AI is going to take our jobs. AI is a bubble. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner. AGI will never happen.

In reality, there is a little truth in all of the statements being made about AI but neither can be completely accurate because, like every industry caught in a frantic rush of development, it is impossible to see where all the pieces will land.

The AI space is vastly unpredictable

Even when the pieces land, the landscape will shift. AI isn’t a destination. It is a journey that our species will forever be intertwined with. We didn’t stop inventing machines when the Industrial Revolution had blown its last puff of steam. We kept inventing and aggregating. It’s unlikely that the inventors of the steam engine would have predicted Boston Dynamics and their robotic dogs but we can trace the lineage from one to the other.

Perhaps even more pertinent is the nature of the industry and the complex web of moving parts that it encompasses. Medicine, finance, search, advertising, aviation, energy, blockchain, imaging… the list of activities impacted is multiplied by the number of technologies being developed by all the established tech companies, universities, startups, and even individuals to leave us with so many moving parts that we can’t really nail anything down.

To add another layer of unpredictability, we must not forget that we are dealing with an intelligence. It keeps surprising us and bewildering is as we develop it. The idea of a predictable or explainable AI continues to largely elude us. While we know what we ask of an AI and can see what results it gives us, the inner machinations of deep neural networks that we have developed is too complex for us to understand. Add to this the “oh shit!” notion that we are using AI to develop better AI and it should cause us to pause for a moment before deciding that we know what’s next.

If there is one certainty, it is that this industry will keep surprising us.

Let’s look at jobs. As horrible as it sounds, some jobs are almost immediately at risk. And these are the ones, quite predictably, that most commonly resemble the tasks that the newly emerging AI models perform so well. But first, we need to have a shared understanding of what AI we’re referring to.

So what’s an AI in this context?

Let’s for a moment qualify what we mean by an AI.

An intelligence can be described as any entity that has the ability to choose a better outcome from a possible list of outcomes. The more intelligent this entity is, the more outcomes it can choose from and the better equipped it is to pick the best possible one. Using this model, an ant is not as intelligent as a mouse, and a mouse is not as intelligent as a human.

Humans have a broad spectrum of intelligence types – the same person can ride a bicycle in a city, write a novel, peel an orange, and flirt with another human using subtle, non-verbal cues. And the same human can generalise intelligence very quickly. We only need to burn our fingers once to know to avoid all flames, no matter what the source of the fire is.

Artificial Intelligence and the neural networks they run on, at least the ones we have access to today, work differently. They take a huge amount of training to generalise knowledge. Tesla have billions of miles of training on their self-driving car models to approach a reasonably good driving AI while it takes a human a few hours of lessons to achieve the same ability.

And they have a narrow spectrum of intelligence. The AIs at our disposal are really, really good at one thing. They are far superior to any human at that task but that’s all they know.

Armed with this knowledge, we can make a few assumptions about what tasks we will be passing on to AI or at least working with AI to help us do our job much better.

AI will help us do our jobs (and relieve us of annoying ones)

Let’s take a day in the life of a content writer or a designer. The day is usually split into many different ‘jobs’ or tasks. There’s some time dedicated to research, some time dedicated to thinking and putting ideas together, and some time devoted to actually creating something new. But there are also parts of the day that are relatively repetitive – the kind of tasks that we do without really needing to think too hard.

Let’s say a beautiful piece of artwork has been created. Now it is time to resize it to fit a pretty standard set of assets.

Or a wonderfully crafted blog post has been written and now it’s time to summarise it into brief captions for a handful of different social media platforms.

Both of these can be offloaded from our mind and given to a machine that has learned how do one of these tasks and to do it quite well. It’s been trained, by assigning weights to successful outcomes, to perform in a way that we like best. It is equipped to learn our preferences and to keep working that way. So, both of these creatives can work side-by-side with an AI and spend the time they’ve saved just enjoying their lives.

Now if there is a person whose job it is to do just the task that’s repetitive and that we would rather give to a machine to do, then that person’s job can be replaced by an AI. This is not to say it will, but it is possible.

But let’s take a plumber. They come home and troubleshoot the most bizarre of faults that we, messy humans, create in our own homes. They use their experience, their tools, their hands, and their ability to take instant decisions on the most practical outcome to get the job done and restore order and harmony in our homes.

Carry this over across all jobs that require skill and we can see that these jobs are safe for now. It will take us a while to implement the broader kind of intelligence needed to do these jobs and to build the robots it takes to give this general intelligence a useful corporeal form. To be more precise, the tech we need to build this robot probably exists, scattered around industries and intellectual property licenses, but it would cost as much as the GDP of a small nation to put one unit together and that’s not good business. For now.

It’s the mid-level white-collar jobs that are at stake.

Wherever there are groups of people in a bullpen doing what is mostly repetitive work that can be passed onto an automated system with a narrow but deep intelligence, the likelihood is that the populations of these bullpens will be the first to start thinning. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to your personal ethical standpoint and the subject of a significantly deeper discussion than this brief blog can go into.

A good point of departure is to think of the fate of the ecosystem around horse-drawn cabs at the dawn of the popularity of the motor car and work your way up from there.

We’re all coders

For a long time – meaning for all the time that computer code existed and all the way until a few months ago – programming a computer to do your bidding was the reserve of the coder, the software engineer, the guys and girls who knew languages that were esoteric to the rest of us. Now, we can address some of the most powerful computers out there by just typing a sentence into a chat box. In essence, every time we ask a chat-enabled AI for something, we are writing a little single-serve app and asking it to do our bidding. The more creative we are, and the more complex the task, the more useful and productive is the result of our interaction.

This means that natural language is already the de facto programming language. And as the AIs available to us get even more powerful, the need to use the programming languages of old (they’re so last week) will dwindle into obscurity. If you’re a sub-par coder, you’d better watch out because there’s a grandma out there doing a better job than you are and all she had to learn was how to write in English.

Symbiotic relationships are desirable

When we think of symbiotic relationships we usually go to that bird that eats the insects on a crocodile’s back as an example. The bird is fed and the crocodile isn’t itchy so both live quite happily. It’s an old definition of symbiosis but for the sake of this article we can put up with eye-rolling of biologists.

The happy relationship we’re referring to is the one between carbon-based lifeforms (us) and silicon-based brains (Artificial Intelligence).

The abilities of the systems that are available to us are quite staggering. They far outstrip the ability of any one person because they have been trained on gigantic models, huge data sets that represent the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of humans. They run on GPUs (the computers that power AI) that just love parallel processing and do so at outrageous speed. This means that, unlike us, they think of multiple things at the same time and do so thousands of times every second.

The highest ideal is, therefore, a human-machine tandem. A carbon-silicon creature that thinks with the value system and ambitions of a human and does so at the speed of a machine, drawing on a data set that is much broader than any amount of swotting for exams can achieve.

Think back to the industrial revolution. A lot of back-breaking work done by humans was replaced by machines that didn’t suffer and that could be significantly stronger than any one human. One man can carry one brick for so many metres but a steam engine can carry many, many bricks for as long as you can feed it coal.

What you want to be in that situation is able to drive the train or perhaps to repair it.

It takes skill to get the most out of any device, and AI assistants are a perfect embodiment of this maxim. Consider a camera. The same camera in the hands of an experienced photographer and in the hands of a complete novice will not produce the same photos. Give me the full set of paintbrushes that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling with and I will produce an unholy mess that no pope would bless.

Embrace the race

Leaps in technology follow a pattern that echoes the one that came before. We’ve seen figures that show how long it took for radio to reach 80% of households and how that time was much shorter for TV, and even shorter for mobile internet.

And there is a pattern in the narrative, too. Early adopters tout a new tech as a panacea, gilding the advance with an unrealistic set of expectations of what it will do. Laggards and those afraid of change are vocal in their objections, with a handful of versions of ‘this tech will never catch on’ or ‘this tech is evil and should not be allowed’. While both positions are heartfelt, neither is entirely true of almost any innovation.

Photography purists are bemoaning the fact that some artists won photography competitions and immediately after they did, they admitted they’d created the images using Midjourney. What they’re angry about is that they didn’t have the ability to discern the difference themselves. ‘AI art isn’t art’ is an echo of the reaction that artists who had honed their skill at oils on canvas had when photography was invented. They argued that ‘photography isn’t art’ because photographers hadn’t bothered learning how to use a paintbrush. If an inkjet print of a photo fetches a couple of millions at the better galleries, why would an NFT of AI-generated art not do the same?

Midjourney won’t be replacing Saul Leiter’s colour work but it can already create passable street work that, at a glance, is coherent and convincing.

It is up to every one of us to land on the side of this story that is committed to history. A sensible place is to embrace the race, to get acquainted with the immense potential that these emerging technologies have to offer while being acutely aware of their limitations. This allows us to stretch the tech to its maximum, harnessing its power to make our lives easier and the output of our work even better. It also keeps us from falling into the trap of unrealistic reliance on a tool that has its inherent limitations.

Once again, this is an echo of past wins and losses with new tech. The ones who said new tech will never catch on died like Kodak did. The ones that put far too much faith in new tech died like so many of the tech startups at the dawn of the internet. The ones that embraced change and pivoted are still doing what they set out to do. We don’t think of IBM as International Business Machines any more but that’s what they are and they remained true to purpose. From cash registers when those were relevant to desktop PCs and laptops and all the way to Watson, they weren’t married to a specific technology but considered their purpose as delivering the machines that ran the business of the day.

We speak about being true to purpose at every opportunity. We also speak about business agility until someone tapes our mouths shut. But they are two maxims that have historically led to robust, sustainable business models.

Opportunity and agility

Opportunity lies in what you are already doing for your customers. Agility means you can remain valid to them, no matter what changes happen around you. Having your purpose clearly in mind means that you can be valid for as long as it takes us humans to evolve into a different species and that will take a while.

This means that to stave off redundancy, we need to be absolutely sure of what we are giving our customers. Let’s take Amazon as an example. They offer low prices, a wide variety of goods, and rapid delivery. Three fundamental pillars that humans will always want. In the words of Jeff Bezos:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.

It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now.

When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

This could be one interesting approach about your business to keep in mind in the face of a sea of uncertainty: What’s going to be constant in your space over the next ten years? What fundamental human need do you serve? Therein lies your opportunity and it takes all the agility you can muster to dance to the changing landscape and keep your operation relevant.

What should we be doing about AI?

If there is something we’ve learned about tech it is to never say never. ‘Never’ stems from fear of change. It is a wholly unrealistic standpoint and this is more true today than ever. The money pouring into silicon that can think is staggering. The parties at play mean business – quite literally. The quicker we accept and move ahead at the right pace the better. You don’t want to be the company that said “We don’t need to be on Facebook because it will never catch on.” Neither do you want to be the investor who put all their eggs into MySpace. But you do want to watch this space with a healthy balance of caution and optimism. Caution about the unrealistic claims and optimism about what machine learning systems can bring to your business.

If you’re recruiting in areas that are repetitive, consider investing in tech instead because automation of anything we humans do more than once will come sooner than we think. This isn’t new – automation has been around for almost two centuries now – but now it takes a deeper meaning. It goes beyond a simple ‘if this then that’ and delves into repetitive decision-making within narrow or specialised fields, especially when this thinking involves drawing on an overwhelming dataset.

Whatever your area of practice, there are Machine Learning systems being developed or already deployed, albeit at varying stages of maturity. Seek them out. If they appear underdeveloped or the results are as yet sub-par don’t dismiss them. Use them for inspiration. Riff on them. Perhaps more importantly, learn about them while they’re still embryonic and allow your learning curve to naturally grow with the tech.

When those who have taken the option to wait for some unspecified time in the future to figure out where the dust will settle, you want to be miles ahead. You want to have found the best way for silicon brains to do your bidding. The prosthetic superpowers we were promised in sci-fi narratives since Jules Verne put pen to paper are finally within reach. We’d be fools to leave them to others.

All images were created using Midjourney.

Here’s a little exercise. If you’ve gone through the cycle of being amazed at what ChatGPT 3 (and now 4) can do and then realised that it’s writing is completely devoid of humanity, read a paragraph of this blog at random and try and spot what it is that makes you think it was written by a human and not by ChatGPT. Put a reminder in your calendar for one year from the day you read this. On that day next year, look up a handful of blogs and do the same. Odds are you won’t be able to make this distinction any more.

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It was inspiring. A 3 days marathon of intense inspiration. And, like all respectable artists with full impostor syndrome and thousands of self-doubt sessions a day, I decided to participate at OFFF Festival to get some answers to my questions. But, like all great things in life, OFFF Festival, wasn’t an event in which I found answers to some specific questions, but rather it gave me a new set of questions to be mindful about. 

And for that I am grateful.

What moves you?

Gmunk (Bradley G Munkowitz) is a multi-platform visionary whose creativity and invention have placed him as one of the world’s top visual and design directors. His unique style is enigmatic, atmospheric, and metaphysical, combining science-fiction themes, psychedelic hues, and practical in-camera effects. The artist may be best known for his collaboration with Oblivion, Tron legacy or Windows 10, an image that all of us had at some point on our desktops.

At Offf Festival, I had the opportunity to find out about Gmunk’s behind the scenes process – like the fact that everything that he does is mostly in the offline medium (playing with visible or invisible light, wood boxes or patience while filming a time-lapse of wondering fog), but besides learning, I had the chance to feel.

Like feel, feel. 

His work is full of emotion, passion and curiosity that it is impossible to remain a stranger to his artwork. For this year’s title sequence for OFFF Barcelona, Gmunk presented his short film,“Decima”. The artwork explores themes of transmigration, empowerment, soul passage, and illumination, a subject that emerged into his life after his dad passed away in 2015.

This made me think:  how do I deal with my emotions?

Do I hide them between a rug of anger? Do I transform them into art? How do I stay present in the moment and curious? How do we all deal with the losses that we recently experienced as a society? COVID-19? War? Our dearest ones? 

What is your fear?

Rick Banks is the co-founder of F37®, a Manchester-based studio that specializes in branding and strategy, typography, art direction, and packaging. Rick presented some of his work through a collection of 10 pieces of advice. 

At point number 5 and 6, bells were starting to ring in my head. 

“Don’t be afraid to fail” and “Feel the fear and do it anyway” went straight to my heart and took me to a flow of questions. 

Rick Banks suffered from dyslexia as a child, but after reading “Dyslexia is my superpower” by Margaret Rooke, he found a way to spin the negative. This is how personal projects like Clubbed (a visual history of UK club culture), Football Type (a book celebrating the rich history of football and typography) & I Belong To Jesus (a book that pays tribute to a disappearing football tradition — the undershirt goal celebration) were born. Rick Banks approached the world in his own unique way – through images. Because, as Saul Bass once said, “Design is thinking made visual”.

This made me think about my fears, as well. 

What are my hidden superpowers? What am I hiding from the world that it is so beautiful, yet I don’t believe in it yet?

How much attention do you pay to details?

Musketon must be one of the first illustrators that I discovered when I started in this industry. Bert Dries likes to play with vector shapes in a very detailed, bold and colorful way. He brings into discussion topics about pop culture and its impact on human behavior. His artworks are poignant, powerful, satirical, and sometimes nostalgic, but always fun, and full of little surprises that are waiting to be discovered after a closer look. 

After zooming in, but like really zooming in, “The Last Supper” artwork has a series of elements which are either funny or awkward and were taken from real-life events: Maurizio Catellan’s banana auction, a scene from Up, Trump’s bleach, Facebook’s intrusive presence, his ex-girlfriend reflected on the teapot and a pair of Nikes with a scene of Adam and Eve in Eden.  

If I had to describe Musketon as an artist, I believe I would call him a “hard working guy from Belgium”. When talking about work, there are no shortcuts for him. I was impressed to find out that in order to build his 2D illustrations, he first builds in Cinema4D the 3D version of his desired object and then he traces it using Illustrator. I mean how more invested can you be? 

In order to build the “Netflix in the ‘90s collectible” he first built his 3D model and then he used that to trace it and to make a 2D illustration out of it. 

This made me think about how much I pay close attention to the little joyful moments in my life.

Am I living every moment with a “stay in the present” mindset? Do I always have the ability to really zoom in and see all the little details that make my life funnier or more colorful as Musketon’s illustrations? 

What is the definition of success?

Thierry Brunfaut is one of the co-founders of Base Design, an international network of studios that are based in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne and are dedicated to strategy, branding and digital. 

Instead of choosing to present a showcase of his studios’ best works, Thierry chose to talk about the way in which you can create a successful studio culture. Coming from a background of being friends with the notion of control freak, long after work hours, eating in front of his keyboard, and defining the core of his company through stress, Thierry chose to start a major shift in himself and in his company in order to change the definition of success. 

Now, success for him doesn’t stand in the ability to have an opening at Moma, but in having a truly healthy company. 

For that, he changed the structure of the company. No more division between the management and the creative team. 

He took time to learn to say ‘No’ and to inspire others to be mindful of their boundaries as well.

He created team rituals. Every week has to start with a meeting in which every team member shares their challenge of the week. Every Wednesday, they met for a creative meeting in which the inclusion method was applied (1. What is my energy today? 2. What has happened since last week? 3. What are my expectations? 4. What will be my contribution?). 

Every Thursday they had lunch together and 2 people from the team were responsible for cooking for the rest of the stuff. And every Friday they had the opportunity to give the feedback of the week and revise the Monday’s challenge. 

He implemented the 4 day work week. 

And he held one-to-one interviews with each member of its team to find out their motivations:

1. The desire to learn everyday
2. The need of ownership over the projects they were involved in
3. The wish to have mixed teams between management and creatives
4. The necessity to have more autonomy in terms of timing

This made me think about my definition of success.

Thierry’s talk made me grateful for being part of the Switch family. I mean how similar are these internal rules? 4-days work week? Being empowered to take care of my boundaries and have a healthy work schedule? Having no clients/work-related talk meetings (Bacon hint for the insiders)? The transparency of the management team regarding every decision, even the financial ones? The no division feel between the design studio and the management one? 

All these goodies, and many more of these, have been a real help in my healing journey towards my relationship with my work and my self-esteem. A big cheer and thank you for that, Switch!

Who are those people in your life that you are grateful for?

Malika Favre, a France and Barcelona-based illustrator, is known for her deceptively simple style, which has graced the pages of publications such as The New Yorker and Vogue. Her art is instantly recognizable, with clean, powerful graphics and exquisite geometry.

Malika takes a unique approach to the design discourse at OFFF Barcelona 2022. Rather than presenting her artworks one after the other, she chose to immerse us into a journey of gratitude towards the people in her life that were key points in defining her career, “because whether you work with brands or individuals, you’re working with people,” she says.

From Nat, Fred, Alex, Paul, Françoise, or Henri, all of these names made me think about the people in my life that without their presence I wouldn’t be where I am today and to which I am deeply grateful.

Who are the people in your life which were iconic points in your career that you are grateful for? Making a call or sending a hug emoji on social media wouldn’t hurt in these hard times that we are going through as a society, right?

What do you do with all this data?

After 3 days of intense inspiration, I left OFFF Barcelona Festival with a lot of insights, revelations and questions. 

In other words: a lot of data. And one of many questions that I had while interacting with this experience is what should I do with all this data?

Refik Anadol was there at the right time for me to help me find at least one answer. Refik is a new media artist and designer. His artwork is based on data-driven machine learning algorithms that have the ability to create abstract environments. 

Refik takes a huge amount of information and transforms it into art. He has the ability to transform, for example, research with a lot of hard to read information into a beautiful artwork that can move and transport you into a dream-like world.

This is what I decided to do with my questions as well. 

Let them sink in me, and hopefully, in the future, will be able to breathe into their own life, just like Refik’s artwork that was presented at the closing party of the festival – Living Architecture: Casa Batlló.

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If you’re not paid to do anything creative, please move along. Turn the page. Click here if you have to. This one’s not for you.

If you’re still reading, strap in for a bit of an angry ride.

How often do you see a joke on something like @designershumour on Instagram and feel like it totally describes an aspect of your day at work? The ones about being asked to design something/photograph someone/take an art commission in exchange for exposure. Or the ones about the seventy-eight rounds of changes that a client requests before they finally accept the work. And by ‘the work’ we mean a version of the original so watered down that it looks like those painting-by-numbers sheets you buy at the Van Gogh museum gift shop.

I recently saw one that struck a chord. The €500 client is the one that acts like they now own your soul, feeling free to call after office hours and to make unreasonable demands and that will pay your fees begrudgingly, often several months after they’re overdue. The €50,000 client (I know, this was on an international channel) is the one that just sends the payment and accepts the work.

This got me thinking. It’s not about the size of the account. It is about the maturity of the client. The small client hasn’t understood the value of creative while those entrusted with massive accounts usually do.

Let’s start by a rudimentary definition of what we could call ‘successful creative’. This isn’t meant to go into a dictionary. It’s meant for us to have a phrase that we can work with for understanding the context.

There is everything we are familiar with. Bread and butter. They go together and we can all see how. Then there is the totally uncomfortable and unfamiliar. This is the stuff we don’t like and don’t want to think about. The creative will take a couple of different ideas and mash them together so they retain enough familiarity for us to see a completely new link between the ideas. If the link is really great, it pushes us just towards the border of the uncomfortable. And the closer it gets, the better the creative.

But, I hear you scream, what’s familiar to me is not familiar to everyone. And what’s uncomfortable to me is not uncomfortable to everyone.

This is where the good creatives excel. They understand their audiences. They know who they’re speaking to and who they are leaving out. They refuse to dilute their messaging to the point where it becomes familiar to absolutely everyone. Because that, by definition, is not creative.

So, backed by experience, fortified by intuition, equipped with years of education, driven by the desire to create beautiful and beautifully functional communication, the creative gets to work. This means hours or days of research, sketching, writing, scribbling, finding inspiration in the least likely of places, digging into ideas that have been squirreled away for this very moment. It means losing track of lunchtime and bedtime because the right way needs more refinement. It means taking honest criticism from colleagues and peers and the humility to act upon it…

It also means coping with the gut-wrenching knowledge that if it takes a hundred ideas to get to the right place, ninety-nine of them will have to be cruelly culled. They’re your ideas and you get to kill them.

Finally, thanks to this ineffable blend of intuition and training, to the careful pirouette between fact and feeling, and to the tango that form and function so elegantly dance, the work is done and ready to be presented.

Presented to whom? This is where it gets messy.

The recipient of your creative work is the steward of the brand. They know what is brand-appropriate and what isn’t. They are also humans, with a lifetime of experiences behind them. And, more often than not, they will not take the time to approach creative objectively.

This is inevitable. Our lives are experienced subjectively. But when we’re at work we must take an amount of objectivity with us. We can’t react emotionally to management accounts even if we want to. We can’t react emotionally to health & safety regulations. We must retain the objectivity we need to think and act in the best interest of the organisation and of the brand.

The best outcome for a meeting of minds between those proposing creative and those approving of it is a piece of communication that stuns your audiences for all the right reasons – a persuasive piece of beautiful communication. It ought to look great and it ought to do the job of changing people’s minds.

This means that those approving of the work need to be comfortable with feeling a little uncomfortable. The best creative does this. Every time you see the work presented at the Cannes Lions or the stuff that does the rounds with comments like ‘this is a brilliant piece of marketing’ you should be thinking “that’s a brilliant collaboration between clever creative and brave client”. 

Because it takes two to win at this game. It takes a creative who is willing to be brave and to have the smarts it takes to produce work that will work, not just look good. And it takes a client who knows to keep their personal preferences out of things and to look at the work based on its ability to work for the brand.

A bigger logo doesn’t make communication any more effective. If you hate the colour blue it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t feature on your creative. If you’re allergic to cats they could still help tell a good story.

This is not an easy ask. It takes discipline and restraint. It takes working through the cognitive dissonance that good creative often puts forth. It takes bravery and the will to fail once in a while. It takes away the safety net that playing safe provides. 

It does lead to greatness though. It means that the brand will be known for great stories. No one remembers the brands that play safe. It also means you’ll encourage your creatives to produce even more stunning work rather than bludgeoning them into a permanent semi-coma. 

If you’re not paid to do creative and you’re still reading this you’ve noticed this one is also for you. If you’re reading this after the warning not to, it means you’re curious about breaking some rules. So be brave, be that rebel who sticks their neck out in the name of a good story that’s well told. Your brand will thank you for it and you’ll have made a creative happy and fulfilled. And we’d have postponed this call to arms for another day.

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You probably don’t know me. 

I don’t like to talk about myself a lot, but I’ll talk about myself now since it’s the key of this series (thanks, past me. I’ll remember this). 

My name is Elise. I edit most of the articles on the blog. I have two cats, a fiancée, a husky dog, a long list of things I love, an even longer list of things I hate, and a list of things that I want to write about. 

My Whatsapp chat is mostly filled with memes. 

I like harassing my bosses with terrible jokes. 

I always have one eye out for the latest longform, and the weirder and more esoteric the topic, the more I’ll enjoy it. I keep an even closer look at the current research, at what other companies are doing, at what’s going on on the internet, and at anything that will make a good story. 

I like writing about sound. 

I love my job. 

I did some of my best work during lockdown. 

And for the greatest part of the pandemic, I’ve barely been treading water. 

The Great Mental (Creative) Health Crisis

My job is solitary. 

I can pick up and carry my laptop anywhere; write at the edge of the beach, in my car, in a cafe, parked in an air-conditioned parking lot. Words are easy to me because they’re malleable, like clay or molten metal or sand just before it turns into glass. You can make anything out of a handful of words, and there are so many to choose from that you can never really stop making things. 

Whole campaigns and brands are built on tiny words. Resilience. Perseverance. Beauty. Zen. Halcyon. 

It isn’t a conscious thing. I can tell you why I chose a certain word, but you won’t like the answer because the reason might only make sense to me. I can also tell you why I didn’t choose a certain word, and it’ll mostly be based on ‘because the sound isn’t right’. My world is built on chords and symphonies and the noise that people make. 

When the office went online, that sound intensified. I could open up any word document, and write as much as I wanted in a single day, and it was never enough. There was always music to catch and pin down, always another chord I needed to capture, always something more. 

I was – and am – proud of that work. 

And then it stopped. 

I haven’t written a single word that I’ve personally liked since. 

Creative Industry, Creative People

The problem with any creative industry is that you can’t really stop creating. 

Shit still needs to get done. 

And you’re the one who needs to do it. 

There’s a myth that creative people will never stop being creative; that it’s something hard-coded into their DNA, like the way their voice curls on a certain letter, or the colour of their hair, or if they’re more predisposed to sensitivity to lactose, if they like cats more or dogs more. 

The truth is that creativity is really just another skill-set. It’s something you hone. It’s as much instinct as it is understanding. 

And it can drain away. 

Making things on demand – and even in the gentlest company, as a creative, you are always making things; always looking for your next idea; always wanting to improve on the last one – nibbles away at you. 

That’s one good thing about the regular 9-to-5 office life: it’s harder for that creative demand to eat you alive and leave behind nothing but bones. 

Working Hard(ly)

Picture winter. 

Dim, long days are my personal favourite; that feeling of being trapped in perpetual twilight, gauzy, hazy light coming in through the blinds, helps me focus. Writing is easier when the hours unspool without a deadline, and dark days make those hours seem like treacle. No beginning or end, only a constant, dripping middle. 

It’s 9AM. I check my work tasks. I open up the documents I need. I research. 

I don’t write. 

It’s 1PM. Lunch has happened. I look at the document I have opened. I tap out a few words, tentative, feeling them out in my mind. 

They don’t look right. 

I delete them. 

I go back to looking at other interesting articles, moving my tasks around. A colleague asks me to edit a caption; it’s five minutes of work, and it goes by too quickly. Those words, written by someone else, needing only a tweak or a comma or a ‘did-you-mean-this-would-you-like-that’, aren’t difficult, and I crave not-difficult. 

Another colleague sends me a task that needs to be finished by the end of the day. It’s a blog – short, only five hundred words, barely 15 minutes of effort on a good day. I know it’s short notice, she says, but can you write it?

Of course, the answer is always yes. 

Pushing through

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, and I’m sorry about that, but writing has nothing to do with whether or not you’re inspired. Writer’s block, creative block, can’t-do-anything-I-like block: it doesn’t mean anything in a creative industry. 

Like I’ve said before: stuff needs to get done. 

And if the dividing line between stuff getting done and stuff not getting done is waiting for inspiration, that line needs to be taken out of the way you think about writing. 

Writing doesn’t ever get easier. It doesn’t start happening faster because you put in one hour of writing a day, two hours of writing a day, three hours of writing a day. You’re going to spout perfect copy one day, the next day you’re going to barely be able to string together a sentence, and the day after that you’ll write the next Maltese novel. 

What makes those days different? 

Who knows. 

Writing just is. 

Good or bad, finished or unfinished, it happens or it doesn’t. 

And that depends on you. 

When you’re a writer in a creative industry, and writing has to happen, whether you feel like it or not, you have to make it happen. 

Make writing write itself

I know this sounds harsh. 

I know it’s hard to take in, the idea that a creative field can be so patently uncreative, the thought that you can basically just force yourself to make. 

The truth is, thinking about writing in terms of creativity is helpful to no-one, and sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike does nothing except make your time-frame to finish something even smaller. 

Trust me. 

I’ve tried that, too. 

What always helps me is thinking about writing as just something else that has to happen. 

You have to think about it as a task, the same as getting up in the morning. It has to become part of your routine: coffee, meeting, write 500 headlines for a new product, write 2000 words for a blog idea, look at the latest movie, write the blurb for a book you’re excited about. 

Is this going to help you with your task that you desperately need to finish immediately?

Not straight away, but yes. 

When you make writing a normal part of routine, switching the words on and off again becomes easier. When that becomes easier, your writing becomes better. When your writing is better, you’ll find it easier to write even when you don’t have anything to say. 

Will you get creative blocks still? 

Absolutely. 

But they won’t matter as much because you’ll work on autopilot, dig in down to the reserves of what you already know, and make words happen. 

The rest is editing. 

How to write like a machine

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Or as dire.

But if you absolutely have to write something – anything – before a deadline, and you’ve run out of creativity, this can help. 

1. Revisit your brief, your topic, your client. Read their website until you can recite it backwards, in a different language. Make sure you know every inch of every product they have. Find competitors. Figure out their industry. See what language other blogs use to talk about that industry. 
2. Start small. How would you explain this to someone who doesn’t know about this product? How would you sell this brand? How would people sell it to you?
3. Write headlines. Make them stupid. Make them long. Make them useful. 
4. Keep a list of words that work for you. 
5. Have sentences you can turn to when you’re stuck, irrespective of industry. 
6. Read what you write out loud. Find out where the gaps are: content, language, sound?
7. Copy the fuck out of the best ads. Break taglines. Swap words around. Make it sound like a different industry. Make it sound like your industry. Make it work. Make it fail. Make it yours. 

You are a writer. Your job, like it or not, is words. If those words don’t work for you, you have to find words that do. 

You have to make them work. 

Everything else is irrelevant. 

The post Crisis in the Creative Industry: Working Through a Creative Block appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’ve practically always operated as a remote working agency because we truly believe that inspiration and productivity don’t come by looking at the same four walls 9 to 6. Some of us thrive more at odd times of the day (it’s currently 23:51 as I am typing this), whilst others are early birds that love starting their day with a cup of coffee at the office.

So when we had to shift the whole team to working remotely last year, we weren’t worried. The logistics weren’t an issue, as the vast majority of us already work from laptops and were used to the flexibility of working from home.

What our main point of focus was (and still is) is making sure the team remains a team. 

Working remotely can feel lonely very fast. 

When the catch-ups next to the coffee machines, the lunch breaks shared together, the office chatter, brainstorming sessions, and Friday drinks get replaced by quiet home offices and scheduled video calls, it can make people feel very disconnected. The lack of human interaction, and the overall feeling of being part of a team – of something bigger, can make it easy to lose the motivation and determination to work. 

To avoid that, we make it a priority to meet everyone as regularly as possible. We work on a number of weekly, monthly, and quarterly virtual events that include one-to-ones with each member of the team, meetings by departments, and also whole agency ones. The purpose of some is to keep our internal communications up to date, whereas the others are aimed at keeping the team glued together. 

In this blog post, I’ll be focusing on the latter, and how we work on keeping creativity and collaboration alive. 

One of the most common comments we’ve been hearing over the past year is how everyone has been missing the brainstorming sessions at the office. These are a fundamental piece of our process for any of the projects we work on, but besides helping us come up with beautiful stories to tell for our clients, it is also a great exercise for the different departments to collaborate and think creatively together. Some of our best work was the result of agency-wise brainstorming (often accompanied by a beer).

We didn’t want the challenges of working remotely to stop these. So a couple of weeks ago, we decided to opt for a brainstorming session with a twist. 

We ended a regular Wednesday a little earlier, and following the quarterly meeting which updates everyone on what has happened the past quarter and what projects/goals/forecasts we are aiming for in Q2, we split the agency into different groups. Each team was formed by one member from each department (creative, marketing, strategy, and project management). The aim here was to get people to step outside of their teams so they could interact with others they may not deal with daily. 

For the scope of the exercise, we opted for a ‘fantasy’ client that we are all very familiar with: Spotify. The brief was simple: each team had 20 minutes to think of a creative concept for May the 4th: Star Wars Day.

We created breakout rooms, and let the magic happen with each team. Once the 20 minutes were up, they were all automatically brought back into the main call. 

Each team had 5 minutes to pitch their ideas. This resulted in discussions, building off each others’ ideas, a little friendly competition, and ultimately selecting the winning idea (which turned out to be the perfect mix of all the proposed ones). 

Spotify Wrapped for Star Wars characters. 

Our office’s Star Wars geeks had a blast working on writing the content needed to make the Spotify Wrapped as relevant to the franchise as possible. From Darth Vader’s guilty pleasure for Cher, to Luke Skywalker’s favourite Ocean Sound genre, we just had to give the mockups a try. And once we did, we obviously couldn’t not share them.

So here’s our Spotify #Maythefourthbewithyou campaign!

The post Remote working: keeping creativity and collaboration alive appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.