I like to tell my marketing clients to think of themselves as concept artists & moodboard designers for the cinematic universe that they’d like to build. I try to encourage them to do the minimum amount of work necessary to produce their desired vibes. (Ideally you’d have lots of resources, but even so, it’s helpful to Think Scrappy.)
Making lists of things you like might seem relatively trivial, but it’s a great 1st step to becoming creative. (Two possible 2nd steps come to mind: articulate why you like the things in the list, and/or try to make some crappy imitations of the things in the list. Both are very worth doing, and I highly recommend it.)
Here’s Philippe Starck describing step 2a elevated to the final form: “‘If I think it has to be pink, it’s pink, and here’s why.’ I explain the difference between pink and green, and all the types of pinks and all the types of green, because I know my job.”
Quentin Tarantino: “What they do have to show is a high regard for their own opinion. They’ve learned to break down a movie. They understand what they like and don’t like about a film.”
So. Make a list of the products that inspire you. Don’t pretend that you don’t have any influences, or that you’re the first to ever do what you’re doing. That’s false and unhelpful. In 1998, Steve Jobs said, “The whole strategy for Apple now is, if you will, to be the Sony of the computer business.” Everything is a remix. Your goal is not to be free of influences, but to remix good influences into something that is useful and relevant to the context that you’re operating in.
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Here’s a little worldbuilding from a video game that I love, Horizon Zero Dawn. Not only do each of the tribes have a coherent aesthetic in their clothes, this is “full stack” and reflected in their architecture and all of the elements that go into their design.
Sometimes at this point I hear from people, well, isn’t aesthetics just… trinkets, wallpaper, superficial stuff? It can be, but it can also be a lot more than that. Done properly, it should go “all the way through”.
A joke I’ve heard from time to time is that we already live in a cyberpunk dystopia, but without the cool clothes, cool cars, and cool scenery. Framed another way, we live in a world that has clunky, janky, inconsistent, incoherent aesthetics. This is painful to people! We want to experience beauty and splendor. Coherent aesthetics is deeply satisfying in an emotional way. Part of the reason Apple is such a valuable company is that they’ve elevated their aesthetics to the point of basically being a luxury brand. This is not an accident – their SVP of Retail, Angela Ahrendts, was previously the CEO of Burberry’s. And she was the highest paid person at Apple, even more than Tim Cook. They know how much this stuff matters!
This might not be so relevant if you’re building say, B2B software. But generally speaking, if you’re doing anything that people are going to look at, it’s worth putting a little time and effort into making things that people can feel proud to show off. For a B2B operation, this might be more about recruiting. McKinsey sells priesthood, and so much of priesthood is about theatre. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t… maybe I’ll update this post more in the future.
Regardless, the directive is: build the moodboard. Lay out your influences, at least internally. If you don’t choose your elements, they will be chosen for you by forces (including randomness) that don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.