The Standards: Creative Sprints (Part 1 of 2)
Danny on how to avoid making medium-wattage work.
A Creative Sprint at Love and Money is – how do you say? – a vibe.
Clients and newbies to the team are almost always blown away by how quickly we’re able to go from abstract strategy to tangible creative. But how do we make all that intense creativity add up to something coherent? How does this whole endeavour stay on the rails? This is the first Standard for Creative Sprints.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
Regular readers will know that we think of brands as memes – powerful ideas that can self-replicate in the digital world. You can think of a Creative Sprint as the place where we road test a meme. We kick the tires, peep under the hood, and take it for a spin. Is the core idea clear, or is it too complex? Does it dead-end quickly, or does it lead to more ideas?
To answer these questions, we test. We play. We creatively sprint, you might say. Over the course of a few days, we’ll carry out a focused, collaborative, creative deep-dive centred around the brand meme. Cursors will fly. Ideas will be traded. Directions will be repurposed, built upon or turned completely upside down.
But all that creative energy can easily tip into chaos, or (even worse in our opinion) “sort-of” ideas, all halfway and fuggy and medium-wattage-ish. Tom Hanks once said, “The rules are what make it fun”, and we agree. And so, to keep things just-enough on track, we break our Creative Sprints down into four core stages.
Creative Sprint Stage 1: Sprinting Start
The purpose of a Sprinting Start is to set the direction for the upcoming sprint. The Strategy Lead will distill a few meme directions (we call these proto-memes, because it sounds smart and is also technically accurate) from the client workshops. The Design Lead or Creative Director will decide on the strongest creative and visual interpretation of these memes, and will use references or quick design sketches to map out the territory for the next stage. We try and do this in a way that leaves the design team room to bring their own builds, challenges and ideas, providing an opportunity for the strategy to be honed based on design feedback. A degree of ambiguity is fine. A degree of confusion is not. Sprinting Start materials typically consist of:
Essence: Also known as the meme. The core deliverable from strategy.
i.e. Energy To WorkOne Trick: The central visual idea that informs the visual language. Ideally, the same as the Essence.
i.e Transfer Of EnergyVisual Synonyms: Additional words, if required, to help articulate the area for visual exploration
i.e Dynamic, ElectricDesign Principles: A first pass at the design principles which will end up comprising the core argument during the creative direction presentation. These may change a little during the sprint.
ie. Positively Charged, Hard-Working, Progressive
Creative Sprint Stage 2: Explore
This is bit where we diverge. In a sense, this is where the Creative Sprint proper really starts. Explorations are based on the brand meme and Sprinting Start™ materials.
We start with a group brief + introduction on the context. Usually, the Partnership Lead who’s managing the job will take the team through the brief, setting high-level context, outlining timelines and clarifying deliverables. The Strategy Lead or Creative Director introduces the team to the brand meme. This is the first time the meme has been released to a large group, and it can be a delicate moment. Non-plussed silence and furrowed brows? Not a good sign. Nods, smiles, and general, “oooh, I get it” vibes? That’s what we’re after.
Then … we just let it rip. Usually we do this in two sprint blocks. We’ll spend ~30-60 minutes building on the sprinting start materials as a group, before taking the back half of the block for heads down time.
The second Explore block begins with an all-hands check-in where each team member talks through their ideas and experiments. We’ll still be in explore mode, so we deliberately don’t shut any directions down (unless they’re deviating from the meme). This is about the cross-pollination of ideas. It’s about being inspired. High energy! Intoxicated by the possibilities! Etc. With these sprints, we strive to create a culture of “Collaborative Competition”. That means it’s the ideas, or the memes, that are in competition, not individual people.
And just like that, congratulations! You are half way through a LaM Creative Sprint. In part two we’ll talk through the final two stages of a Creative Sprint: Exploit and Elevate.
01: Sprinting Start ✓02: Explore ✓03: Exploit
04: Elevate
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles on what some of these Standards are and how they help us Make Room For Magic. If you like what you’ve heard and want to see us in action with your next project, you can book a time with Joe (South Hemisphere) via this link or Adnaan (North Hemisphere) via this link.