The Standards: An Introduction
Making incredible creative work unavoidable.
While reinventing brands is the cornerstone of our industry, reinventing the wheel is a waste of everyone’s time. So how can we think outside the box without fucking up the die-lines?
As a creative agency, we’re responsible for leveraging our creativity to empower our clients. And while clients (and our parents) might view “creativity” as some ethereal witchcraft, we believe exceptional creative work is unavoidable if you have the right structures in place.
That’s why we’ve codified our creative best practice in The Standards. They operate as a manual on creating excellent work that works, every time. They’re a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
Why The Standards?
One of the best examples of a system that balanced freedom and structure in service of creativity was The Real Book and The Standards it contained. It was a low-quality, illegally-produced collection of songs that standardised the most important pieces of each (the chords and melody for the “A” section that everyone recognises) without becoming prescriptive. It’s enough to get the players on the same page, while leaving the most room possible for improvisation.
But this concept isn’t unique to beatniks. The need for clearly defined and proven processes is a fairly universal requirement. From the pocket you put your phone in to your coffee order, they take the guesswork out of the minutiae of our daily experience and let you focus on the important things. Even better, they can take the guesswork out of good work. We’ve already written a bit about what The Standards are here, but we’ve only covered them in broad strokes.
So in the interest of being Hypercollaborative™, we’re going to zero in on the specific Standards we use day-to-day to provide you with a peek behind the curtain and (hopefully) some tricks to use in your own agency.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles on what some of these Standards are and how they help us maximise room for magic, so you can too. If you want to see how we can improve your next project with them, you can book a time with Adnaan via this link.
In the meantime let us know what Standards you set that allow your organisation to exercise its agency. Get in the comments.
N.B. You may have noticed we’ve been moving our email lists between platforms, to see which one’s best (and of course it’s Substack). If you’re not into getting emails like this from us, feel free to unsubscribe, although you’ll miss out on our Standards for How We Pitch, Brand Strategy and Creative Sprints.