Multimedia Journal is trouble for anyone with no spare time. Idle hands are Richard Koci Hernandez‘s playground, and he has put together a fascinating book that pushes you to channel your creativity and exercise your imagination. Hernandez’s main grind is deputy-director of multimedia and photography at the San Jose Mercury News, which largely due his efforts is a seriously progressive publication as far as newspapers go.
As any book about getting creative should be, Multimedia Journal is more of a resource you check back on than a traditional dust collector. It is based largely around the premise that you have to suck at something before you get good, and you might as well start sucking at the right stuff as often as possible and have a lot of fun while you’re at it. Which is a solid hypothesis if I’ve ever heard one.
Creative success through repeated failure is the manifesto, and the book is overflowing with cool ideas to get you started, as well as a resource list so long he put it on the website because somebody was liable to hurt themselves trying to write it all down.
The only aspect of the book that disappointed me was that it was marketed and written mainly for journalists, and even more specifically photojournalists. While this isn’t a problem when it comes to understanding the book itself, it limits a lot of people from picking up the book without some encouragement. I have no idea why you would publish this really awesome book about getting creative (something anyone can enjoy) and then state very plainly that, “This book is for Multimedia Journalists.” How many multimedia journalists do you know? That’s what I thought.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in having fun. It’s an easy read (I burned through it on the bus to school today.) and will make you a better person. What more do you want?
You can download a PDF of the first 15 pages on the book’s site, but if any of you are really interested, I will have a full PDF shortly. I encourage you to buy the book if you have the cheddar, because if I published something and some punk posted it on the Internets for free I would show him the back of my hand but I know that in real life isn’t always like that.
