ISSUE #02

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This is going to be a bit of a shorter email as son I’m headed out the door for some camping soon. I still wanted to leave you with a quick thought for the week. If you like this content, please send me an email and let me know!

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Cost is irrelevant (at least for creative work)

Phil Knight reportedly paid an art $35 to Carolyn Davidson for 17.5 hours of work on the original swoosh logo. That’s roughly $265 in today’s money.

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I have no idea how much money Burberry paid Peter Saville to do the sans-serif wordmark/rebrand (that they’ve now since turfed for yet another direction). I'm sure it was much more than $265.

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The reality is — for creative projects at least — that the cost doesn’t matter.

I’ve seen great work done on the cheap, and so-so projects work that cost a lot of money. I’ve also seen (much more often I might add) sub-par work done on a budget and great work done for larger budgets.

As a "client" or as a business looking to get creative work done, your budget matters less than you think.

I believe what matters much more is making good decisions.

Good decisions aren’t answering the questions, “Does it look cool?”, or “Do my buddies like it?”, or even, “Will it win an award?” Your designer or agency might want that last outcome, but that’s not your goal as the decision-maker in a venture.

Your goal is to answer one question: does the work push you closer to or further away from the core attributes and character of who you are as a business?

That’s really what matters.

Apparently Phil Knight said he didn’t love the logo, “but maybe it’d grow on him”, a line they borrowed in the recent movie “Air”. I don't know if that's apocryphal or not.

What mattered to Knight at the time, was launching a business, and having something to put on the shoe that differentiated his company from his competitors. In that moment that was the outcome that pushed him forward.

Keep in mind: In Nike’s life as a company, I’m sure there’s many more times where they’ve spent A LOT of money on creative/design. I mean, look how big Wieden + Kennedy is.

I’d encourage you to not be drawn to either cheap OR expensive creative work. Instead, I’d focus my resources on knowing my company and my attributes in the market (or what is “on brand”), and working on making great decisions.

I’m not neither here nor there on AI, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that the cost of creative will continue to trend lower. Even with AI though, you still have to in making good decisions, and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.