Creative Agency: You wouldn't understand, you're not "creative"

For an industry that literally trades on creativity (especially in this day and age), we’re really awful at explaining it. By design or disaster creativity is mystified, and as long as it is how can it be seriously valued?

We create ‘creative’ work, solve problems with ‘creativity’, some days the ‘creative’ juices don’t flow, other days it can’t stop and won’t stop. It’s something ‘creative’ types always understate and the only thing ‘non-creative’ types will talk about. So what is it? Can anyone have it? Can you? Yes.

Let us Attempt to Explain: Creative Agency.

We’ve worked on hundreds of clients, in hundreds of markets, making hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. Impressive, we know...

What’s always been true and is now kinda of undeniable is that the brands that thrive in their environments don’t need a “creative” agency to solve their problems. Rather they need “creative agency”.

Pls explain..

Creative agency is when an individual has the confidence and clarity to express their ideas all on their own. They are empowered to hold strong opinions loosely and be decisive. It can be hard to do that especially if you’re starting from scratch– there’s nothing scarier than a blank page, especially when you don’t have a pencil.

Every idea is an original one, and without the right tools very few of them see the light of day. That’s why we’re invested in creating tools that allow our ideas to be chosen, interpreted and shared such that they multiply in as many meaningful ways as possible, that’s memes for you! Does that mean they sometimes run out of our control? Does it mean that sometimes people do things with them that we wouldn’t? Yes, and that’s the point– so long as we have the materials that give our collaborators the clarity and confidence in what they’re doing, we’re good.

When clients come to us they might think that a ‘creative’ object is graphic design or Thespian shaped. While these are the things most commonly identified, they actually only represent a sliver of creative potential executed. Most often the most insightful, original and resonant ideas come from deep immersion and whose business is it to be more immersed in our clients business than our clients themselves? The challenge for us isn’t in jazzing up whatever they have to say for themselves, that’s easy. Instead we invest in building the instructive materials (tools) to operate brands, regardless of how good you are at using the magic-wand tool– ToolKits™ for creative agency.

Developers are creative (albeit pick-me) types too

As a developer, one type of "Creative Agency" that I do is all about anticipating what users expect when they interact with the things that I build. Sure, some things are obvious, like closing a window when you click the "X" button.

But I'm talking about the more subtle actions that users still expect, even if they aren't spelled out in a design.

For example, when a modal opens, we consider things like whether clicking on the darkened background behind it should close the modal, or whether we should lock the page to prevent accidental scrolling. We could also think about how we can add subtle animations or transitions to make the modal more engaging.

Another type of Creative Agency involves solving problems in the code itself. We constantly make decisions about how to structure and componentize code to strike the right balance between readability, maintainability, and scalability.

As design iteration happens and components evolve - the code also needs to evolve with it. But, making changes to an existing design in Figma is usually a little bit easier than refactoring code.

A few tweaks here and there to an existing design can take a few minutes in Figma, but a few hours to do in development. As a developer this is when we need to decide on the best implementation based on the time required verses the quality of the implementation, and is probably one of the tougher examples of Creative Agency.

Creativity thrives with constraints, guard rails, measures of success–

I don’t intend to sound self aggrandising, but something like our Toolkit is a great example of what a ‘Creative Agency’ is. It’s packed with things that help guide creativity and creative decision making.

We have the Typestyle guide so that you not only know what fonts to use, but how to use them too. The colour palette can be an inspiring resource when creating some branded assets. The user can reference the Art Direction and Design Examples page a lot to get the vibe of the brand. On top of that, one of the most exciting things about a ‘Creative Agency’ like the Toolkit, is that it has room for interpretation. We’ll do our best to communicate our thinking and research behind the brand, but we don’t usually have strict guidelines on how things should be set up.

That’s because we know that brands can, and should, keep changing. This means the user can take the information, interpret it in the way they understand the brand, and create something unique themselves.

Ever heard the phrase 'there's nothing original anymore'? That's horse shit.

We all have our own individual takes on any stimulus, by sharing an idea, we change it just through our own lens. By that definition everything created is original. A better way of putting it is nothing isn't original. And how exciting is that?

When this is embraced, when everyone accepts that they have the capacity to create– that they literally can't do anything else, the world will be full of richer, more exciting, diverse dialogues and ideas. And a powerful idea can change he world.