Steal Like an Artist: Ideas We’re Taking From Our Interview Subjects
We’ve learned a lot from these folks above (and many more).
We have interviewed more than 100 creative people about how they are building their careers, honing their crafts, and shaping the culture. And we’ve learned a lot along the way. Illustrative lettering artist Gemma O’Brien reaffirmed the importance of embracing physical labor in our creative pursuits. Accenture Chief Creative Officer Jason Kreher is redesigning an abandoned DMV at the Lloyd Center Mall in Portland into a new creative studio/art experiment. (“It’s like a WeWork meets a Spirit Halloween.”) And Emmy-winner Mike Perry shared almost everything you want to know about drawing nudes. Because you know, you know?
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 The 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.
Taste is Everything
Ok, so maybe I’m a little jealous of music producer and songwriter Andrew Petroff. With his long rocker hair and full beard, he looks every bit the cool Nashville cat that he is. And his workdays consist of collaborating with the likes of Lainey Wilson and Sheryl Crow on their music. He shared how he works and this point stood out to me: “Taste is everything,” he said. “For those of us in creative professions, taste is why we get hired. Technical perfection isn’t what usually connects or translates the most.”
The past six months have been full of conversations about AI and data, data, data. While we’re certainly not Luddites around here, what feels like it has been lost in the conversation is good taste as a barometer for what’s good. The kind of sound human judgment that can’t be borrowed, taught, or bought, and that is rightly contextual for the times. (Because data always looks backwards.) At Creative Factor, we rely on data as much as the next organization, but we also need to remember it’s just one part of the equation. What I’ve learned from Petroff, and what we’ll make sure to also rely on, is our gut feel for the kinds of stories we publish. Our team is insanely curious and has a high bar as to what warrants a story-data point or not. If we find something we’re interested in, our belief is that you will find it interesting, too.
–Matt McCue, Editor, Creative Factor
Fewer Things, Better Quality
I wish I had met Sara Little Turnbull, a woman who turned her storied editorial career into a product design (and early UX design) legacy that is closer to legend. She helped create one of the first N95 prototype masks out of a bra cup. This woman was truly something. Her story on the Creative Factor sucked me into a deeper wormhole of wonder on the internet. Her reminder, "don't just look — see" is something I have scrawled into memory lately, as we are all continuously bombarded with excessive stimuli. We can't always find creative solutions within minutes of exposure. I am striving to sit with my ideas a little longer. She died in 2015, but left behind a foundation that helps advance underrepresented young people and women in design careers. I'd also like to live by her “fewer things of better quality" mantra, but I'd say that's more of a work in progress.
–Naomi Piercey, Partner & Strategist, Coalesce
When Everything Changes Around Us, We Can Chart Our Own Path of Change
I’m embarrassed to admit that I have a dated perception of cultural centers. When I think “cultural center”, I think of an old building with high ceilings and culturally-specific artifacts. I imagine the inhabitants to be stern and “conservative” by nature. Memories of being a child in a museum come to mind. You can look but you better not touch…or else.
I’m truly inspired by the approach taken by Gaëtan Bruel and his team at Villa Albertine as they redesign the creative residency. They recognize the ever-changing nature of culture and, instead of fighting the tides, they’ve made a conscious effort to be the change they’d like to see. There were a handful of statements in his interview that made an impact, but none more than “France supports culture everywhere in the world, even more than its own culture.” This seemingly radical proclamation completely flipped my perception of what role cultural centers could and should play. I couldn’t imagine making the argument to bureaucratic members of the French government that funds should be directed towards the artistic development of cultural art other than their own. And then winning that argument!?
–Alex Severino, Creative Director, Coalesce
Keeping It Real
What resonates the most with me is authenticity. And authenticity is exactly what pours out of Bulletproof Strategy Director Ali Marmaduke’s piece aptly titled “How to break rules and create new realities”.
What was beautiful about this piece was learning about his journey—going back to his roots in Yemen to become a political journalist so that he could help advocate for the truth, which eventually brought him to joining an American political NGO where he felt he would have more impact—all in the name of advancing democracy.
There he met his love, and when things started to get precarious where they were living, they eventually made their way to the Netherlands (but not before he and his team were accused of being spies by the Sri Lanka government!).
Throughout his entire journey he realized he was trying to influence policies and laws, but he had no real foundation for understanding the human mind and how it really worked. This sparked a drive in him to learn more, which eventually led him to studying Persuasive Communication; people's attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, i.e: better understanding why people are so damn resistant to change. This knowledge eventually dropped him off in the brand strategy seat, where he could take everything he had learned along the way and put it into play.
This piece exudes what it means to live life—to follow your heart, understand your shortcomings, pursue what you love and persevere even when times are tough. To continuously learn in areas where you don’t have the knowledge, and to constantly have a growth mindset. In Marmaduke’s words:
“People are not thinking machines that also happen to feel, we’re feeling machines that sometimes think. Most of the time people don't want to be changed. And they really don’t want to think…..It’s about finding what’s real and avoiding bullshit at all costs.”
–Jamie Woolfe, UX Researcher & Designer, Coalesce
Getting Inspired
I’m probably not the only one who reads about people and tries to relate with them on a personal level, and reading the How I Work series, I find myself humanizing people I initially saw as “rockstars.” I’ve been surprised with their personal lifestyles, knowing their work often portrays something totally different. Richard Turley described his very methodical morning routine, and meanwhile his work is so unapologetic and experimental. (I was slightly expecting a chaotic drugs, sex, and rock & roll lifestyle from him.) I related to Damian Bradfield a lot in terms of not following a routine. I used to passively follow one, until my body responded pretty negatively to my daily coffee consumption and my hectic sleeping schedule. One day, I aspire to wake up as early as most people interviewed for the How I Work series — I assume the ones who had children and needed to drastically change their lives. Or, just like a quote I read the other day, I’d like to “wake up early and tackle the day before it tackles you.”
–Barbara Cadorna, Designer, Coalesce
Trust the Process. Sometimes There Are No Right Answers
Sometime between moving back to New York from Ohio this summer and getting a visa to live in Stockholm later this year, I realized that settling down is overplayed. And that’s a pretty liberating realization, even though my path is tangled and I have no set plans for what I want to do once I graduate. The Creative Factor is exactly how I am learning to trust this process — the one that has no right answers. Or learning that even the right answers aren’t really the right answers.
Take John Donohue. He was already a successful editor at one of the most prestigious magazines in the world, the New Yorker, when he was laid off in his late 40s. He had to recast everything he thought he knew, and with that, he happened across the next act in his career. Today Donohue travels the world, illustrating restaurant facades with the pen that he has always carried in his pocket. I admire his bold choices, like his switch from pencil to ink because the permanence of the ink helped him learn to draw faster. But even more so, I admire that he is willing to change his mind a lot. Switching career paths was his chance to mold his passion into something even greater, and that speaks volumes.
My first day on the job, Naomi told me, “No one knows what they’re doing.” She’s right, and somehow that makes everything feel so open.
–Madeleine Magill, Contributing Editor
Refill Your Cup
Not too long ago I found myself at a rodeo outside of Carbondale, Colorado. As I watched the cattle ropers and bull riders, I started to feel an unexpected kinship with them. They were all hanging out at one end of the ring talking about their events ahead, talking about each other's rides, and laughing. They would get deadly serious during their ride and then after they would head right back to the group and immediately slide into laughing and joking and talking about rodeo. It occurred to me, we all love that wild ride, but there is a reason a champion bull rider only hangs around for eight seconds. You have to refill your cup.
The last decade has been a wild ride. Our team has found ourselves inside a hydrogen atom in a VR headset, hacking a Mr. Robot premiere, sleeping on the couch at a paper factory in Canada, and taking on projects that sound even weirder than those when taken out of context. It was this year that I finally learned an important lesson about wild rides. As our projects have grown more complex and our team along with it, I have needed to find ways to get out of the saddle for a bit.
The problem is I am not very good at “resting” and I just love what we do. I started reading the interviews in the Creative Factor a couple years ago and then I had good fortune to find myself at its Salons. I was so damn inspired by the work and passion I saw in everything I read and everyone I met. Honestly, I was jealous too.
This year I learned that, if I am going to last another decade in this industry, I need to cultivate people and places that replenish my creative cup and that inspire me to get back in the ring after each ride, good or bad. I want to be around other people that love the things I love and can teach me or inspire me to do it even better. I’ve spent a lot of this year pushing myself to be more active in our creative community, and I hope to keep that going. Also I need to find less ridiculous analogies. That’s next year’s lesson I am sure.
–Tucker Marguiles, Partner and Strategist, Coalesce
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