The One-Word Litmus Test for Hiring a Creative

Speaker A: I think you can tell a lot about the experience you're about to have with a professional creative based on a very simple test on how they use the word art. I want to talk about that today because it has a really big impact on what we're seeing today in professional creative services, brand strategy and brand architecture. My name is Dan. I own Brand Shepherd. We're in our, uh, 20th year of business. This is the Field Notes podcast. I hop on here every week for about 10 to 15 minutes, give you a unedited download on what I'm seeing in the world of brand building so that you can use it or just move on with your day. So the quick test to get a good sense on how your experience is about to go with a professional creative is simply in how they use the word art. And I would even simplify it more by saying if they use the word art at all, you're about to have a bad experience. Why do I say that? Well, I say that because of my. One of my design heroes. One of my heroes in my profession is a man named Walter Gropius. He helped found the Bauhaus back in the early 1900s. And he is, uh, he's the, he's the man who said a quote that I've committed to memory for over 30 years. And it goes like this. Art is self expression. Design is problem solving. I have carried that with me as a very quick test to determine what am I even doing, Am I doing art or am I doing design? And yet at the same time, I am in an industry where my peers, people who should know better, use the words art and design interchangeably. What I hate about that is that back in the earlier days, back in Walter Gropius's days, In the early 1900s, up until about the 1950s, art and design were very distinct, very distinct. The commercial art and the fine art worlds collided often. And there was robust debates about this across a bunch of different media and in person at schools and universities. And the commercial artists and the fine artists eventually, uh, were broken into different groups. And Gropius helped define those groups with Bauhaus, where he took the, uh, fine art of, uh, industrial design and other types of design and made it into design where they were solving problems, um, partly in response to the Industrial Revolution. But it has an impact today because now the debate is about generative AI and the creative services that are coming out of it. Whether it's written words, headlines and text for your website or your ad campaign, whether it's a strategy, whether it's it's images, videos that you're, you're prompting and using source imagery and, you know, making new stuff come to life with your old creative. Whatever the case may be, the debate is raging again on what is this we're looking at? How can we do this to art? Why is art under fire? And I cringe when I hear that because what I'm hearing is someone who doesn't understand the difference between art and design. They're looking at this and saying, well, why are they doing this to self expression? When instead they should be saying, okay, this is a new execution tool for problem solving because it's commercial, it's not self expression, it's not art. So when you have people who use the words art and design, um, interchangeably, or if they just use the word art for everything, you're setting yourself up for failure. Now I want to talk to the artists, and those who lead artists can listen in on this. In fact, I encourage you to. In his, uh, pivotal book, the Heart of the Artist by Rory Nolan, he has, uh, one section in there that I've committed to memory as well, in which he makes the case that artists or creatives are creative because we are hypersensitive by nature. In fact, it's what makes us creative, our hypersensitivity. You cannot be a creative without being hypersensitive. I have known people in my, in my career who hate working with artists and creatives and designers and writers and photographers and illustrators and on and on and on because they're so sensitive. I can't even tell them, like, give them criticism because, yeah, that's what makes them, that's what makes them great. Moron. That's what makes them great. Deal with it, accommodate it. It's, uh, they're, they're a, uh, they're a fine stallion that needs special care. Like, what are you talking about? You know, just as much as your engineer needs everything presented in ones and zeros, black and white, it works or doesn't work. Your creative needs to be spoken to and dealt with and worked with in a way that honors their hypersensitivity. Because it's that very thing, the hypersensitivity, that makes them creative. The reason why that matters in the conversation that I started with is because when you are hardwired to look at your art and say, oh my gosh, if you critique, if you use AI to do something with my logo, then it's slop. Okay, there's a lot of wrong statements there. You just said your logo. It's not Your logo, it's your brand, it's your client's logo. And even on that, you didn't create something that went to market. You accommodated preferences by the brand stakeholders and the owner, the brand manager, marketing manager, whatever. Like very, very rarely does a logo, for instance, or just anything, uh, anything that gets produced by creative services. It's very, very rare that that thing goes to market as is from the creative. It is always going to go through client review and revisions. And that's why in my industry I cannot take anyone seriously who says, oh, I hate this new logo, I hate that new logo, I hate this, I hate that. Because it's like, do you guys not know the process? Are you just not good at what you do? And you, you don't, you, you don't go through client reviews, you're, are you just not employed? Because if you were employed and you go through the process, you would know that there's client review revisions. And creatives never see their work that they created enter the market as is. It has to go through revisions in order, in order for the owner to feel like they own it. So this is where the, it all breaks down. Because the creatives who are very sensitive about AI, I respect their creativity and I respect their sensitivity, but it needs to be corrected and realigned to reality. And that reality is back to what Gropius said back in whatever 1913 when he said art is self expression. So a, uh, quick check. When you're creating that logo, that video, that photo, that headline, that web copy, are you expressing yourself? No. You're expressing the brand. You've been hired to wield your hypersensitivity in your creative services, to speak on behalf of a brand. You are not creating art, you are not an artist in that sense. Please wake up every morning, look in the mirror and tell yourself, I am about to go get paid to design, not create art. I swear, uh, to you, it will help you swallow what you need to do for the day and you'll feel, uh, you'll be a better creative because of it. Now on top of that, you still need an outlet for your creative. So you have to divide up what you do and you always have to have a creative outlet that you do not do for money, that does not get client interference, does not get outside input that could change or alter what you do. You have to have creative outlets that are just self expression. For me, that's music. For me, that's music. And up to now, um, I've enjoyed creative, uh, creating music with the input of fellow bandmates, fellow musicians, um, but no client feedback on, on music. When I'm creating music that for myself, I'm my biggest fan of my music and that's because it's my art. It is 100% self expression. It is not problem solving even remotely. But when I sit down to, to craft a brand strategy, a marketing plan plan, um, uh, you know, a website, whatever, uh, that's not art. When I, when I write the prompt to create an image for a brand that may or may not get fixed by a photographer or an image editor, um, that is not art. That is problem solving. I'm solving a problem to help them sell their stuff. It's not art. So as I said at the very beginning of this episode, I can tell if you're about to have a good or bad experience based on how the creative you've hired uses the word art. If they use the word art to describe everything they do, you're about to have a bad experience because they are going to. They haven't. They have not disciplined their, um, their hypersensitivity into something that solves problems. That's what I've spent my career doing. I'm so thankful to the, the people that educated me in college who drilled this in my head in the early mentors I had in my career, who drilled it in my head in the workplace that when I am hired to do a job in the world of creative services, I am not creating art at all. I'm a, uh, I'm a problem solver and that's what separates me. That's what separates me from my peers. I have lots of peers and I love them. But I look at us and I think, how in the world did I end up still being in this, this, this long and they're not in it anymore? Well, it's because they looked at what they do as art. I don't. That's why people like working with Brand shepherd, because I lead a team of people and I come to the table and I say, hey, here's what we think is the best possible solution to this challenge you've given us. Now what do you want to do? And what I tell people point blank is I tell my clients I'm not getting equity in most cases, I'm not getting equity of your business. This is a fee based service I'm providing. So with that being said, you're the one who's going to live or die by the idea that actually goes to M market. You can either pay me to do smart things with your brand or you can pay me so you can tell me what to do with your brand. Seems like kind of a waste in the latter. And I would echo what Steve Jobs said. He said that at Apple we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. We would never hire a smart person and tell them what to do. That's how you, that you know, for designers, creatives, that's how you know you're about to have a bad client experience is if they, they hire you and they start telling you what to do, that's a bad client. You've been hired for your expertise. You should be compensated and respected with your, your uh, direction at every step. But at the end of the day, what ships has to meet client approval because if they can't sell with it, if they can't believe in it when it reaches market because it's some quote unquote artists self expression of their logo and their brand, it just, it's going to break down every time and then you're going to break down when AI enters the chat and people and it's part of the workflow and the designers all got, you know, got super sensitive about how they do things because AI is m now interfering with their quote unquote art, blah blah blah. It breaks down. It's a big mess. And so you got designers absolutely creatives absolutely losing their minds over this topic. And it all stems from the fact that they don't know and were never taught that they're not artists when they're getting paid. That's been today's episode of Field Notes. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if this uh, strikes up any ideas.