I’m going to start by saying I’m a design hack. A recovering business development guy, who always wanted to be a creative. I broke into Creative as a Bus. Dev. or salesguy. A source of almost constant agitation to our creative team, because of my “contributions” to client creative. As the salesguy, it was my promise to our clients on the line. So I “got involved” in projects. By the time I wrapped things up with the agency, I’d begun writing copy, and building websites to fill in gaps in our offering.
In 2012 I was sent an invitation to be part of a beta launch for a new creative tool called CANVA. As I was trying to grow my personal creative offering, while growing the business offering of my shop, my hands had felt tied due to my lack of design skills – and my lack of love for adobe and the apple operating system. CANVA changed all that for millions of business minded, creative neophytes. At the Inbound 2016 conference, there had to be close to a thousand attendees crammed into a huge conference room to learn about CANVA tricks, hacks and work-arounds. The primary take-away from the CANVA breakout session was that if you’re a digital marketer and NOT using CANVA, you’re a hack.
Having said all this, I fall in the middle regarding what should go into creative. That middle is more or less determined by the total number of creative assets needed to pull off a campaign and their respective purpose. Should big-deal, brand-spanking-new homepages get the audacious adobe design suite treatment? Yes absolutely. Do blogpost thumbnail images require the same level of creative grandeur? Hard no. These more pedestrian graphic elements should of course conform to brand trends and guidelines and achieve a level of professionalism, and represent your brand appropriately. But if you’re a digital marketer suffering from imposter syndrome as you nervously attempt your first landing page design, or blog thumbnail in CANVA, you really shouldn’t do that.
So in the end, there is a time and a place for creative pomposity, and a time to be professional, clean and standard. Knowing when and where to apply which is the real trick, and can save you time and heartache. Not knowing can sink a business. A client’s business, or your own.
