100 Creative Interviews: Wisdom We’re Taking From Our Subjects
We have interviewed more than 100 creative people about how they are building their careers, honing their crafts, and shaping the culture. Here are some of the best things we’ve learned.
Wow, we’ve had a great run of interviews so far this year. From the White House creative team, to a Netflix documentary filmmaker, to the Paris Olympic logo designer, we’ve seen time and time again that every single creative profession has its own language for making great stuff.
Every so often, we like to check in with our own creative team on what they’re learning from our interview subjects. After all, creativity isn’t just about doing, it’s about learning (and sometimes stealing… like an artist, of course).
Our team believes you can cultivate more creativity through practice and exposure. But any creator knows we also need to constantly learn — new skills, ways of working, and career steps we never considered taking. Come to Creative Factor to read and learn. Then go and do. In that spirit, our team members share some of the most important ideas they’ve learned so far this year — and how they are incorporating them into their creative pursuits.
Matt McCue, Editor: On Why New York is the Greatest Creative City in the World
As a New Yorker, I often have people from other parts of the country tell me they could never live here. Great, I want to say, let me write that down in the book of stuff I don’t care about. New Yorkers aren’t concerned about how outsiders feel about their beloved city. Because there are so many reasons to love it. In her essay, Why New York City is the Greatest Creative City in the World, my business partner Naomi Piercey makes the case that one of the best things about living here is that it’s hard and competitive. In New York, “you are surrounded by constant and ever-increasing levels of effort. It takes a lot of energy to live here, let alone work creatively and consistently. But effort is highly contagious and addictive.” As Naomi noted, New York is a great place for dreamers, a haven for doers, and a place where big ideas happen. No reason so many of the top creative people in the world call it home. They like the energy, and love the challenge of it all.
Madeleine Magill, Contributing Editor: On How Creativity Takes You Places You’d Never Think You Could Reach
In school, there’s not a lot of room for failure. If you make a mistake, you have to explain it to someone… and usually it’s yourself. But punishing mistakes is silly business because they just mean that you are giving yourself the room to try things and fail. In his interview with us last year, Modernist Cuisine founder Nathan Myrhvold takes us through his wild career journey, sharing how he applies creativity to literally everything. He says, “If failure is not an option for you, you’re probably not doing something creative. You have to give yourself the freedom to try and fail.” And keep in mind, this philosophy on failure comes from someone who has achieved several major successes (becoming Microsoft’s first chief technology officer, starting up a huge food and photography company), but who has also made his fair share of mistakes along the way. The point is, you can do both. It’s a good reminder to always make bold choices and do the things you love with a lot of enthusiasm. Before this year, I thought the working world was just like the school world, only the mistakes part would be even more high-stakes. But not in the creative field. At Creative Factor, being curious and thinking outside the box are characteristics that are rewarded, not punished. While creativity is a risky process that can generate failure, it pushes you further than you could otherwise go. And I’d take that over playing it safe any day.
Justin Rancourt, Product Architect: On Why You Should Always “Tinker” in the Tech Space
After working in tech for over 17 years, the endless new technology adoption cycle can be exhausting. Suff Syed’s interview was a nice reminder that it’s always important to “tinker,” as you never know which breakthrough could help you unlock new ways of creation. “It’s not arranging flows. It’s not building the user experience. I’d argue AI will soon be able to do all of this. It’s breaking the user experiences of today by delving deeper into the technical architectures of how these things work so that we can build entirely new paradigms,” Syed says. “So it’s only a matter of time. Instead of pushing against AI, I’d advise people to embrace it, tinker with it, and dive deep into being able to direct the output from these systems in ways never possible before.” These insights are a nice reminder to keep an open mind, and to keep finding time to experiment.
Tucker Margulies, Special Advisor: On Climbing Back Out of the Rabbit Hole
Well, I learned how to rob a bank. But I did have to mail this response in from my jail cell. I probably should have watched Seth’s movie to the end.
In all seriousness, Creative Factor has always been a way for me to step out of my day-to-day creative work and look at the craft from someone else’s perspective. When you work in a creative field, it’s all too easy to view all creative work through that one skill’s lens, but that really limits the lessons you can learn. There are so many creative acts each with their own language and lessons. Robbing a bank is creative as hell. Not necessarily in a good way…but you certainly have to come up with some interesting ideas to pull it off. We spent a lunch hour in the office trying to come up with our bank robbery plans and I have to admit…we stunk at it. No one will be walking into the office next week with a sequentially numbered stack of 100s in their pocket. Seth didn’t just remind me not to rob a bank. Reading his interview, I was reminded to pop my head up from time to time. He says, “We found that the deeper he got into this criminal enterprise, the more trapped he became.” Replace “criminal enterprise” here with “project” and the same applies to many of us. It’s so, so, so easy to fall down the rabbit hole in any creative pursuit. That’s sometimes the most fun part. But it is also its own trap.
We have to remember when to put the paintbrush down, ship that design, or abandon it altogether. I have a particularly hard time with that. Da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” I would like to add “and it’s the last heist that gets you caught.”
Barbara Cadorna, Head of Design: On Designing For the Future
Hearing Sylvain Boyer's take on the French Olympic logo is quite interesting. It’s not easy to predict taste, and we all tend to overestimate what inventions there might be in the future (flying cars and such), yet what Boyer created was pretty realistic from my point of view. I’d like to know if he would change anything, considering the current overuse of geometric vector shapes within a highly gridded composition, which was once ground-breaking, probably six years ago. Nevertheless, it was a well-executed idea and a top-notch, thought-out visual system that uses color and forms to blend and contrast at the same time with the rich ancient and modern French architecture. Using cultural and historical context as inspiration seems like an appropriate solution, and regardless of the same, it will always spark controversy for formal or content reasons — you simply can’t escape from public opinion on such a global project. I enjoy the radicality mentioned by Boyer about the London 2012 Olympic identity and, more so, the complete visual system behind it, which many underestimate.
Someone has to break the cycle of “normalcy,” and, as the saying goes, "All publicity is good publicity." Any design debate among non-designers defines a moment of appreciation for an almost invisible profession. I believe someone has to challenge "normalcy," be the first one to raise their hands, and risk getting called out as weirdos, traitors, and “pseudo” failures. Swimming against the wave is harder, but much more rewarding.
Julianna Collares, Designer: On How Young Creators Inspire Great Work
As a designer who has just graduated and entered the job market, An Evening with the White House Creative Team was a very enlightening experience for my future. It's no secret that there is pressure to find the best job when we leave college, and we have to dedicate ourselves to the utmost to make that happen. When I heard White House Creative Director Meena Yi share her personal experience on how to handle feedback using a scale from one to ten, with ten being the most meaningful to her and one being the least significant, it made me realize that design is a team effort and that we should choose our battles wisely. I reflected that dedication and attention to detail will always come first, regardless of the feedback received. Seeing designers like Meena, associate creative director Abbey Pitzer, and designer Shae Greene, so young and managing President Biden’s and the White House’s digital channels, websites, and social media, is an important example of how the new generation of creators is increasingly focused and qualified to take on positions that define the future of the creative world.
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