Back to basics
Domino’s Turnaround builds up then destroys their pizza and brand
By now you have probably seen the new Domino’s Pizza campaign from Crispin Porter called The Pizza Turnaround where Domino’s monitored consumer comments about the brand on social media channels and according to this feedback they created new pizza recipes. Crispin did a great job with the TV spots and a slightly longer form documentary because it makes you want to give Dominos another chance. My wife who is a serious foodie even turned to me on the couch the other night after one of the spots aired and said ‘I always hated Dominos but after that I would give them another chance.’ The advertising did everything you could have asked of it because it changed people’s opinions and created an intent for them to act on it. Pop the champaign, make room on the trophy wall and tell the client to increase the advertising budget because we have a winner… or do we?
I went to the campaign site today to dig around a little more before I wrote this post about how successful the campaign has been when that feeling and my intent to actually try the new Domino’s came crashing down around me. On PizzaTurnaround.com you find the previously mentioned documentary, one news story and a Twitter feed that displays tweets with the tag #newpizza running down the right hand column. As you start to read down the column you quickly see that people’s love seemingly only extends to the campaign as I did not see one positive comment from anyone who actually tried the pizza. The first four found Tweets I read were “Tried the new Dominos pizza….. In my mind, collossal fail.”, “Meh it was ok…”, “im not feeling the new crust. i miss the old dominos.” and “not so great. Since when did “add more garlic/butter” = make things better?! Blech.”. That noise you hear is my intent to try the new product exiting stage left.
Using social media to give brand transparency to consumers can be a powerful tool but it has be used carefully and thought out to work correctly. In this case you are asking consumers to give your brand another chance and your advertising delivers that intent but it is a tenuous opportunity. From the time when you create that intent until the time when it gets paid off you can’t have any bumps in the road because the bond to the brand isn’t that strong yet. These Tweets are big bumps that are going to break that bond and kill the opportunity. I don’t know why this site didn’t take it’s cues from the video it was supposed to support and MAKE IT A TWO WAY DIALOG! Your video said you were listening to consumers and you were responding so why did that stop once the campaign launched? It makes the video feel like just an advertising stunt and that the brand really isn’t listening. You have a chance here to be transparent and let people post their thoughts BUT Domino’s has to be part of the conversation. They have to address these comments and not let them destroy what they are trying to build. It is the only way this is going to go from a quick fix to a real long term solution that will restore their business.
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Are you a creative manager or a leader?
Over the years I have come to embraced that fact that I am a process voyeur and I realized it happened because it is a skill I needed to developed to be successful over the course of my career. It first started when I went from designer to art director because that change requires you to be able to stand up and present your ideas to your clients and you become aware of presentation craft, the dynamics of team hierarchies and politics that create a need to tailor your presentation based on the audience and what they will respond to. I had to grow and refine those skills again when I moved into pitching new business because I had to have the ability to understand the dynamics of a new group quickly to find the best angles to sell ideas and win new business. That skill then transformed for the final time when I became a Creative Director and had to be able to understand the dynamics and motivations of my own studio so I could get the best work and the best out of my people. In the end it has given me the ability to read and analyze group dynamics, process work flows and individual behavioral cues to see how to tailor my process, communications and presentation style to get the best results. I wanted to talk about some general observations I see all the time within creative groups and companies that are worth the time to self analyze to see where you fall and if it is an area you should spend some time thinking about and working on.
I want to start with focusing on a big problem I have consistently found with the leadership style of senior creatives through my career – managers vs leaders. The best creative directors I have ever worked for had figured out a way to have the two characteristics combine but those instances were sadly very rare. I think that the ability to combine the two characteristics is especially important when you are leading a creative team because you are dealing with individuals who all create in different ways, get inspirited in different ways and who have different latent levels but all need to work together and produce a product that is in line with the creative directors vision.
Round the table we go…
Managers do just what the name implies and sadly not much more. Their leadership style consists managing the project load for the group and the individual deliverables that have been assigned to each person. They usually hold a weekly status meeting where the team slowly and painfully goes around the room reporting in on their progress of the previously mentioned workload and concludes with a quick rundown of the highlights from the latest company newsletter. This method maybe be great for employees who do repetitive and mindless tasks but anyone who is being asked to be creative it is a slow, uninspired death where you increasingly feel like your career is going no where.
If you are in charge of a group then being a manager has to be part of your tool kit but it has to balanced out with vision and leadership. Everyone says they want to be a leader and even talking like one is pretty easy but it is your philosophy, actions and follow through that will be the ultimate judge of if that is really the true or not.
Stand for something
Leaders have a vision for the way they want to run their studio, if they will focus on ideas or deliverables, the direction and focus of the work and how they are going to grow and evolve the people who work for you. They set the tone and have a plan for moving their people and their aspirations forward and not just manage their deliverables. But this means they have to take the hard road of doing things like having unpleasant conversations as they are trying to effect a change to actually standing up for their for beliefs and vision which may not be popular inside of the company. I think the willingness to stand up for yourself and your beliefs is found far, far too rarely because it is easier to just blend in, not make waves and accept mediocrity generated by diluted mass thinking. When you stand up for something you claim a position and no longer move hidden within the crowd and it lets the small minded managers and office politicians sit in the background and judge for your views, take shots at them and try to tear it down. It’s a hard road to travel and you often find yourselves traveling it with few if any companions.
It takes confidence to be able to go down that road especially since you have to create confidence in something other than what you got into this business to do. I got into this business to be a designer but the longer your creative career the farther you will find yourself from what you loved and got you here in the first place. I continue to move me farther and father away from being able to actually be a designer on a day to day basis and have had to add this tools to be a process voyeur and idea filter I spoke of before. Once I was placed in a leadership position it had to be done or else the growth of the development of my group would depend on the motivation of the individual creatives which meant it would be uneven, headed in the wrong direction or even non-existent.
The creative process by its very nature is personal and emotional and your leadership style should be no different. You are not going to find the secret to your leadership style in a book or anywhere in this blog because it has to come from you. You have to use your own experience to become an inspirational spark, a career mentor and guard against mediocrity. You have infuse your experience and vision but it will only happen if you really believe it and follow through with it every day. Be introspective with you own creative process to find the insights that let create great work and use them as a guide to be able to able to set a direction and tone for everyone else. It can be a hard first step to move away from the crowd and stand for something but it is the only way you will be able to create great work, keep people for more than 2 years and build a successful team. Any other thoughts or comments feel free to but them in the comments below.
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If a good interface is hidden and no sees it how does it make a difference?
I’m a car guy. I love to drive a great car and I love a great car design. The new Chevy Camero intrigued me in that ‘it’s a cool design but still won’t buy an American car’ kind of way and so I checked out the site. I was in the photo gallery and found one of those things about the site that is like the American car industry itself – a nice design idea badly merchandised and probably lost on most everyone. In this case you go to the photo gallery and the obvious move would be to go to the ‘view all photos’ tab at the bottom of the page that reveals the standard long line of tiny thumbnails that you can randomly click across to reveal the true content of the photo that looked like nothing but an amorphous blog in the thumbnail. After you select the previously mentioned amorphous blog the main photo changes along with two smaller photos on the right hand side. If you are paying attention you will realize that two smaller photos are actually the photos directly before and after the large photo on the left hand side. If you are really, really paying attention and curious to rollover those smaller photos you will find that they are also navigation that lets you move from photo to photo without the need for the standard interface at the bottom of the page. It’s a really nice elegant solution to this kind of content and surprisingly something I had never seen before. That being said my reaction to the good execution is quickly drowned by the anger generated from the realization that most people will never know it is there. If they just would have taken the time to develop the short term memory loss needed to see that what they have created is too much design and not enough usability. So all of your designers out there please take the time to look at your work with fresh eyes or show it to your mom, your dog or whoever you need to be able to see if your solution is as genius in the real world as you think it is in your head.
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Why is client-side creativity too often a self-defeating process?
I came across something really interesting this week that was near and dear to my heart for two reasons. It was a site called ‘Dear American Airlines‘ that was created by Dustin Curtis who wanted to show American Airlines what an updated design could look like for their brand. He didn’t take the subtle route with comments like “If I was running a company with the distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed–no ashamed–to have a Web site with a customer experience as terrible as the one you have now…Your Web site is abusive to your customers, it is limiting your revenue possibilities, and it is permanently destroying the brand and image of your company in the mind of every visitor.” Shortly after posting it Dustin received a response from a user experience architect who works on AA.com titled “ You’re right. You’re so very right. And yet…”. It goes into a long description of the reasoning behind why their corporate culture has blunted and paralyzed the design of the site to the point where the site and customer experience suffers greatly.
This problem, this brand and this trend are all very near and and dear to my heart because I worked on American Airlines’s advertising for 4 years and I spent all of that time begging to get my hands on their site. Those attempts were greeted with the list of excuses that are chronicled in the letter Dustin received. It’s a problem that I have seen too many times over the years with my clients and even in my current client side position. So why does it keep happening? What goes wrong inside the creative process of a corporate structure that creates this dysfunction?
Short term memory loss in the ivory tower
I think the first part of the problem is a matter of perspective and being able to look at a project with fresh eyes. When a team starts working on a project they forget that when it is released the site the customer experiences is completely blind to the logic, compromises and excuses that have been built up on the by the internal team over the course of the project. The consumer doesn’t know or care about why something was de-scoped to awkward solution or that you will fix it when you get around to version 2.0. You have to have the ability to develop short term memory loss and be able to see the work with fresh eyes or else those problems will be glossed over by the meaningless internal reasoning for why they it wasn’t right. You have to look at it from the customers point of view because that is the only true reality and that will determine the success or failure of the site.
I think this happens the most inside of a corporate structure because you live with the brands, their problems, their work and their excuses so you become desensitized to them. The symptoms of this are usually expressed as eye rolling and under the breath jokes in meetings when you try to propose solutions to fix long standing problems that are en-snared with internal politics and problems. It is a hard place to be in when you have to be the person who needs to stand up against the apathy and frustration that lives around these issues and try to effect change. You constantly have to work to keep a fresh view of what the outside world is seeing. The only advice I would have would to try and start with small problems that can really be solved to get momentum and then try to work up to the larger ones building on the smaller successes.
Better design doesn’t just come from better designers
I wrote the previous paragraph knowing full well that even if you develop the ability to rise above the internal excuse blindness you still have to overcome a massive problem. Let’s look at the problem by creating a comparison between a web site that is produced by an agency and one produced by an internal creative team. What is the difference in the process and structure between the two where you generally see more cutting edge and powerful solutions out of the agency than what you see out of internal creative teams? The divergence isn’t in the process of how the work is created but in how it gets feedback, gets approved and the hierarchy is has to travel through. At an agency the creatives are in a structure that puts them at the center of the universe and empowers them to be leaders and the voice in guiding the vision with supporting teams to help delivery of their vision. In a typical corporate hierarchy creatives aren’t the center of the universe and they have they aren’t empowered to be able to influence the final deliverable because their work has to go up a decentralized corporate approval system. This breaks the idea in to multiple directions by multiple stakeholders who dilutes it in to smaller and safer ideas a large group can take credit for and will satisfy the internal approval audience. This is a crime because the internal creative teams have the best view into the problems that need to be solved for the company and can bring solutions to market faster than those created by an external agency who aren’t as familiar with all the nuances.
If you ask any company they will always say how they want to be like Apple or BMW and produce these breakthrough ideas and designs but they don’t understand that better designs and ideas aren’t going to come from hiring better designers. They come from a fundamental structural shift where the people with the best ideas are given the most power and best ability to execute on their ideas without having to put them through a mouse trap like system that robs them of their power. Hopefully more and more people will come to understand this problem so more good ideas see the light of day.
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Creative is all about R-E-S-P-E-C-T
As of today I have been writing this blog for four years and I am not sure why I feel like this is more of a milestone than the previous three years but it caused me to go back and take a long look at what I have had to say over that span of time. There is a very clear focus in my writing on trying to analyze, detail and document what I think goes into making great ideas, great creative and great creative teams. In looking back at what I have written I did see that I have neglected what is probably the most important part of have great ideas, running a successful creative group and keeping great creative talent – respect.
Wikipedia defines it as esteem for, or a sense of the worth or excellence of, a person, a personal quality, ability, or a manifestation of a personal quality or ability. That is a great textbook definition but what does it really mean in real life? For me it means that if you work with me you not only say what you mean but then you follow through on it. It’s that action that is critical for me because lack of follow through, lack of inclusion or just flat out ignoring what I am trying to contribute shows me huge lack or respect to my work and my talent. I have gravitated towards that attitude because for me actions are clear and generally free of the bullshit , partial truth and spin that can color what people say.
When it comes to leading a group of creatives the problem is that respect is probably the most important thing you and your team need to have success but it also the hardest to control and develop. It is a multi-dimensional problem as it exists and is needed in several places throughout your process and an idea life cycle.
Respect thy fellow designer
I have written a lot about how I think that techniques like constant failure and even fighting can be used as essential parts of creating great ideas and running a successful creative group. The asterisk that should have appeared at the end of those statements is that those two techniques are only possible if the group has enough respect for each other that they are able to make those exercises work. If you don’t have that respect then those exercises won’t work because you don’t respect the talent of the designer next to you enough that you think they can come up with the right or better solution.
Leadership is more than a job title
During my career I have found that the two most common reasons why creative people change jobs are for money or because they feel like their talent or work is no longer respected. I have sadly seen a lot of designers who leave only for money rarely find success or long life in their new role. I think this is because they are usually blinded by that one dimension of the new position and aren’t taking the time to look at the whole picture to be sure it is the best fit for them. The issue of feeling like your work or contribution isn’t respected can come either as one big gesture here you see it quickly and clearly or it can come in a long series of small gestures that slowly add up over time but in either case it comes to the same end.
Even if you have the greatest idea…
Probably the biggest and most important area you have to have respect to be successful is with your clients. It isn’t hard to get a read on your client to know if it is going to be a relationship where they value your opinion or if they are going to just treat you like a commodity who needs to do what they say. I think this is the most important aspect of respect in the creative process because you could have he best idea in the world that would totally change your clients business but if they don’t respect and trust you enough to listen to it and then go through with it it won’t go anywhere.
So knowing where the problems come from only lets you know where to watch to see if you or your team is at risk but what should do to make sure you don’t have these problems? I try and do the following…
Talk and walk your talk
I have always believed that the biggest thing you have to to have people respect you is to always be honest people, tell them what you think and then actually do what you say. The biggest mistake I encountered time and time again in my career are boss’s who say what you want to hear and then they never follow through with it. As I said before people will judge you by your actions and showing them lack of respect can could be a small thing like a comment on a piece of creative all the way up to much larger things like no doing what you said when it comes to your career.
Respect yourself and your creativity
I think this goes hand in hand with that I had to say above because you have to respect yourself and your creativity enough to have the confidence to tell people the truth and to stick to what you say. If you don’t believe in yourself and your opinions then you tend to want to take the easy road and tell people what they want to hear. This is really the only part of all of this that you can have a real and immediate effect but your team can and will pick up on it and ti will effect all aspects of their confidence, focus and their willingness to go that extra mile for you.
I am sure this is a subject I will revisit in the coming months as I give it more thought and concentrate on other ways you can increase it in your creative group. If you have any good techniques feel free to post them in the comments.
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Creative leadership doesn’t comes from a job title
Anyone who has ever had to lead and inspire a group of creative people knows how challenging it can be. You have to lead but let them find their own solutions and creative process. You have to set the tone and style for the work but allow for individual creativity. This isn’t ever going to be book that will give you all the answers on how to do it. I get a lot of emails from people of all levels asking for advice or ideas on how to do it better as we all move down the road in our career and develop from a creative designer to a creative leader.
I break the problem down into how you manage the creatives who work for you on a day to day basis and creating the long term road map for the group.
The day-to-day creative director
I have found that creatives will come to me for two things on a day-to-day basis – hope and support. Hope because they they need to know that tomorrow is going to be better than today and they are going to be able to do better, cooler, bigger work in that future. I think that if we are really honest we would say that creatives are restless and insecure by our very nature so we need a sense of hope that this personal endeavor will be well received. Support so that they know their work is valued and you are just as passionate about it as they are and will fight to protect the countless hours they have spent creating this work that is very personal to them.
I say that knowing those are very big and general points so I break it down into things that are more executable like the next time I talk with one of them I am sure they walk away from me with:
1 – a plan of action for both of you which will give them hope that things will improve and the two of you will work to fix their problem, challenge, campaign, design, etc. It also sets goals and expectations so that hope will be fulfilled and not become and empty promise which will become more damaging.
2 – an understanding of what I am going to do about the problem because this tells them I understand and value the work they have done and tells them I am going to fight and protect them, their work and our group
From designer to creative director (or how I miss the days I was still a designer)
You get to the point when you decide to transition from a just a designer to a designer and manager and that you need to be able to focus on leadership, vision and hope more than your design ability. In a lot of ways it is a strange system that the higher you go in your career the further you get away from what you love and what brought you into the industry in the first place.
For leadership you need to lay out a clear path for your team and the company right away so they know what is expected of them and what they should expect from you. Vision to me has always been to be the one who is always pushing the team to go 10-20% beyond where they want to so the work gets better than it is now. Hope, so that they know tomorrow will be better than today, that their work will be better than it is today and for you all of that will add up to them staying with you for years.
Along with laying out your expectations for the group you also need to evaluate the talent you have to work with. Trust your gut and make any cuts you need to. The one thing I have learned from working for a lot of epic creative directors is that you always protect your best talent no matter what and let the rest fall where they will. It is never worth losing a truly talented art director because you didn’t fire a junior copywriter who is making their life hell.
These things are just the starting point but don’t be afraid to actually lead, set the tone and set expectations. Listen to your people so you know what they need, how they work and what you need to do to support it. You are asking them to creating something personal for you while working crazy hours so remember you owe them just as much as they give you.
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Maintaining creativity – Get to know your creative process
Your ability to understand your creative process, your ability to observe how you have ideas and then be able to recreate it is an absolutely essential and extremely overlooked part of our business. I never had a class in college that covered it and I never had a creative director who talked about it so I wanted to spend some time on it here.
I don’t think is talked about much because the creative process and it’s triggers are different for everyone. This is because the act of creation is extremely personal and the influences and triggers are unique to each person, their life experience and their interests. All of those different combinations are the foundation for why there can be infinite solutions to any given creative problem. I have found through my lectures and portfolio reviews that to many designers are trying to find one universal way of thinking that will bring them success and think this is the completely wrong way to approach the problem. In my experience it is the search for that homogeneity that weakens your work because you aren’t embracing what is unique about you and how you work. When you are able to figure out what the process is that brings you good ideas then you are able to do it more often and your ideas come faster and get better. Since it is different for everyone I thought I would lead by example and go over how I work and the things I do that help me come up with ideas. I will follow that up with an entry on some of the tricks I have found that may help you.
My process is pretty evenly split between outlining the rational elements that make up a creative strategy and collecting a wide variety of visual inspirations that I use to create a visual brief. It is a very distinct right brain / left brain way of working and I get the best results when I work up each side so I can soak my head in all aspects of the problem and then let them bleed into each other and capture all of the ideas and conceptual connects that I start to see. It generates a lot of partial and complete concepts but I capture all of them because I don’t know where they will take me or where I might find a connection. After I capture them all it is about editing them down and then starting the process over but now in a more refined and focused state. I do this over and over again because with each pass the concepts get tighter but at the same time it keeps me loose enough that I don’t close myself off to new or altered directions. I have found working this way helps me create the best product possible as I am sure that any concept or design meets the business goals and that the business goals marry with the visuals. This also keeps me open because I know that I don’t always get the big idea right off the bat and sometime I have to grind it out to get to the end product. It also makes sure that the big idea that came to me in a rush is really as good as I think it is.
Once I tuned into this process I started setting up my office to help make ideas happen. I take two different walls of my office and put a write board on one of them where I can write out the rationale elements like the business needs or creative strategy and then I hang metal strips on the other wall so I can put up visuals like my sketches, tear sheets, photos, comps etc. to help me tune in on the visual design. I found the the physical act of writing out the challenge and hanging the sketches forces me to really focus on each aspect and give it the attention it really needs. When I did it in a sketch book or read the creative brief I would skim not really paying attention because my mind was already wandering around on the problem. It was the addition of the physical act of getting up away from my computer that forced me to focus and that change made a huge difference in the quality and depth of my ideas.
This is just works for me and it may or may not work for you but the key take away is that you have to start watching yourself to see what creates that creative spark. It is also about giving yourself permission to make A LOT of mistakes and using those mistakes to see what you did that worked and what didn’t.
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Consumer design fears or why Tiger Woods doesn’t care if I pick up a golf club
There has been an interesting trend that I started to see at some of the conferences I attended this year and has grown into several email I have received from designers all over the world asking the same question. It all centers around companies like Apple and Adobe making entry level design software available to the masses and if it will hurt our business or how we are viewed as professional designers.
I wanted to go on the record with an answer that I will admit is not my own but honestly I couldn’t say it any better. This discussion came up with one of my old creative directors who looked at us and said “Do you think Tiger Woods gives shit if I go and pick up a golf club? Do you think he is losing any sleep over me hacking away out there every other weekend?”. Looking at this example I don’t have the ego or the portfolio to begin to say that I am Tiger Woods but the sentiment is dead on.
First, if you are a professional and you do this everyday then you better crush some guy doing design nights and weekends or you shouldn’t be doing this for a living. Just because people can get the same tools as you doesn’t mean they know how to use it the same way. Look at sports where we wouldn’t think we could perform at the same level of a pro athlete but we can all go to a sporting goods store and buy a baseball bat or golf club. It’s how you use it that makes all the difference.
Second, if you have a client that thinks that your web design experience is the same as the site his wife created for their son’s little team then you need to run away – now. Just because there are clients out there who don’t see the value in good design and thinking doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You need to be able to know when to walk away from situations that aren’t going to let you do good work so that what you create is unique and has value and doesn’t just become a commodity. From my experience that work that would be created for a client like that isn’t going to be anything you are going to be proud of so just save yourself the headaches and arguments.
So use the tools like a pro, leave the weekenders to have their fun and stop worrying.
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CRM should mean Consumer Relationship Mediocrity
For the majority of companies they seem to think that CRM (Consumer Relationship Marketing and/or Management) equals email. When a generic piece of communication from a company that is put in with more valuable and relevant content in my U.S. mail box I call it junk mail but when it comes as email I am suddenly going to give it more value?
So I did an experiment to see if my perception of this problem was what is really going on in the real world. For the past month, every time a company that I did not interact with on a regular basis asked for my information, input, feedback or opinion in any medium I gave it to them to see what they would do with it. I even created a new Yahoo! email account and only gave that address in my responses so I was sure anything I received wouldn’t get lost in my personal email account or trapped in my spam filter. The results were that I engaged with 62 different brands that ran the gamut from high-end luxury to local mom and pop stores I got templated emails from 21 brands, generic printed mail from 10 brands (6 of them also sent me email), and 0 meaningful messages or interactions.
That is appalling. Somewhere along the way we decided that we would rather have the convenience of technology that can send our mass anonymous emails over a real relationship and understanding of our customers. You have a person who is raising their hand and saying they want to at a minimum interact with your brand and at best build a relationship with you. We reward this investment by telling them they just another number in a database.
To companies I say that you consider spending less time worrying about re-branding and re-positioning your re-done logo in your re-done color palette you re-launched last year and more time understanding how to build a relationship with your customers. To agencies I say we take a step back and understand that ad campaigns are just part of an overall communication plan that builds a relationship with customers.
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Conference Coma (We are all smarter than we think)
The end of last year I attended the Future of Web Design conference here in New York City. The opening speaker was Joshua Davis and anyone who has ever seen him speak knows that his presentation style usually appears to be a battle between a mild jet lag induced dementia and a the greatest Red Bull rush you will ever see. It was a good start to the day as I enjoy his personal style as well as his work. As the day ended I realized that I had spent more time surfing my iPhone than learning anything new about the future of web design and it wasn’t the first time I had felt that way after leaving a conference. That realization has been rolling around in the back of the head and I found myself mentally reviewing these types of events in my head and the conclusion I came to made me laugh. Maybe I am smarter than I think. Maybe we are all smarter than we think and we don’t gibe ourselves enough credit for it. What is driving us to goto these events and think that sitting in a room with a few hundred people will cause inspiration to strike?
For me, and I think for a lot of us, since I am asked to take a blank canvas and create something it’s a very personal undertaking and when it is finished you want to find recognition and validation for that work. I think it’s why we go to these conferences because we want to know that what we are doing is as good as the designers who someone has deemed as “the best” and we look for similarities between their work and ours. The problem comes because recognition and validation are emotions that face to the past and work we have already done and we must face and shape the future with new ideas to be successful.
Try this. Think of the artists who’s work you love the most. Do you think they got the inspiration or idea for that work sitting in a conference listen to someone else or working in their studio? Keep it in mind next time you get the urge to validate the past and not work on the future.
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