The Standards: Creative Sprints (Part 2 of 2)
Danny on why waiting for inspiration to strike is a drain on time, money, and your precious life-force.
We think being creative in a commercial context is a mixture of art and science.
You need inspiration. But you need processes that convert it into work and the discipline to follow them, too. In the first half of this article we saw how LaM uses the start of a Creative Sprint to diverge: to go very wide, very fast. Now it’s time to bring it all home. Let’s converge. This is the second Standard for Creative Sprints.
Creative Sprint Stages:
01: Sprinting Start ✓02: Explore ✓03: Exploit
04: Elevate
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.
Creative Sprint Stage 3: Exploit
You know that feeling when you’re utterly convinced that the thing you’re making is the single best thing ever, and that no other idea could possibly come remotely close? That’s what tends to happen at the start of a creative sprint. It’s powerful. It’s intoxicating. It’s also why this phase (Exploit) is so important.
In-between the Explore and the Exploit stages is what Don Draper would probably call the Overnight Test. It’s the part where we put the work down for a bit. The endorphins fade, the dust settles. We take a figurative breath, and then look at the work afresh. We stand back and squint a bit. We may or may not do some chin-stroking. Mainly we just ask ourselves: what’s actually working here?
That level of objectivity allows us to dig up the best bits from the Explore phase and craft them into a cogent expression of the brand idea (meme). We usually start with more ideas and design than we’ll ultimately need so we can work with, or exploit, those materials, refining, whittling, rearranging and removing until the idea and design system clicks into place. Along the way, we’re constantly thinking back to the brand’s core idea (meme). Does the design system express the idea? Is it memetic, or (if you prefer) is it an idea that gives us more ideas?
If the answer is yes, we’ll start turning our attention to the artefact we’ll be presenting to the client: the Creative Direction presso (by which we mean “presentation”; please nobody ever use that word again).
Creative Sprint Stage 4: Elevate
So it’s all clicked into place. We have our brand idea (meme), and we’ve proven that we can build a generative design system around it, too. This, then, is the bit where we polish. Imagine the project Slack channel clogging up with snippets of very enthusiastic and very specific design geekery and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the vibe.
We’ll polish up the Creative Direction presentation to a world-class standard. We’ll spin out a bunch of what we call “expressions” – touch points for the brand that show the breadth and depth of the brand system we’ve built. Take a website expression for example: this will be based on best-practice UX and what we know about the project, but it’s not intended to be something that can be approved for dev immediately off the back of the presentation. Rather, we’re aiming to prove that the visual system we’ve created can flex across this channel. The same applies with all our other expressions. The most important thing is that we prove that our system (articulated in the Explanation section), can be used across multiple channels (Expressions) to clearly communicate our meme (Essence).
The secret sauce that makes this all possible is our Atomic Brand System™, but that’s another article.
And just like that: we’ve Sprinted, Creatively! Congratulations.
Curious to see where some of our creative sprints have led us? Good news: case studies are now up on our website. Here’s one. Here’s another. Here’s yet another (we could keep going all day).
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.