 Great photo by Brett Sayles Whether you’re a creative professional, have creatives under you, or simply need to hire other creatives, you face a common challenge: You want to get the most creative bang for your buck.
Or your client’s buck. Same thing, here. This is easier said than done. Creative professionals know what they’re doing; that’s how they’ve managed to carve out a career in professional services. So shouldn’t you simply trust them to do the right thing? Of course you should. But if it were that simple, there would be no need for this article. Direction... give or take Every single creative assignment begins, necessarily, with direction. That creative person needs to know what to do. Where to go. How to proceed. They can’t work in a vacuum. And this—right at the first step—is where it gets tricky. Do it right, you get great stuff, and big bang for your buck. You can guess the other half of this equation. Or maybe not. It’s not just that you won’t get great creative out of your creative person(s), but you’ll waste time, energy, and effort. You’ll get frustrated, as you receive deliverables that don’t meet your expectations. Importantly, your creative person will get frustrated, too. And that’s not good. We hate to generalize, but we’ve been in this biz forever, so here goes: Creative people are higher-strung, and thinner-skinned, than most people. We like to say that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” In other words, their fuses are shorter. They’re like professional athletes: They like to perform. But if you, as their coach, keep calling the wrong plays, they’ll not only fail, but they’ll burn out. And they’ll resent you, since they won’t respect your judgment. So the direction that you give is everything. Just as important, if not more important, than the direction you give... is the direction you don’t give. And this, by the way, was the impetus for this entire article. Setting the stage As we’d noted above, creative people like to perform. Which points up a convenient analogy, beyond, say, athletes. Know who else likes to perform? Yep. Performers. As in, actors. If you’ve never directed actors before, or even if you have, there’s a cardinal rule—or perhaps cardinal sin—when it comes to directing them, and that is: “Never give your actor a line-reading.” Huh? What’s that mean? And how does any of this translate to, say, getting a good layout or web page? A line-reading is when the director actually acts out a given line of dialogue, telling the actor, “Do it like that.” It’s an easy knee-jerk reaction for a director to make when he or she doesn’t hear the right phrasing or intonation, but doing it is the kiss of death. Why? Not only does a line-reading “talk down” to your actor (“You don’t know this as well as I do, so let me explain”), but it also “pollutes” their process by planting an impossible-to-ignore version in their head from the get-go which makes them utterly miserable. It short-circuits their own, internal creative process. They will hate-hate-hate you for it. Same thing goes for creative people who work for you. Never tell them: “Use this font” or “Add a six-point black border.” It’s tantamount to giving them a line reading. So what do you do? Do the opposite. Talk around what you want. Describe it aspirationally. “Here’s what we’re looking to accomplish, in broad strokes.” Stay out of the weeds. And challenge them: “Think you can figure out a creative way to solve this?” Thin-skinned though they may be, creative pros like to show off, in their own way, and tossing down the gauntlet, appropriately, plays to their sense of pride and entices them to rise to the challenge, to outdo themselves. To show off. All of this is hard to do, but boy is it ever worth the effort. You’ll get better results, and improve your working relationship with the talent at the same time. Need help with interpreting, and giving, the appropriate creative direction? Contact us. We surmount these kinds of challenges, for our clients, all the time.
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