Creativity and Efficiency

All Art Is Commercial Art (Mostly)

When a young, plucky artist decides on a career in creativity, we all have dreams of making meaningful, personal work that speaks to people. Somewhere along the way, provided we stick it out through the early grinding years in our first design jobs, we learn that to keep that dream alive, we must learn to balance other motivations. There’s the profitability of the organization we are working for, the time constraints set by the client’s needs or the constraints of their budget, and sometimes the whims of an overly ambitious creative or art director.

At Mile6, we find it helpful to rank the end user as a top priority. At some point, we learn about the politics of centering our life around our creative impulse and how complex the forces are that create commercial art. The most successful designers we know find a balance by working efficiently. To have time to create great work, we need time to think. Creativity is an intellectual process, after all, but we can not afford to agonize over every creative decision we make, or get too attached to our specific bias. 

The Generational Challenge

Every generation or so, it feels like the industry of commercial art is reinventing itself. The biggest leaps forward always seem to surround integrating a new technology into the mix that allows creatives to work more efficiently. Changes like movable type, offset printing, modern design software, and, most recently, generative AI always land on the scene like a bomb and have a way of clearing out an old guard and becoming a marker in the industry of “when it all shifted.” Some people decry the innovation as the end of the craft as we know it. Still, within half a decade or so, it’s hard to imagine the industry without the new tool. All of its detractors are, for the most part, out to pasture with a few curiosities still keeping the old way of doing it alive for posterity. It’s best not to look at generational sea change as an inherently good or bad thing. If we are really making commercial art, we have to give innovation its place in making great work more profitable. The operative work in that previous sentence is “great,” which the work rarely is when the change happens.

We all remember what the work looked like in the early days of Photoshop. If you don’t, just go to one of your Gen X veteran designer friends and ask them if they still have examples from their old portfolio. There was A LOT of overuse of the gradient tool. It makes sense because, until that point, most gradients were generated by complex ink mixing on huge rollers to achieve that effect. Suddenly, it happened in less than a second.

In commercial art applications, it’s easy to fall for the allure of technological breakthroughs as simply a way of working faster. This is a mistake because, in time, the tools develop, as does the breadth of the aesthetics designers discovered they could get from it. The point is that creatives need to incorporate a tool into their creative mindset; given the opportunity, they will always turn it into something positive. The profession advances as we integrate these new technologies, and they improve BOTH our efficiency AND our creative language.

Keeping It Fresh

The best way to avoid burnout or irrelevancy is to employ a host of strategies to stave off the darkness. There’s no single thing that you can do to sustain the spark for the life of a career, and unfortunately, we’ve found that you kind of need to rotate techniques to keep a fresh perspective. Here are a few that we like to use. 

Look at other kinds of art!

On our last company retreat, the design department walked from our office at 2 Liberty Place in Philadelphia to the Barnes Museum to look at their massive collection. It was an enriching experience for all of us, and we still reference it occasionally. When you’re looking at a sculpture or any other art form, the direct relationship to design may not be instantly clear. Looking at “Entrance of The Port of Honfleur” by Georges Seurat can give us a deeper understanding of how our colors relate to each other in smaller views, like on the phone. A close view of the painting “Masts” by Charles Demuth can teach us about the direct relationship between composition and letter forms. All of these things enrich us as we return to our computer screens to begin creating, and you just might see something that gives you a whole new perspective on your work.

Have Constructive Critique

We have a rule, if your note has no actionable direction for the receiver, then rethink it until it does. We don’t give critiques like “I don’t like the color,” “This looks boring,” or the dreaded “Can you make it pop?”. None of those things help the listener understand how you think they should go with the work. So, “I don’t like the color” becomes “This color combo is a bit warm for their branding.” “This looks boring” becomes, “I think you need to add more visual elements to liven up the composition.” “Can you make it pop” usually means that the person needs to spend more time thinking to themselves about why they don’t like something. The answer is rarely ever “start over,” and the conversations can be more of an inspiration to improve rather than descending into an argument. 

Focus On the Real Audience

This is huge for us at Mile6. If we focus our creative output on mainly pleasing the client, we are constantly building for a similar type. Our agency has a broad array of industries that we service, but we deal most often with marketing teams within those industries. That’s one user type, but if we also hold up and examine the individual users of those digital products we get a MUCH more diverse set of people to consider and work for. This helps us to consider things like education levels, life experience, social class, and relationship to technology. One day, you can build a design system that retirees will mostly use, and the next, you may create an interface for children in an elementary school. When we value the end user’s experience first, we enter a world of limitless creative interest.

Jake Trunk

Creative Strategy Director

Jake Trunk is our Creative Strategy Director. He brings a passion for creativity, sound design principles, and a desire to provide delightful digital experiences. Jake is always eager to walk our clients through the process of understanding their users, identifying the users’ needs, and creating digital products that help them accomplish their goals. His aim is to always provide innovative and intuitive solutions to digital problems. Jake brings skills in all kinds of creative mediums from digital illustration to website prototyping, and he believes that the muscles of creativity grow stronger not only with repetition but with stretching. Outside of work, Jake can be found in his art studio working on his latest paintings, or spending time with his wife and two small kids.