Not withering in the bud
It was a long time ago when I was at art school and my industry has changed enormously over the intervening years, but one thing I still feel strongly about is maintaining a creative spirit.
Throughout my career I have always appreciated the need to understand the commercial requirements of my work, but my unrelenting aim is always to find a visual dialogue which stretched the creative possibilities of any brief or project through thoughtful and meaningful creative exploration - where I begin isn’t always where I end up.
Many years ago I was told by a marketing director that one of my aims was, as the company’s creative director, to ensure my presentations were ‘right first time’. If one is presenting to a room filled with people, all of whom have their own department’s requirements to be fulfilled, it is unlikely that the first presentation is going to be ‘right first time’ on all counts. A more rewarding approach is for a mutually creative progression.
Work of course has to be right, but sometimes this requires a need to go through various stages of development. To crush the creative spirit so early on could very easily deny the possibility of a truly original idea. It isn’t that creatives should operate within a bubble-wrapped existences without an appreciation of market forces, competition or technological trends, but these forces can be a huge challenge to the explorative and instinctive creative spirit if the people working within those areas don’t value the work of designers and art directors.
In addition to working for clients a joy for me is being a lecturer in image making, creative direction and branding. It’s an honour to nurture a new generation of creatives at various stages of their education, but it’s also a terrific responsibility; not to crush their own creative spirit whilst at the same time getting them away from their screens and the worlds they already inhabit.
As a lecturer my aim is not to force my own creative style onto students, but to inspire them to look and think deeper and wider, to create meaningful and well thought through concepts, to take inspiration from the past as much as the present, and by doing so to begin the exciting development - over time - of their own creative language with every idea they have and every idea they reject and re-think. The important point is to be right in the end, rather then allowing a possibly brilliant idea to wither in the bud simply to be ‘right first time’ and by ignoring a creative spirit.