The first part is understanding the client’s parameters, says Mindel.

Question: What is your creative process?

Lee Mindel: There is no recipe to the creative process, but I think that first of all we are in the service business. So we can’t be so arrogant to think that you just kind of draw, scribble and that’s the end of it and those things that look like they are scribbles in the end are not really scribbles. The process is first of all understanding the parameters of the job who your client is, what the program is, what the financial situation is, what the context is, what the building code is and then synthesizing that ingesting all of that and then throwing that all out the window because if you don’t ingest that and make that part of your system you are not free to move on from that, but you need to understand that to move on and so we spend a lot of time trying to get that into our blood stream. So we are freed from it and then something may happen.

Recorded On: 6/1/07