, all of which are worthy outcomes. (For more info go to http://www.complaintschoir.org/.)