What is that job called where you just think of fun ideas all day?

LOL. I think it’s called “the weekend” or your “vacation.” The “job” is what you do the other days of the week and the rest of the year.

Well, to be serious, inquiring about a possible career in “design” is pretty broad and kind of vague, my dear amino acid. What is it that you might want to design? Narrowing that down would help determine your trajectory, I think.

A lot of design (or any job really) can be busywork. Also, @lillycoyote is right…there’s a big difference between designing websites and designing sewer systems.

@lillycoyote yes, I suspected as much. I was thinking a career designing things that other people finish…lol

but seriously, marketing would be interesting. Isn’t that just working with good ideas?

Imagineer for Disney.

Twitter.

It’s called ‘the right job for you’. Doesn’t make any difference what it is. If you don’t wake up in the morning and think “I can’t wait to get to work!” then you’re in the wrong job.

What kind of design? Graphic design? Industrial design?

Dictator of some tinpot mad ass regime?

Day dreaming?

If you mean just think of ideas, and not actually create anything, I have heard there are places called “Think tanks” where people apparently get paid to sit around and talk about their ideas all day. There are also blogs where people write down their thoughts on various subjects and sometimes they get paid to do it.

Garrison Keillor makes a living just sitting around talking about life in a fictitious small town, and huge audiences pay to listen to him talk. Samuel Clemens used to do the same thing, and he also wrote down a lot of his ideas.

Creating designs can be very hard work. I used to design fantasy costumes.

I still design patterns for needlepoint gifts. After the idea appears in my head, I have to take the time to put it down on paper, or on the computer. A program to put stitches on a grid has already been designed, so that takes place of the old fashion marking them down by hand on graph paper.

@Ltryptophan LOL. A career in ”... designing things that other people finish” is not exactly narrowing things down. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are maybe worth a little more, but still, an idea is just an idea if it remains only in yours or someone else’s head. Ideas have to be realized or executed or materialized in some way or else they are all pretty much worthless, whether they are good ideas, bad ideas or mediocre ideas.

No one will pay you simply for ideas unless you have some history or track record of your ideas being materialized in some way and valuable to someone.

As @YARNLADY points out, even designing needlepoint patterns requires her to move them from her head out into the world and that takes work, the ability to communicate them somehow. She has to move them from her head onto the graph paper. Someone else could do the actually needlepoint work going forward from there but if she doesn’t do at least that much of the work it is just a nice idea, in her head.

And Garrison Keeler and Mark Twain have and had wonderful ideas but if they didn’t write them down or speak them in a way that people wanted to listen to them or read them we wouldn’t even know who they were. It’s the execution that counts, really, not the idea.

What do you want to design?

I don’t think a job exists where people have ‘fun’ all day long. Even in jobs where you are brainstorming and having fun much of the time, there would still be pressure to produce. Even if you work for Google (said to be the best company to work for in terms of fun environments) you still have to come up with ideas and produce whatever it is you are employed to produce.

In terms of design jobs, think about where both your skills and your passions lie. Are you good at drawing? Are you an ideas person? Are you better at designing things that move or buildings? What are you passionate about? What do you absolutely love doing? What activities lead to you losing time and forgetting about everything around you? Find the answers to some of these questions and that will help you to hone in on the right field for you. That’s how to get a ‘fun’ job. Find your passion and then find out how to get a job in that field. If you can find at least the ‘direction’ you want to travel in you can start to talk to people in that field about how they got into that work and what qualifications (formal and informal) they have.

Politician. Your ideas don’t have to work and cost is no object.

Boss.

Part of Garrison Keillor’s bibliography:

An author with more than 20 books to his credit and a syndicated weekly column, Keillor is also a highly sought after speaker and lecturer.

He is credited with reviving the virtually lost art of live radio entertainment in America; his weekly radio show, started in 1974, has more than 4 million listeners and is broadcast on 590 stations. Keillor and his characters leapt onto the big screen and an even wider global audience in Robert Altman’s 2006 film, A Prairie Home Companion.

He has edited Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, and he broadcasts The Writer’s Almanac every morning on the radio

These accomplishments do require some labor; the introductory essays alone in the “Good Poems” volumes are worth the price of admission and did not fall effortlessly from his pen.

Most people I know in the idea business have spent a lot of time researching the issues that interest them and practicing creating ideas and implementing them. If you are in the creative industry, there is all kinds of scutwork to be done, and most people spend a lot of time doing it before they get to a point where they are good enough people will pay them just to come up with ideas.

I get paid to come up with ideas. I’m a consultant. People ask for my help because I have spent a lot of time doing the work they want to do.

I have friends who create dance or music or movies, and they all work really damn hard to come up with ideas. The idea don’t just come floating out of the air. They have to practice all the time and it is through practice that the ideas come.

My impression is that you don’t even know what you are interested in. If you don’t know what you are interested in, you can’t be practicing it. If you aren’t practicing it, they you certainly aren’t developing any good new ideas.

So don’t worry about the work. Worry about what interests you. Just do what interests you, whether you get paid or not. Do it and do it and do it and do it. Somewhere along the line, if you do what you love, you find yourself getting paid to come up with fun ideas.

Writer.
Sibling.
Parent.
Inventor.
Etc…

I call it brainstorming. Advertising gets to do this too.

Teaching younger children, camp counselor, working with elderly people. You actually have the possibility to be creative in many jobs. It may take creativity to figure out where it would fit into the job you have. I don’t think I’ve had a job that didn’t require some creativity (And I’ve had a lot of jobs, paid and volunteer. )

Good for you for identifying one of your Strengths: Ideation.

Ideation:

You are fascinated by ideas. What is an idea? An idea is a concept, the best explanation of the most events. You are delighted when you discover beneath the complex surface an elegantly simple concept to explain why things are the way they are. An idea is a connection. Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection. An idea is a new perspective on familiar challenges. You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre. For all these reasons you derive a jolt of energy whenever a new idea occurs to you. Others may label you creative or original or conceptual or even smart. Perhaps you are all of these. Who can be sure? What you are sure of is that ideas are thrilling. And on most days this is enough. Source

The challenge comes from the fact that all ideas require follow-through in order to bring it to fruition. It often takes a fleet of people in order to do so. This takes additional skills in order to get the vision and thus motivation across to form a common goal.

What is it that you enjoy most? What really jazzes you when you do it? By answering these questions, we may be able to help point you in the direction that you desire.

Isn’t this the chief requirement for those working at ad agencies either print or media? These are the folks who produce all those memorable commercials which have become enduring classics and the stuff of water cooler discussions following the Super Bowl.

But they also have to carry all those ideas out in actuality. They dont get paid for just sitting around coming up with the ideas. They also have to implement them into a finished product.

@Buttonstc Nailed it. And the creative process is not a lot of fun more often than not. You can have any number of concurrent projects that have to be handled on deadlines. You have clients who impose all sorts of restrictions on what you can or cannot do and say. You have to have the right artist, typographer, film director, musical editor, etc who all bring their ideas to your priceless ideas. Plus, you have other ad agencies trying to get your business by doing presentations on the commercials/ads you make … for free.