You're a creative
The idea comes first. Everything else catches up.
You had the line before you finished reading the brief. You get possessive about the good ones. You want your fingerprints on the work, and when someone tries to sand the strange edge off it, that's the part you fight for.
You're a Strategist
You see the whole board.
You've never made anything by accident. Every choice ladders up to something. The audience, the goal, the reason this exists at all. You're fine being the least popular person in the room for thirty seconds until it lands.
You're an Explorer
You start with a question
You're comfortable not knowing where it lands. The reference nobody else has. The tangent three doors from the brief. The thing you found while looking for something else. That's your material.
Get your result.
Creative, Strategist, or Explorer. Three ways of working, three ways of thinking, three ways of showing up to the work. One of them is you.
Find your patch.
Every result has its own patch. Show us what you got, take the one that's yours.
wear it.
Jacket, tote bag, cap, bag, anything you brought with you. Put it where people can see it. It's yours now, and so is the type.
Nine questions. Answer honestly, the first instinct is usually the right one.
A blank brief lands.
First move?
Read it three times to find what they're actually asking vs. what they wrote
Open a doc and start writing the line before I've finished reading
Close the brief and go fall down a research hole that's barely related
01/09
A festival talk pulls you in.
What hooked you?
A weird reference the speaker dropped that I'm now googling under the table
The craft. I'm screenshotting the work, reverse-engineering how they did it
The case-study logic. The one insight that cracked the whole thing
02/09
An idea you love tests badly with the audience.
You…
Defend it. Good work is ahead of the room; they'll catch up
Get weirdly excited: why did it bomb? There's a better question in there
Fair's fair, the data's the data: rework it toward what actually moves people
03/09
Your camera roll is mostly…
Cracked pavement, a sign in a language I don't speak, a stranger's jacket
Frameworks, charts, that one slide I'll reuse till I die
Half-finished stuff and screenshots of things I want to make
04/09
The compliment that lands hardest:
05/09
A better idea appears mid-project.
You…
Drop everything. The new one's alive and I can't unsee it
Cool, but does it serve the goal better? If not, park it
Chase it for an hour just to see where it goes, then decide
06/09
Your ideal collaborator is the one who…
Shows up with a reference from anime, fishing, old packaging, somewhere I'd never look
Takes my half-baked thing and goes "what if it was bigger/weirder" until it's good
Asks, when I'm three rabbit holes deep, "okay but what are we actually trying to do"
07/09