If I were to start a new restaurant, I’d choose a somewhat popular area where I could find a reasonable building to lease or purchase. Then I’d make it a contest of sorts for the public to decide which business would best be suited for that area, limiting their choices to a few things that I’d consider starting up. For example the pizza idea or coffee shop.

Maybe the area has been itching for a pencil sharpener sharpening business to open but nobody has ever offered to open one. Maybe I could re-invent the music store or the drive-in theater. Why not a drive-thru music store? You’d get a download a day plus a cup of coffee.

The fact is that there is a majority of people who want something and will gladly pay for something you can provide. I believe this to be true. I have just begun looking.to find those people and figure out what they want.

Copyright Gabriel Utasi

We get better at what we do every day. We can be inspired by work we’ve done in the past, by work others have done and by work we imagine.

My inspirations are science, nature, math, realism, humor, love and music to name a few. Sometimes a combination of inspirations can help one visualize a project in a new light.

I’m currently reading business books about Art Direction as well as Fine Art painting techniques. While reading both, I had to stop and make a quick doodle. As a lesson plan for students of the author of one of the books, the imagery of an egg being dropped from a three-story building without being broken was being described and that got me thinking. What if the author took that thought a step further? We all have a set of visuals from high school and television sitcoms based on that topic, so we’d probably all have similar solutions.

My lesson plan would have been to require students try to devise a way to drop an elephant from a three-story building without it breaking. Here we add humor, science and creativity. That’s what led to this sketch.