Tea Infused Creativity
A Look Into the Teactionary
Creativity and silliness come in all shapes and sizes. They can also come with a nice cuppa tea. That’s why on Tuesdays we do Teactionary entries.
For years, I’ve been sharing posts where I do a small pivot from Visual Typos and create whimsical tea puns for fellow lovers of tea. The approach is simple, take any word with a “tea” sound somewhere in the word, replace it with tea, look up the original definition, have fun with it.
That’s it.
I either take pictures or look up some interesting stock pictures, design the layout, and share. Unlike Visual Typos, I don’t put a time limit on how long I have to develop the Teactionary entries although they rarely take too long. The idea again is to do something creative with limited resources and a clear direction: make it about tea.
In advertising, it’s so common for clients to want to say a dozen things about their product. Although it’s good to have many things to say about your product or service, it is also counterproductive when it comes to communication.
All you need to understand yshi is the tennis ball analogy.
Imagine that messages are tennis balls.
You identify the person who will receive the message/s.
You decide how many messages you want to send that person.
You send the messages.
If you send one or two messages, you have a better chance of those messages being received effectively and remembered than if you send five, ten, or twenty. Let’s say you’re dealing with someone who is a professional juggler or is just a wizard in catching tennis balls. They may catch ALL the messages, but how many will they remember and with how much detail will they remember them?
The Teactionary exists for very simple reasons. To share tea-infused puns and celebrate tea. If you see a post on my social media about a cuppa tea or read the word Teactionary, you’ll know what it’s about. Maybe you won’t care about it because you’re #teamCoffee. But if you love tea, you’ll know that it’s Tea for Tuesday.
Having worked on the Teactionary so long, the challenges have evolved. The most obvious one is to come up with new tea puns and definitions. But more than that, you start to look at your entries and realize which letters need a little more love and which letters already have plenty of entries.
It’s a different creative exercise than what I do other days, though it’s still a lot of fun for me, and it might be fun for you. So if you’re up for it, give it a go, and feel free to share your creative-tea.
Peace, love, maki rolls, and rich tea
- JD
