The creative industry has a quiet problem. We are producing more work, faster, for more channels than at any point in our history — and most of it looks the same. Brands blur into each other. Campaigns echo campaigns. The visual language of an entire category can shift in a season, and not because anyone reinvented anything. It shifts because everyone is reaching for the same available answer.

This is not a talent problem. The industry is full of talent. It is a process problem, and underneath that, a values problem. Somewhere along the way, we let efficiency become the thing we optimize for, and originality became a nice-to-have we hope falls out of the schedule. It rarely does.

I founded Brand New School to bet the other direction. Originality is not a happy accident at the end of a tight process — it is the product of a process specifically designed to produce it. That process has a name we have used since the beginning, and it is not a metaphor. It is play.

What originality actually is

Originality is the rarest thing in our business and the most valuable. In design and visual communication, it is the moment a solution arrives that nobody — including you — saw coming, and it fits the problem so precisely that the work feels inevitable, in hindsight. Concept and form lock together. The idea generates the visual language; the visual language reinforces the idea, and neither is borrowed.

Work like this attracts the best talent, opens doors to the best clients, and lets a creative company set its own terms. It also outlasts the campaign cycle and becomes the work future decks reference. Derivative work expires the moment the next derivative thing appears. Original work becomes the reference point.

Everyone in our industry says they want this. Almost no one organizes their company to produce it. Not making it any better, the hard truth is, no matter how much they say they want/need it, most clients are afraid of ‘newness’.

The role of play

To make something genuinely new, you have to play with the problem. Not brainstorm it, not workshop it — play with it. Turn it over, take it apart, ask absurd questions of it, follow associations that look like dead ends, sketch the wrong answer on purpose to see what it tells you. Play is how you generate the raw material that originality is eventually built from. There is no shortcut.

Play is also uncomfortable. From the moment a brief lands, the human instinct is to resolve the anxiety of not knowing by producing an answer — any answer. The first idea, the second, the third. These ideas are rarely original. They are available. They are the ideas your training and your peer group and the last campaign you saw have placed within easy reach. They calm you down, and they almost always lead to work that looks like everyone else's.

The hardest discipline in a creative company is staying in the discomfort long enough for something better to surface. Over the years I have come to believe there are really only two types of people in this business: those who are afraid of the unknown and those who thrive in it. Both are essential to original work. The first group are often the most exceptional executors — they make the idea real, beautiful, and finished. The second group are the ones who can sit in the open mode without flinching, who actually enjoy the discomfort of not knowing yet. A creative company needs both, and it needs to be honest about which is which, because the two groups need different things from the process.

I am the second type, to a degree that is probably not healthy. I drive myself mad with every brief — no matter how easy a solution comes to me, I make it purposely harder on myself. I torture the living shit out of myself looking for something better. It is where I am most creative: in the middle of the night, the last one in the gym, refusing to accept the available answer. Mamba mentality, applied to an industry of ideas. Kobe didn't take the open shot if a better one was a beat away. Neither should we.

Whatever success I've had has had very little to do with talent. I am a dog. I am willing to sacrifice almost anything — my health, my friends, my family — to make great work. I made that decision a long time ago, and I can't live with myself any other way. I am not recommending this as a lifestyle. I am saying it because the entire creative industry has organized itself around the polite fiction that originality is a function of talent, when in my experience it is overwhelmingly a function of how much you are willing to put into the problem after the moment most people stop. The companies and the people producing work that actually breaks through are the ones who didn't accept the first answer, the second, or the tenth. That is not glamorous. It is mostly just hours.

Time is the input

The other input originality requires is time. Not infinite time — focused time, protected time, time that hasn't been pre-spent on Slack threads and status updates and revision rounds. The more time you can keep a problem in play, the further you can push the idea past the obvious answers. Experience cuts both ways here: a senior creative knows more, which is useful, but also reaches for known solutions faster, which isn't. Decisiveness — the trait every business celebrates — is, in the early stages of a creative project, often the enemy of originality.

This is why the externalities pressing on our industry matter so much. Tight budgets, compressed schedules, expanding deliverables, the expectation that a single team will solve every problem in every channel — each of these chips away at the time available to play. And when play time disappears, originality goes with it. We end up shipping the first acceptable answer because the first acceptable answer is all the schedule allows. The brand blends in. The work expires. Everyone wonders why.

There is real opportunity in this adversity. A creative company that protects play time as a non-negotiable — that builds its operations, its team structure, and its client relationships around protecting it — has a structural advantage over competitors who have quietly given that ground away.

Two modes: open and closed

About thirty years ago, John Cleese gave a lecture on creativity to a room of British broadcasters. A friend sent me a clip recently and I tracked down the full talk. Most of it confirmed things we already knew at BNS. One part gave us better language for articulating it.

Cleese described two modes a creative person operates in: open and closed. They are both required, and they are not interchangeable.

The open mode is play. You are exploring the problem from many angles, making associations, writing and rewriting, sketching and re-sketching, sitting with ambiguity, allowing things to be silly or wrong on the way to being right. You can do it alone or in groups. The temptation in this mode is to grab the first solution that quiets your anxiety. The discipline is to refuse it.

The closed mode begins when you commit to an idea. Creativity does not stop here — but it changes. It becomes the intelligence of execution and the rigor of craft. How does it look, move, sound, behave across surfaces? What variations earn their place and which get cut? Closed mode is where good ideas become great work, and where great ideas, badly executed, die.

The mistake most creative organizations make is living in closed mode. Everything becomes a deadline; every meeting demands a decision; every conversation collapses toward an answer. There’s no protected open/play mode anywhere on the calendar—only framing, presentation theatre, and case-study polishing. Creativity gets treated as an output of pressure instead of an input you schedule. Then the company wonders why the work is competent and forgettable.

The other mistake is running open mode forever — never committing, never crafting, never shipping. Romantic, academically honorable, but it doesn't build a business or a body of work.

The companies that make original work, consistently, learn to switch deliberately between the two and protect the integrity of each.

The standards we hold ourselves to

What does any of this mean operationally? At BNS, it means a set of standards we hold ourselves to. They are not aspirations. They are the things we have learned, often the hard way, are required if originality is going to be the consistent output of a creative company rather than an occasional surprise.

Build a playground, and redefine failure inside it. Play requires permission to be wrong. If failure inside the open mode is treated the same as failure inside the closed mode, people stop playing. The ideas get safer. The work gets duller. A creative company has to make explicit that exploration is the job, not a detour from it.

Give every creative a seat at the table. Originality does not come from a single author handing down ideas. It comes from a wider set of minds engaging the problem directly, including direct contact with the client and the context. Filtering the problem through too many layers strips it of the texture that good ideas hook into.

Treat experience as a useful input, not a ranking system. The best ideas come from anywhere, and part of the creative leader's job is to make sure they can actually reach the table. That means assembling teams with diverse backgrounds, diverse disciplines, and deliberately diverse levels of experience — and then refusing to let seniority decide which ideas get oxygen. Experience is overrated as a predictor of originality. It is excellent at telling you what has worked before, which is a different question from what should happen now. I started Brand New School at twenty-three. The work we made then opened the door to everything that followed. I have never forgotten what that meant, and I build the company accordingly.

Allocate playtime to every project. Not as a luxury for the lucky brief — for every brief. Solo time and group time, both. If it isn't on the schedule, it doesn't happen.

Trade some efficiency for creativity, on purpose. A creative company that optimizes purely for efficiency is optimizing itself out of the only thing it sells. The trade has to be conscious and structural, not apologetic.

Balance the room. You need original thinkers and you need exceptional executors. Both. A team weighted entirely toward either one produces predictable failure modes — beautiful execution of derivative ideas, or brilliant ideas that never become real work.

Lead with ideas, not execution. Pitches are won by ideas. Spend the open/closed time accordingly. As a rough split, eighty percent of the early work should be open mode; closed mode comes later and goes faster than people expect when the idea is right.

Teach creativity. It is not a fixed trait. New tools, new frames, new exercises — these can be taught and practiced, and a creative company should be teaching them continuously.

Protect the unknown. The most fragile part of any creative project is the stretch where nobody yet knows the answer. Protect it from premature decisions, from anxious clients, from your own discomfort. That is where the work you will be proud of comes from.