"All artists are basically very insecure.  It's all about making sure that, by the end of the day, they feel they've accomplished something.  You're making something out of nothing.  The process really helps you get over that intimidation."
Heather Kim, Troika Design Group

The blank slate is stuff of nightmares and day sweats for the human asked to make something out of nothing.

Designer/animator Heather Kim has a plan when intimidation plagues her work.  It's called process. That, and working in a rich environment where high stakes projects (network TV branding), digital technology and collaboration are the norm.

"I was contemptuous of 'facts' for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing."
Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

I don't suffer facts gladly either.  I get the impression my mind toys with me, daring me to live by facts alone.  I do usher a great deal of information across my threshold - and usher the bulk of it right back out the galley way, as I call to the skittering factoids, 'I'll google you next week, we'll do lunch!'

I really don't want poems and constitutional amendments lounging around the living room when I have work to do.  They can be a little testy when I get their names mixed up and - arrogance?  Sheesh!  They're insufferable bores that way.  Wiki this.  Pedia that -- what a bunch of eggheads.