Unlocking maximum productivity within creative teams is about a combination of clarity of vision, perfect communication and preparedness. Let’s delve deeper into each aspect to harness their transformative power.
Clarity of vision
It is very easy to fall prey on the fact that you feel you have a clear vision, and are communicating it to your team perfectly but trust me, the opposite is the case, or at least you should always assume that. If you actually manage to put yourself in the place of your direct reports, producers and clients, I bet each person has a different understanding of what you have in your mind — and probably you don’t have it as clear as you think you do.
At the core of productivity lies a crystal-clear vision. This means having an end in mind downloaded from your brain to “paper”. Make sure your references are on point and not confusing and for that Midjourney is an excellent tool. Sometimes looking for references and crafting beautiful moodboards can confuse your team.
Have a hero image that your team can follow and you will make sure that you are not improvising feedback or focusing on the small details that do not make an impact on the final work. Think of it as the compass guiding your team’s journey, it prevents distractions and ensures alignment among team members.
A good hero frame that defines — Mood, atmosphere, setting, design & composition, hero object and environment.
Perfect Communication
Communication isn’t just about talking; it’s about transmitting ideas precisely.
Flawless communication means setting explicit expectations and fostering an environment where ideas flow freely. Miscommunication can derail projects, wasting valuable time.
This means that you have to communicate and get into an arrangement with your team of what you want and the decisions that you make. Bad communication leads to misinterpretations that makes the work go into wrong directions costing time to steer back.
Ensure that every team member understands their role, the broader vision, and the decisions made. Regular check-ins and adaptable communication styles cater to individual team dynamics, fostering clarity and cohesion.
In a best case scenario, you train your team to be able to make their own decisions that fit your vision and your studio’s culture.
Preparedness
Preparation is the secret sauce. Take your time and don’t rush things. Having even 20 minutes to prepare to communicate your vision to your team can make a huge difference.
Anticipate questions and foresee roadblocks, arming yourself with solutions in advance.
Mental scenario planning ensures you’re ready for any curveballs thrown your way. This preparation allows for smoother interactions and immediate problem-solving.
These things are really powerful, they might sound like superficial prescriptions but nailing them all together do make a difference. In embracing the power of clarity, communication, and preparedness, you’re not just enhancing productivity within your creative team; you’re fostering an environment where speed and efficiency can really unlock incredible results, giving you extra time to focus on making the final product better, and iterate more.
In this post I will show you how you can increase your productivity 10x and get to better results faster in any creative discipline. We'll uncover the essence of perseverance and the iterative process in the realm of design and creative problem-solving.
We are all grownups here: We know the secret to success in the creative industry does not rely on the genius, or the talented, or even the...well genius. The secret is really that the ones that want to solve the design problem the most, and by want, I mean, REALLY want the thing, they will solve it. At any cost.
The Importance of Persistence in Design
When facing a creative problem, the designer that manages to create more value per output, is the one that will get closer to success. Design is a process of discovery, you will start doing something, and it will not match what you have in your head, so you need to iterate over and over until you start discovering that little seed, that little thread that you need to pull until you figure out what that thread is.
It is in the repetition, in the exploration and in the discovery that you will find what tool, technique or driving force actually starts to multiply the output. That is for example, the essence of style.
The Significance of Style
Style is a set of choices and decisions that are repeated over and over forming a pattern that is recognizable and over time, it starts to mature its coherence.
The Dual Approach to Problem-Solving
The formula is on one side understanding the problem and on the other side trying to brute force a solution, eventually you will manage to marry both. The more experienced a designer you are -more library, more tools, more skills- the faster you will transform overclocking your brain and trying to bash through a problem, but everything starts on those two energy demanding edges.
Application of Principles Across Creative Disciplines
Here is the thing, that principle can be applied from developing a custom set of brushes, to drawing circles in order to learn how to draw basic shapes and also if you want to learn anatomy in order to complement the foundations, and you manage to repeat this every day until it becomes second nature, then you will start finding solutions faster.
This happens also when you are trying to solve hyper complex design problems, in real time for example, working on a landscape or an environment, you need to understand your foliage brushes, distances, landscape design, scale, composition, etc. Then in order to get to a perfect frame, you need to go through hundreds of iterations.
In concept art, usually before starting drawing, people do thumbnails, and they do sheets of dozens of them until they find that seed of what they are looking for.
Same applies to character design, character designers go through many iterations until they find the right curves, the right colors, the right expressions, etc.
With photography its the same thing.
The Art of Discarding
Bear with me with this one... In philosophy, via negativa is used to explore the nature of existence and reality. It emphasizes the limitations of human language and understanding when it comes to describing complex or abstract concepts. By focusing on what something lacks or what it is not, philosophers aim to clarify the boundaries of what can be known or defined.
We judge design, by what its not, and so, we try to define what it is, since designing is bringing something useful into this world (serving a commercial purpose then digital design has intrinsic value), we poke, challenge and stress test design and see where it fails.
Some designers value their work too much. They believe that their output is something that comes from the gods, and treat their work. But its the other way around, you can create divine work only if your decisions translate to an end result that solves the design problem.
Therefore, like evolution, the strongest designs, meaning the ones that are judged by stakeholders, will eventually be challenged, morphed and adapted to fit that particular need that the design is trying to fulfill.
Therefore, you have to get used to discarding your work, to try millions of iterations until you learn something, until you find something that is useful not to satisfy your ego, but to solve the business problem and provide value.
The Path to Infinite Productivity
You cannot brute force your way without an intellectual understanding of a problem, but the secret, in the end is not too complicated. Start. That is 50% of the battle, then keep going, repeat, try something else, repeat again, gain confidence and speed, iterate as much as you can and have as many options as possible, have a backup plan and be a master of your craft. Be open to examine your work, as if you were an ice cold judge, poke holes and challenge it, be brutally honest with yourself and make sure that the only thing you are mostly aware of is your own ignorance. If you ruthlessly apply this principle to every single stage of the process, no matter how small, it will mathematically push you forward in your discipline.
I don't think I can write something truly original today, I'm tired. And I have to admit that, sometimes I use chat gpt to get rid of nuances, but I obviously hate the final output, I tweak it a little bit and try to make whatever corny text I got back, to make it more human. More myself. Soon enough, the nuances will be picked up by the LLM and get my writing pattern. I will just have to say dumb things to the voice recognition software, and then process it and get some decent text out of it.
Now, back to the header topic. Originality comes from many different places. You have thousands of theories, articles, and pop books about how everything is recycled, or you have to copy the masters, and eventually you will come up with an original stlye. That is not incorrect.
But what truly makes something original. Particularly in this day and age where, digital, a medium made for ease of replication seems to allow for very little originality in the creative output. The NFT promise enabled a generation of artists to find a sense of originality in their post, but, what became more popular is not the original visual style -think punks, and apes. There's literally a million of other projects out there with more original content, stories, and visuals than those project.
I am of the belief that true art, is just an expression. A mixture of mastery (or luck) in a certain domain that manages to bring something new to this world. Art does not reflect but expresses truth. Right? There's no more absolute definition.
But originality can be found in many places, design, physics, mathematics, sports.
What makes something unique? Is it a stamp? A marketing campaign?
The important here is the differentiating factor. Something original is a mixture of something that has a new way of expressing something, and idea, a picture, a car. But not necessarily, expressing something truthful to this world.
It is as if, we need to process, process and process a lot of information, chew it, replicate it, find a way to express it, copy what is out there, and slowly by boredom or intellect, we decide to create something that is not quite. Something different to what is out there. With a twist, perhaps.
Why do Apple products obsess me so much? The iPhone is the first and only smartwatch, everthing else is just a copy. Does that make it a piece of art?
Then how do you create something original after that. Its closest competitors either copy them, or focus on a completely different type. But the experience and of the iPhone (and almost entirely of its ecosystem) is unique.
Crafting Originals
How do you craft originals? In storytelling, for example, we revisit always the same patterns. The hero's journey, rise and fall, sky beams final battles.
Tech Edge
There's always an edge to be found in technology. Back to the iPhone example, the new tech that the product enabled, allowed for a new and original product. In tech, the NFTs, the apes are popular partially because they were piggybacking on a new tech, and an economic bull market. They found product market fit, almost by chance. If it was not going to be the apes, it was going to be some other similar project. But the guys at Yuga, figured out original ways to foster and develop their community and looked for new approaches to ownership and IP expansion.
Creating a new product - not so long ago- I was chatting with a girl in a small party, and she was telling me that she was working at a startup that was training an LLM to create a better Siri. It just struck me, why do you want to invest your time copying two existing products and make a worse version of whatever it is that Apple or ChatGTP can potentially already have in their roadmaps?
Cross Polination
There is always this belief that cross pollinating ideas or concepts is a formula for creating original content. Think Sharknado (Sharks + Tornados), Godzilla vs King Kong, Pocahontas + Blue Man Group (Avatar).
But on the other hand, you have Ridley Scott pitching Alien as 'Jaws in space'. What worked there, is not only the script and the noir take at sci-fi, but brining in a crazy person such as H.R. Giger to design the alien and the overall aesthetics.
Originality is that rare combination of factors and circumstances that give birth to something new.
Solo Originals
The best way to be original is being yourself to the absolute max. I speak mostly for designers and maybe some artists. And yes, its the cheesiest advice ever. I don't consider myself original, but I feel that the more library I build and the closer I am to new tech the more original my content is. And at the same time, the more hours and discipline I put on something, the more I get rid of the obvious. Some people get there faster, I just do not.
The best way to achieve originality is, actually, getting faster to getting rid of the obvious. Some people develop conscious processes for that, and sometimes those processes just randomly stop working.
The secret, is to keep going, be consistent. Go to the masters, copy, imitate, try to master the tools to express what is in your head, and always aim to be world class because you are competing with the world and the world needs more original content.
I love the metaverse. I would read of metaverse design in those consulting forecasts, or blog articles about "10 future jobs unleashed by the web3 craze" and thought it was all BS. Sure Beeple opened a whole new market for 3D artists, but the web3 craze in the art world, meant that a lot of the creative class could now imagine completely new sources of income, new jobs being generated. I had friends working at decentraland, and there were other very promising projects out there that were trying to combine blockchain technology and NFTs to be able to create these unique metaverse experiences.
Let's also not forget that we were just fading out some heavy lockdowns and a crazy amount of these companies got a lot of traction, because a lot of the marketing or tradeshow budgets had to be allocated for something and people were craving experience on one side, but also a little window of opportunity was developing.
A lot of blogs started raving about how 3D designers, architects and coders would create a whole new market for these virtual experiences that people would use, even create their own economies. I was reading The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson at the time and everything made sense: The future of work and money, the future of creative work and the new ways of experiencing the internet.
But the crypto markets started to collapse and the intoxication of all these new ideas started to fade off. But not at Journee –where I work– they were thriving.
Think Again
Metaverse Design is a completely new discipline. The new advances with Pixel Streaming technology and web interactions make it possible to showcase triple A gaming experiences directly in the browser, with e-commerce integrations, web layers and cms backends that make it extremely easy to create custom virtual experiences with very little technological knowledge.
This took me a lot of time to understand and it is a strong shift in the way that I've approached my work. We are not building video games, we are not building full scale CG projects. We are building unique custom experiences in a video game engine, we are also trying all the latest AI tools to include in our pipeline, even if they are clumsy, we get excited because we know 6 months from now they will be doing things we cannot even believe. Midjourney a great, obvious example that has evolved exponentially during 2023, and has become the best tool to enhance the art director's role within the company.
What is this new discipline?
The process of building metaverse experiences is fairly new. We are somehow in uncharted territories.
On the first hand, you have experiences like Decentraland, or Sandbox that are open world platforms where you can customize your avatar, purchase virtual land, etc. These experiences are locked to their unique visual styles and ecosystems. There is a certain degree of flexibility but the world is essentially locked as it it.
What we create at Journee are custom virtual experiences that are enterprise ready to be deployed for brand and artists around the world. I know it sounds like a boring sales pitch, but I can't contain my excitement to the work that we are doing, it is truly groundbreaking.
This discipline is a mixture of high-end 3D design, combined with video game design, combined with strategy, e-commerce, interaction design, cinematics and storytelling.
Metaverse Design
A shot from Mstyle Lab for Macy's created at Journee.
Let's call it the discipline of Metaverse Design. As always, it all starts first with an idea, a story that we want to tell, some client's objectives that need to justify the investment. As any part of the creative process the idea is the leitmotif for what should happen through the whole experience. A bit of dramaturgy, theatrics and attraction design needs to be complemented and married with the latest and most accurate visual aesthetics that one can find around.
Being able to construct everything possible, metaverse design usually demands that our worlds are always in a sense surreal, extraordinary.
Furthermore, If your worlds are not convincing, then, the whole illusion falls apart and people very easily close the window-tab, and all those months of effort die after 30 seconds.
The biggest challenge is to get your aesthetics right. This is what the users buy in probably the first microseconds of entering the worlds. Designing real time graphics means we can move really fast, but at the same time we need to design in 360 degrees. That means that our decisions and designs need to work from all possible angles, plus adding the fact that we need to transition from area to area and that needs thought too.
As a creative director, or as a designer not only you have to consider the visual look, you need to also think what set of logics and interactions your user will face.
Usually experiences are exploratory, micro-stories that help brands promote a new product launch. Other times the experiences can be educational, or even tailored for interactive commerce.
Therefore how the user interacts with the world requires a lot of thought processings.
User Experience Design
Let's add more complexity to the whole topic. We need to craft an experience that has to work on desktop, mobile, vertical and horizontal format. We need to make sure people from different ages are able to understand to navigate this new format. It's not like web design, where most people know what a hamburger menu is and thinks are pretty much thought through.
Being able to move around and interact with things require a lot of investment from the designer towards the user. It's a little pain tradeoff, to educate the audiences how to interact with the world, and it usually involves a first onboarding session done with a landing area and a micro-onboarding tutorial.
Consider also that these experiences can be crafted not only for young, gaming savvy audiences, but also, for middle aged executives. Usually the people that sign-off are top management and we can't afford that they don't fall in love within the first seconds of running around.
To ensure a user-friendly experience, we aim to minimize any potential difficulties. This means we steer clear of overly complex tasks or challenging puzzles that might overwhelm users. Instead, we focus on straightforward and easy-to-grasp micro gamified interactions, ensuring that the main points of each section are clear and easy to understand. Simple logics that help us make sure that the user leaves the interaction with the key takeaways from each area.
We also need to recognize that users employing web 2.0 style of media interactions typically spend more than the average time, between 3 to 7 minutes, exploring these type of metaverse experiences.
If they quickly lose interest, they are likely to disengage prematurely.
What is our goal? Ensuring that the user enjoys the experience while we simplify the intellectual effort required for each of these encounters, making the process easily navigable and incorporating an element of amusement, alongside stunning designs.
Typically, we commence with ambitious ideas, often complex in nature, but ultimately distill them into the most streamlined interactions for the experience.
Avatar design
Rey Loves Life - A virtual influencer project that I started and never took off.
Online expression has long revolved around presenting an idealized self, irrespective of the circumstances and as some sort of shield against the troubles of the outside world. The internet gave its anonymous users in weird IRC chat rooms, a place to explore social interactions, find love or even become someone they would never ever dared to become with a high degree of psychological safety.
In this realm, individuals can project their idealized selves, showcasing the embodiment of their aspirations.
Consequently, when fashioning avatars for our immersive metaverse experience, we regard avatar design as a pivotal touchpoint, treating it with utmost significance, and in some cases it becomes almost a parallel project on itself. There's artists that specialize only in avatar design, and I personally believe this will become a sub-discipline of this new frontier.
We always have to consider factors such as refraining from engaging in divisive discussions pertaining to gender, ethnicity, nationality, location, and age. What we strive to offer aligns with the demand for gender-neutral, enjoyable avatars, constantly seeking to defy conventions and introduce novel forms of self-expression within the metaverse, offering an extensive degree of customization.
Each aspect of the avatar undergoes thorough scrutiny, interpretation. Given the metaverse's unique nature, we often work with unexplored materials and unconventional combinations, leading to an extensive process of trial and error in designing features, material combinations, impossible fabrics or physics.
To help us facilitate this unique design process, we utilize a service known as "Really Player Me."–or RPM if you are in with the cool kids. This platform offers a system for grading and preserving one's digital identity online. Their concerted efforts to achieve cross-platform compatibility have been instrumental in establishing an interoperable metaverse experience, representing a significant milestone in the field.
Advantages and advantages of real time design
Our real-time design methodology allows us to work swiftly and efficiently, enabling the rapid development of complex and immersive environments. We can bring to life expansive landscapes, and cityscapes, all within remarkably short timeframes, all really exciting stuff!
As our clients and partners begin to comprehend the dynamic pace at which we navigate these projects, the creative iteration process takes center stage, undergoing countless transformations and refinements. This is not always great because you can get lost always trying to improve and improve things, and there is a time to freeze, and start putting everything together. This accelerated creative cycle fuels our passion for pushing the envelope of what's conceivable but it's a double edged sword.
One of the challenges we encounter is the harmonization of various elements into a finished product. We find ourselves occasionally prioritizing the pursuit of exquisite visual aesthetics without due consideration for the intricate web of interactions that sustains a truly engaging and user-friendly experience. This often leads us to grapple with the intricacies of balancing visual excellence with practical functionality, recognizing the fine line between artistic expression and usability constraints.
Optimizing and launching the project
Once we conclude the design and logic iterations, our focus shifts to optimizing these projects for online deployment. While pixel streaming technology offers great potential, the associated server costs pose a considerable challenge, particularly given the temporal nature of many of our projects.
Ensuring that our projects remain playable at sixty frames per second becomes imperative. Regardless of the visual allure, it's essential that our creations operate seamlessly on our servers, often demanding a trade-off between visual quality and performance.
This continual push for visual innovation occasionally overshadows considerations of practical functionality, prompting us to find a delicate balance between visual splendour and interactive efficiency. Our experiences with complex natural landscapes featuring abundant foliage or expansive urban environments highlight the cost of intricate detailing, necessitating careful optimization strategies.
Fortunately, the extensive expertise of video game designers and optimization artists comes to the forefront, guiding us through the process of balancing aesthetics with performance. While adhering to established best practices in 3D design and polycount management, we often find the creative process challenging these norms, resulting in striking visuals that warrant careful consideration and compromise.
The finished product as an immersive experience
As we near the completion of our experience, the culmination of our design, implementation, logic, user experience, optimization, and web integration processes, we finally hold in our hands the definitive metaverse build. This build not only encapsulates the experience but also serves as the end product.
This is an exhilarating phase, where the crafted experiences become unique platforms for users to engage with, offering insights into user preferences and behaviors while providing a delightful, interactive, and 360-degree brand immersion. The metaverse transforms the brand narrative, evolving it beyond mere advertising to an interactive storytelling experience with an unparalleled potential for user engagement and shared human–yes human experiences.
Forging new disciplines
Skytopia a huge metaverse experience designed for Shiseido.
Our journey into uncharted territories represents a pioneering effort, redefining the landscape of virtual experiences and forging new paradigms for future exploration. With the trust of forward-thinking brands willing to navigate the uncertainties of this new internet, we are not only shaping new best practices but also paving the way for a new discipline in itself.
This process spans a wide array of sub-disciplines, encapsulating design, branding, user interface, and virtual aesthetics.
These efforts extend beyond the creation of virtual worlds, encompassing the establishment of corporate identities within the metaverse.
It reflects the growing realization among brands of the necessity to embrace virtual experiences, recognizing the potential for fostering intimate, persistent brand ecosystems that enable interactive engagement, customizations, and transactions within a singular, brand-centric environment.
Anticipating the inevitable convergence between virtual and physical realms, we find ourselves contemplating the intricate details of foliage, the nuances of architectural design, and the harmonization of diverse brand presences within the metaverse. These endeavors not only shape the metaverse's visual aesthetics but also establish a new standard for interactive experiences, transcending the realm of novelty and emerging as a fully-fledged platform for meaningful, immersive interactions.
As technology advances and computational power becomes more accessible, the convergence of the physical and virtual worlds is no longer a distant vision but an impending reality. This paradigm shift positions the roles of metaverse designers, creative directors, and architects as integral components of a booming discipline, one that is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical realms, shaping the fabric of our future interactions and defining the landscape of our digital experiences.
Let's have a think about references and I will tell you why you scroll down pinterest when an idea itches your head and you can't truly nail it.
We usually have amazing ideas in our heads that we need to communicate to our peers, our clients.
We need to craft a vision about something that is in our heads, and because designers are designers because most of them can't really draw as good as they want to, we need different visual tools to express ideas.
Have you ever roamed the vast internet realm with a half-formed idea, feeling that it makes perfect sense in your mind, yet you lack the words or images to convey it effectively?
You want to create something new but all you see is recycled content. The images you see on the internet are processed versions of some old cohort of references that were trendy 6 months ago and a 3D designer just regurgitated 15 days ago on an NFT platform.
Even Midjourney, after some time of heavy use, starts to spit out similar shapes/textures over and over.
Now, what I really wanted to say with this blog post is - that usually - we scavenge the internet looking for that perfect reference that matches with that idea in our head for a very unique reason: we are looking for a reality check.
If the idea we have is great, it's already been done before, and it already exists in some shape or another.
It's a bit of a sanity check - having competition on something (in this case, an idea) means that you are not crazy, that it works.
That is why it's so easy to cross-polinate for insta originality... 80s vibe meets lo fi beats, superheroes but its a neo-noir, shark meets tornado.
Samurai meets Sci Fi
We scroll the internet, look at design and art books to make sure that our idea works, that there are pieces of it distributed in the zeitguised that we can put the pieces together into something that already resonates with the world. After all radically new things, usually need some time to get to the public imaginarium.
Then it relies on your creative capacity to put those things together and generate something original out of that. All art is recycled ideas from the past, we just live this eternal cultural collage that only moves forward.
The select few who bring forth novelty in this world are the true artists, serving as conduits for the art itself. What they receive is merely a whisper from the muses. The rest of us find ourselves tethered to the real world, attempting to make sense of it all.
Or the AI clickbait version: The Presentation Code: Cracking the Formula for Conquering Your Creative Demons
There is this thing in the creative industry, which is, there is always a point where you have to share your work with someone else for review...the presentation.
In the creative industry, the moment of presentation is akin to baring your soul before others for scrutiny and critique. It's a process that often induces trepidation, even for seasoned professionals. I've experienced the nerves & the sweat. However, I've also learned that these presentations, when approached with the right mindset, can be transformative, providing opportunities for growth and affirmation.
Presenting always involves exposing yourself, raw, naked in front of someone else to get ripped apart, your flaws will be shown in public, and every mistake that you did will surface. Depends on the audience, if its a peer that is more senior than you, there is a really big chance that your work will be challenged in a way or another.
This doesn't mean that the experience will or has to be traumatic, it might be intimidating in the beginning, if you are a more junior in your career, even though, I always dread some feedback sessions, I get nervous and sweat, feel insecure or get an instant imposter syndrome shock in my bloodstream.
A presentation with an empathic, benevolent partner, can give you honest and motivating feedback. It can give you confidence that you are working on the right path and maybe share with you a key or two that can unlock your career path. You never know. Sometimes, after a presentation you realise, that you've grown.
The more experienced that you are presenting, the more confidence you can project and the easier it might be for you to navigate your audience. But there are certain guidelines that can help you arrive to your appointment more prepared and reduce not only the level of stress, but of insecurity, dread and give you protection when you are facing a challenging counterparty.
First things first, you are a designer, not an artist. You solve problems. It's crucial to remember that every element you present must be justified. From the color palette to typographic choices, every design decision should have a purpose. A cohesive narrative that ties together the elements of your presentation can make all the difference. Anticipating potential weaknesses and having well-prepared counterpoints ready can fortify your presentation against potential challenges. If you are presenting a moodboard for example, you cannot have random images that don't make sense one next to the other. People will always, and I mean always, pick up your weakest spot within your performance and question you around it.
A well-prepared presentation not only encompasses the content but also the design and communication strategy. It's crucial to ensure that every detail is meticulously planned, allowing you to confidently navigate through your presentation. By being aware of your current position in the creative process and having a thorough understanding of your work, you can confidently present and respond to any challenges that come your way.
This also trickles down to the presentation design, the story beats, the way you prepare the editorial. How you communicate your ideas. The more solid and prepared you come - the more you know the upside downs of your work, the higher the rate of success. If someone challenges you, better to be over prepared, have stuff under your sleeve, that you can pull off to make a point.
If you have all your systems in place, all your content on point, and you are aware what stage in the process you find yourself, you can present and respond with confidence. Confidence in presenting is not just about displaying your work; it's about showcasing your journey and the expertise that underpins every creative choice you make.
I can't get enough with these clickbait titles. I want to perfect them so that you can get in and read my AMAZING content. In this post I will explain you how there is the rise of a new creative class that is meant to take over every aspect of society.
OK - Let's go down memory lane.... once upon a time, when the first iPhone was released in 2007, I remember being at University as assistant professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (FADU) and the head of staff just came back from Miami, and in between his rants about how it is a city without culture and how easy it is to just arrive there with some street art project of sorts and make it, he also came with a little 3.5-inch screen device called an iPhone.
As a nerd that he was, he was fascinated by it, and said to me something I will never forget.
"From now on, design problems are going to be logical problems, problems of interaction, not aesthetics."
He was insanely right. At the moment, websites and motion graphics were all the rage, and the term UI-UX designer did not even exist. My students were struggling printing slides from Photoshop and Illustrator, and I was hot-stuff just because I was doing 3D motion graphics using the cloner with Cinema 4D.
Mr. Jobs creating infinite and true prosperity to a whole new class of creatives.
As I developed my career in Europe, I started to see with time, more and more a couple of terms that became more and more popular. One was User Interface and User Experience designer. In the beginning I thought they were only fancy names for website designers.
How much has the web and mobile market exploded that designers started to become more and more part of the hierarchy of organizations big and small. Gathering importance as they started to solve bigger and more complex interaction problems. And because one could argue that form follows function, those that managed to enhance the UX via fantastic and delightful UI were growing stronger, becoming essential parts of these startups and corporations.
Nowadays, we have rising stars "Chief Design Officer" - "Chief Creative Officer". And those designers that managed to cross-pollinate creative problem solving with creating business value, from an agency and also within every aspect of the value chain, start to prove their value more and more.
A new term also that surfaced at that time was "Design Thinking" a problem solving methodology that was popularized by IDEO that came as a sort of productized framework to solve problems from product to service placing the user at the center of the problematic.
Problems, problems, problems...
Designers are problem solvers, and those that can properly articulate, propose and build solutions, will sooner or later will be transitioning more into higher leadership roles. Sooner or later designers will start replacing engineers and business executives as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and that will be the dawn of a new era for humanity: global warming will revert, wars will stop and the world will finally transform into a better place.
A 2019 McKinsey study found that companies with strong design capabilities outperform their peers on financial metrics by 32%. (Yes Mr. Consultants!) A 2020 study by the Design Management Institute found that design-led companies were more likely to report innovation success, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction. Finally a 2021 study by the Boston Consulting Group found that companies with CEOs who have a strong design background are more likely to outperform their peers on both financial and non-financial metrics. - some of these papers can only be accessed via subscription, we will have to trust Google Bard for its word.
Jony Ive, the former Chief Design Officer of Apple, is widely credited with helping to make Apple one of the most successful companies in the world.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, is a former designer who has instilled a design-centric culture at his company.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet (Google's parent company), is a former design engineer who has overseen the development of some of the most popular products and services in the world.
Johny Ive spent 4 years after leaving Apple perfecting this typeface: LoveFrom (more info)
These are just a few examples of designers who have achieved success in leadership roles. As the world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, the skills and mindset of designers are becoming increasingly valuable. As a result, it is likely that we will see more and more designers rising to the top of the corporate world in the years to come.
I don't know much about hip-hop culture, maybe just enough to understand some of the basic subtleties I can perceive with this masterpiece. Rising star white rapper, goes deeper and deeper into trends, fads, going through a physical transformation that eventually get him tired, out of energy while a crowd of young replacements swallows him while they show off and battle for being next in line. At the end a strong aggressive and angry fan base imposes themselves toward the camera.
In the middle of the crowd, Gessafelstein's dark figure stoically appears, as if always been there, his style, evolved but uncompromised, against all these other hip-hop trends that he himself has helped elevate, and fades into the dark, the image and the sound perfects descent.
This track doesn't feel like it was thought to be a hit, it doesn't sound like one, but the decision to make a video clip out of it definitely elevates its status and brings something unique into this world. Makes it play over and over in my mind in repeat. Makes me think, about how simple an audiovisual combination, world class music, and uncompromising style can craft such raw and exquisite darkness and turn it into art.
The videoclip is also a masterclass in editing. Matching perfectly to the music, those loop cuts, camera matches keep the spectator engaged, elevating the medium, because every time the camera moves, the frames change and the character has changed too, whilst the background stayed the same. There probably is a ton of VFX that we don't notice. Congrats, this work is timeless.
I really would have loved to see the pitch deck and witness the director Manu Cossu, previously directed also one of my ultimate videoclips also from Gessafelstein: Pursuit.
This is a basic how to guide to become a creative director. Besides the obvious clickbait title I will break down how you can become a creative director in no time, even starting as a dumb designer at the bottom of the food chain. This text tries to be less of a prescription and more of sharing some mental models.
Develop you own ideas.
Find a style that you can scale.
Present, present present.
Own the responsibility.
Aim to be world class.
Develop you own ideas.
As the titles suggest being a director, means directing projects, people, teams. You set the vision and you bring everyone together where to go. You can't do that dry, empty, or copying everyone else. Your position only generates value if your vision is unique and clear. Solve problems, bring new ideas to the table that you can execute and always be developing and nurturing your vision and ideas. Collect them, share them, mix & match, go to the past and bring into the future.
People will take you in for your unique way of seeing the world. Do you have great taste, can communicate ideas clearly and also be business savvy enough to deliver value to your clients even from the early days? Then you are on your way.
Find a style that you can scale.
Similar as before, your style, is the personality that you bring into the table. You like clean and minimalistic things? Let that be your forte. You want to make the world a better place? Then focus on the projects that you feel are the most meaningful. Strive to be unique and find that which separates your from your peers. I remember one of my first assignments at the university, I had to design an energy drink. And everyone of a class of 300 people where coming with skinned versions of Red Bull cans. I got the highest score because I brought a bottle, at the time - a radical idea. But I wanted to differentiate myself of everything that was out there in the competition and it worked. That small lesson made me focus on always trying to be different, finding a style that I can scale.
I try to work so that my style becomes - timeless. I hate looking at Pinterest and seeing that everyone is doing the same type of work over and over. There are shape languages, color palettes, ideas that might change, but work that considers the fundamentals of design, composition, light and storytelling -and obviously- your unique (justified) spin is guaranteed to be successful in the short and long term.
I don't feel one ever masters this, but being aware is definitely a differentiating factor.
Present, present present.
For many, many years, I was always the guy making presentations at design studios. I used to design them, prepare them, and eventually go to present them. This is a very underrated task, many people fear the spotlight. Looking back some of the presentations I had in the past to clients are nothing compared to the ones I get to do on a daily basis directly to global clients, where I get to joke and convince people that the work that's been done is what was asked for and delivers value to them.
Offer always to create the presentation deck early one your career, use it to get your foot in the door the big table, be part of that meeting, see how the masters present, learn from them. And to our previous point, see what they are not doing and where there is room for improvement, but also, see how other people react to the jokes, the pacing, the editorial, the story beats. The more you present the more you will get to be yourself at the top. Obviously - try to do more public speaking and a bit of theater doesn't hurt.
Own the responsibility.
Directing projects and teams, means that you will be looked as the vision holder, and you will make decisions, and sometimes you will mess up. You will make someone on the team unhappy, you will not consider production needs, or you will make that bad joke that someone go offended. Own it. Be able and be ready to defend all your work, designs and ideas at each granular level. If you are insecure, be honest about it, maybe take more time to become more confident. If you fear things will be delayed or are heading into the wrong direction, open up, let people know. Some designers, artists, are happy just being on the other side, waiting for direction, masters of execution, the risk is easy to mitigate, but if you give bad directions, you are responsible of the output, and also for their wellbeing of your team. If you are just getting started, own each aspect of your work, and your decisions and soon you will be the one making decisions for teams and projects.
Aim to be world class.
Can't state this strong enough. Like it or not, in the era of the internet, you are competing with the whole planet, so, aim to be world class. A world class designer, with storytelling aspirations to grow, should look at whoever is on top of you that you admire and, in the beginning try to figure out what they do, that you can apply to become better. So simple. Compare your work with the whole world. Challenge yourself and be honest, own the responsibility of being self aware of your strengths and weaknesses so that you can double down on fixing both. Do you need to be more curious? Are your ideas the best in the world? Compare yourself with the best, and endure the pain of competing against the world and yourself. If you manage to tolerate that pain, understanding that it's just making you a better creative, then there is no way to fail. You will only fail if you stop.
Just one more week, and this pitch/presentation/project/design would be perfect.
Of course I just asked the client for more time, and the only thing I can think about is to have one more week, heck, even just one more day and I could pull off more references and create more mockups, designs, sketches and finally get the idea that I have in my head and get it perfect.
Sure thing, one more day might get you to that point in your deadline where you theoretically want to be, but let me tell you a secret. It will not.
You know how you will feel one week from now if you got that extra week?
Exactly like how you feel today. Desperate…wishing you would have one more week to polish that little thing here, and change that detail nobody sees over there, and things that add absolutely no value to your presentation.
I would even bet that using the power of Pareto (aka the 80/20 principle), 80% of the genius of your presentation, comes from the last 20% of time left in your schedule. If you would have one more week, then you are basically forfeiting your chance to discover your great ideas.
In order to create a killer presentation, you need critical mass. So, even though you structure your presentation nicely, you need to review and edit your work in order to make it make sense. And that won’t happen until 2 or 3 days before your deadline.
Once you have everything in place, you will realize what is missing to make it look solid, therefore, you will have to rush to get things done, and that is when you start wishing you had just one more day/week/month/year.
Let’s say that your wish came true, and the deadline has been extended one more week. You will lose momentum. You will ‘let go’ that grip of focus that took you weeks of procrastination to master. I don’t believe in that week you will ever really, drastically improve your presentation in such a way that is worth extending the suffering for that one more week.
So embrace the suck, finish that presentation as good as you can and if you are lucky, and confident have it ready a couple of hours before deadline, so you can reward yourself with a little coffee and a clear head.
