How do the visionaries do it?
Hi I’m Mikey, and this is Creative Diction, a writing and self-improvement side-project aimed at helping my-own-damn-self understand how brilliant leaders from different creative fields are able to consistently, clearly, and effectively guide others toward producing great work.
I am not one of those people. As an introverted designer with a business mind, I had a knack for understanding what my clients needed, and pretty rapidly designing materials that solved their communication woes. I found a niche within the tech industry designing presentations for marketing leaders, and I absolutely love it.
As business grew, I found myself needing to delegate more of that work to others.
Holy hell, this is challenging.
Only in trying to pull work out of other designers did I realize that my entire process, to that point in my career, had taken place inside my own head. All of the exploration, brainstorming, iteration, trial, error, ah-ha breakthroughs had occurred intuitively, instinctively, internally.
For several years I tried to guide others. Calling myself a Creative Director, I turned out to be something more of a shitty translator. A confused, confusing, verbose, meandering, inarticulate, indecisive rambler who would get super frustrated with the design outputs, like “this isn’t what I asked for.”
Pretty sure nobody knows what I’d asked for.
Those poor designers.
“Screw it, I’ll do it myself” became my go-to way to make sure we were delivering work to meet our clients’ needs and deadlines. That doesn’t scale.
Eventually, I had to let go a bit, step out of the way, and promote a much more talented, much more patient creative leader, Allie Wilson, to take the helm as GhostRanch’s Executive Creative Director. I relegated myself to working on the business stuff.
From time to time, I still get pulled into client projects, and I’m reminded just how hard this creative direction thing is. I find myself constrained by my own limited vocabulary, falling back on some of the same cliche or empty asks I’ve overheard many clients repeat over the years:
“Let’s give it some energy”
“Try to tell a story”
“Make it pop”
That’s tough to actually work with.
“You teach best what you most need to learn.”
But I’ve seen some straight up legendary marketing leaders come in and get what they need, almost every time. These are the ones with both the vision and vocabulary to guide others toward great results, damn near every time.
On the other side, the clients who come in the “I’ll know it when I see it” camp are the biggest red flags ever. They’re commonly frustrated, and so are the designers attempting to make them happy, after round eleven.
I don’t want to be that dude anymore.
This project, Creative Diction, aka The Art Director’s ABC’s, is my attempt to develop a broader understanding of creative inputs needed to guide better outputs. I want to expand my own terminology toolkit to be able to communicate with more clarity. I’m going to study great works, deconstruct them, and meet with inspiring creative leaders to borrow from them some of their go-to tricks and tools.
We’re better than “make it pop.”
Let’s guide great work.
Calling all Creative Directors!
Know a CD or Art Director or Copywriter or CMO or other creative leader who knows werdz real good, and stands out in their ability to pull epic shit out of their teammates, time and time again? Please, shoot me a message and let’s talk!
Follow along, eh?
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Thanks a ton!!
