One of the great things about my job is sometimes I just have to think up creative ideas. Get paid to think? Hell yeah, that's the best part of my job. I've got an interesting project right now and we are having a team brainstorming session later today with all of crayon, but of course I want to think up some ideas ahead of time so that I've got a pile to pull from. So how do I do that?

For me it means getting away from everything, cranking the music and just writing down every idea I think up no matter how random. Sometimes it's just a single word and other times a full blown idea. Then I can go back and scribble, doodle and just change things around and put random ideas together with each other to start solidifying an idea. I prefer to do this on a white board, but I don't have one at the moment so it's in my trusty notebook for now.

How do others out there brainstorm? I'd LOVE to know what gets your creative juices flowing. Do you have particular music? Some staples for me include The Chemical Brothers, Buckethead and The Prodigy. Something about the vibe just does it for me. Of course today I put iTunes on shuffle mode so I've had all sorts of mixed up stuff. As much as I love Tori Amos she doesn't do the trick for me.

Oh good, I just got some graphics/logo to run with. I had no colors or vibe to work with and that is good and bad at the same time. In this case it's a VERY good thing!

Ok, back to squeezing the creative juices.