Vision
How I see, work and lead.
How I see
What makes the work good?
My internal bar, not a formula. Most projects can't max out every axis, and pretending otherwise is how work gets bland.
- Idea
- Is there something worth communicating?
- Relevance
- Does it matter to the audience?
- Clarity
- Can people understand it?
- Distinctiveness
- Could this belong to anyone else?
- Craft
- Is it beautifully and intentionally made?
- Impact
- Does it actually accomplish what it needed to?
Creative process
Start with the question.
- 01
Question
Don't rush to solve the first version of the problem. Ask better questions until the real one shows up.
- 02
Connect
Strategy, culture, audience, brand, people, technology and visual language. Ideas live in the overlap.
- 03
Clarify
Turn complexity and ambiguity into something clear. Clarity is a creative act, not a cleanup task.
- 04
Create
Thinking eventually has to become something tangible. An idea needs form before anyone can judge it.
- 05
Refine
Good creative isn't finished when the idea works. Craft matters. Details matter.
Seven questions I start with.
Practical, not academic. Most bad design decisions are unasked questions.
- 01What is the problem?
- 02Who are we solving for?
- 03What are we assuming?
- 04What could be simpler?
- 05What needs to be felt rather than explained?
- 06What should remain flexible?
- 07What absolutely cannot be compromised?
A loop, not a line.
Creative work rarely moves perfectly from left to right. You go back, sideways and sometimes all the way to the start. The goal isn't to follow the steps in order. It's to know what the work needs next.
SOAR+
A way to pressure-test the thinking.
Five prompts I come back to when the path isn't obvious.
AI creative practice
The tools are changing. The responsibility isn't.
AI is a creative tool. It helps me explore and communicate. It doesn't decide what's good. Judgment, taste, empathy, curiosity and accountability are still the job.
- Research
- Strategy
- Concepting
- Planning
- Visualization
- Creative ops
More space for creativity
I'm not interested in using AI to replace creative thinking. I use it to make more room for it: the twelfth version of a deck, the sorting of references, the first pass at a matrix nobody wants to build by hand.
The taste moves upstream
Less time producing every asset. More time deciding which problem is worth solving, what the system needs to allow and where the work must not compromise.
Craft still matters
When everyone can produce something passable quickly, the difference is the decision-making: the crop, the type size, the restraint, the thing you removed.
Fix the structure, free the content
Define the small number of things that must never change, then design deliberate space for invention. Efficiency is a creative problem. If designers don't shape it, someone else will.
How I lead
Ask the uncomfortable questions.
Question
Create room for people to challenge the thinking and the brief, including mine, not just react to the execution.
Trust
Give people enough ownership to make the work better. The best idea doesn't have to come from the most senior person in the room.
Clarity
Give enough direction for people to move confidently without solving everything for them.
Collaborate
Bring copy, strategy, design, production and partners into the thinking early.
Push
Protect the quality of the work when the timeline argues otherwise, and know when to let someone else make it better.
Brand approach
How I think about brands
A brand is not a collection of rules. It's a system for making decisions.
- Meaning
- What the brand is actually for.
- Positioning
- Where it stands, and against what.
- Personality
- How it behaves when nobody is checking the guidelines.
- Visual language
- Type, colour, image, layout, motion. The decisions that repeat.
- Flexibility
- Room to respond to culture, season, market and medium.
- Evolution
- Systems should be able to grow without a rescue mission.