About a month ago I spoke at MARCON in Oklahoma City. It's a conference built for marketers, but it's absolutely just as much a home for creatives. Everyone in the room was testing, experimenting, figuring it out in real time: How do we actually make work that matters?
I stuck around for Lola Bakare's fantastic keynote, which included the following quote (originally from Stephanie McCarty):
"We love to blame budget. We love to blame tools. It's almost never either. Marketing has always been about courage. The courage to do something different. To do something your category hasn't seen before. To be misunderstood for a minute. To take a swing when the safer option is sitting right there. That's the variable."
Abso-freakin'-lutely. It's so easy for brands to fade and be forgotten because they default to the safe ideas: the one that gets approved faster, the one that looks like what's already out there.
The constraint is courage. Because you could spend a million dollars on a campaign that falls flat. You could have all the tools at your disposal and still end up with a lukewarm idea. What actually separates the work that resonates from the work that disappears is the willingness to take a stance. To risk being a little early, a little misunderstood, or a little uncomfortable in service of something truly transformative.
Something to carry into this week: What would the braver version of your idea look like?
Natalie Kent, Creative Director
LINK ROUNDUP
1. Brands Are Built on Trust, Not Prompts
"As our industry has long said, 'a brand is more than a logo.' Done properly, branding is a process of building trust, taking risks, and encouraging accountability - processes AI cannot automate, that humans should be paying more attention to than ever."
2. Fruit Stickers
Fruit stickers? Fruit stickers.
3. Xerox As Medium
Graphic designer Eloise Aitken's work utilizes "cutting, pasting, scanning, reprinting and having complete agency over all corners of the page."
4. Lettering Legend Dan Forster
Dan Forster's calligrapher father Tony told him, "'You'll never learn anything about the shape, proportions or beauty of letterforms by just pressing a key on a keyboard.'"
CREATIVE SPOTLIGHT
The Peculiar Manicule is a lovingly curated collection of psychedelic graphic design from the '60s and '70s. The Hallmark and American Greetings collections are particularly interesting as examples of mainstream embracing counterculture. For "comix" fans, there's a few by a young R. Crumb. Source: The Peculiar Manicule
