I'm Going Off-Brief.

I've been meaning to do this for years. Which is another way of saying I haven't done it or even given myself permission.

I've accumulated ideas, observations, questions, screenshots, half-written essays, things that fascinated me, things that irritated me, and opinions I probably spent far too much time developing.

Most of them ended up in the same imaginary bottle with a very respectable label:

Will get to it eventually and professionally. Eventually is now.

Maybe that's because I'm coming out of one of those career moments that forces you to look around and take inventory. What you believe. What you've learned. What you want to carry forward. And what you absolutely do not.

I've spent more than 20 years in the creative business. I've been a designer, art director, creative director, brand strategist, team leader, presenter, pitcher, mentor, problem solver, occasional therapist, and professional asker of “But why are we doing it that way?”

I've worked inside agencies and organizations, with enormous brands and tiny ones, alongside some extraordinarily talented people.

I've made a lot of things. I've also watched a lot of things get made. That distinction matters.

Because somewhere along the way, I became just as interested in how creative work happens as I am in the work itself. And I've become particularly interested in what happens to creative people inside the systems we've built around them. I've seen environments where talented people become braver, more curious and better at what they do.

I've also seen the opposite. I've watched fear masquerade as accountability. Control masquerade as leadership. Subjectivity masquerade as strategy. I've watched feedback become hearsay, process become politics, and talented people spend more energy navigating the people around the work than actually making the work better.

That's not creative leadership. And I think our industry should be much less polite about saying so. There are leaders who create the conditions for creativity to flourish.

There are also "leaders" who slowly squeeze the life out of creativity while wondering why the work isn't better. That's a big one.

I've worked long enough to know the difference. And yes, I have thoughts.

• Ideas start brave. Then doubt sets in. Somewhere between the spark and the final approval, opinions, politics, fear, feedback, and consensus can slowly sand the edges off an idea until everyone approves—and nobody cares.
  

• Talented creative teams still make mediocre work. Why? Talent is only one ingredient—and sometimes the conditions surrounding the team matter more than the talent sitting inside it.
  

• Creative work is mind work before there’s anything to look at. Thinking, researching, wandering, experimenting, talking, sketching, and staring at the ceiling can look suspiciously like doing nothing in an industry obsessed with utilization and outputs. Does your organization have a perception problem?
  

• Organizations hire creative people—and then systematically remove the conditions they need to be creative. How do Creative Directors protect the time, space, trust, resources, and occasional weirdness their teams need to produce great work?
  

• Creative leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all. Neither are creative people. Great Creative Directors figure out what each person needs to do their best work—when to push, when to protect, when to challenge, and when to get the hell out of the way.
  

• Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Not every opinion is entitled to become a revision. How do we create critique cultures where perspectives are welcomed and expertise still matters—without turning creative reviews into dictatorships or democracies?
  

• Words matter. “Creative Services” says exactly where you think Creative belongs in the hierarchy. If you want Creative to think, challenge, strategize, and lead, stop naming the department like its job is to take everyone else’s order.
  

• Creative Director job postings have become fucking ridiculous. If you're on the job search, you've seen them. Postings increasingly swing between barely defining the role and throwing 30+ bullet points at it—then attaching a salary that doesn’t remotely match the experience, responsibility, or scope.
  

• AI doesn’t replace human connection or human thought. Used thoughtfully, it can be one hell of a creative partner—helping us explore, provoke, iterate, question, and get somewhere we might not have gotten alone.
  

These are the things I think about. Some are consequential. Some decidedly aren't. It's not enough to ask these questions or dispense these thoughts but another to provide some perspective on how we can still succeed.

That's where Off Brief comes in.

A brief, at its best, gives creativity somewhere to go. I've spent a career working from them, challenging them, rewriting them, defending them and occasionally ignoring them.

But not everything interesting needs an objective, deliverable, KPI or approval process. Sometimes curiosity is enough. So this is where I'm giving myself permission to follow it.

I'll write about design. Advertising. Brands. Creative leadership. Culture. Technology. AI. Things I love. Things I don't understand. Things everyone seems to love that I absolutely don't. Color might get an unreasonable amount of attention. There will be rabbit holes.

And there will be mischief.

I'm not starting this because I've figured everything out.

Twenty-plus years in this business has mostly taught me how much there is still worth questioning.

But I've learned some things. I've succeeded. I've failed. I've worked under some shitty and amazing leadership. I've led talented people. I've worked with talented people. I've made things I'm enormously proud of and things I'd happily launch directly into the sun.

I've also learned that experience eventually gives you something more valuable than certainty: perspective.

And after spending a career putting my creativity toward somebody else's brief, I think it's time I made some room for my own.

No client.

No approval process.

No comments consolidated into one PDF.

No waiting until eventually. Note to self: I think I may have just wrote the brief for this blog.

Welcome to Off Brief. On purpose.