Does travel make you more creative?

Jeda Villa, Pemuteran, Bali. Photo: Bart Speedman / Flickr Creative Commons

Can seeing new places, meeting new people, and living new lifestyles spark your imagination?  SpyreStudios, an online magazine for web designers, thinks so: 5 reasons travel can improve your design work.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Traveling rocks. Practically everyone likes to travel, whether by land, sea or air. And why not? You get excited to see new environments and people, try new things, and be surrounded by fresh and inspiring surroundings. But did you know that traveling can actually help your design work as well? Yep, there are at least 5 reasons travel can improve your design work.”

To see these ideas in action, here’s a wonderful TED video, “The Power of Time Off.”

Stefan Sagmeister is famous for designing for musicians, like their album covers and posters. Every seven years, he takes a one-year sabbatical. He shuts down his studio, refuses work from clients, and travels somewhere new. In the video, Sagmeister gives examples of how his stints overseas have informed his aesthetic in various design works. As a bonus, if you’ve been to Bali, you’ll enjoy his stories even more.

Sagmeister also makes a financial case for taking time off. Freedom to experiment with new ideas can lead to profitable ventures. He recounts the famous story of how a 3M employee invented Post-it Notes on his own initiative. During his presentation, there’s a cool slide at 7:00 min where he lists successful companies that grant even more time off than he takes.

One great example Sagmeister gives is El Bulli, widely considered the best restaurant in the world. Head chef Ferran Adrià only allows it to be open for 7 months a year. He spends the remaining 5 months pursuing “culinary experiments.” The time off hasn’t hurt business. El Bulli can only accommodate 8,000 reservations, but often gets requests over 1 million.

From my experience, one of the most valuable things about travel is that it allows you to see and compare.  From making comparisons between people, places, and things, you’ll develop your own opinions.  And from those opinions you’ll have more things to say, whether in writing, photography, filmmaking, music or whatever media you work in.  You’ll be able to inject more meaning into what you create, in addition to high technical execution.

Have your travels inspired you to create art? What places gave you new eyes? Please share your stories in the comments.