Years ago, while in EO, I picked up a little nugget that finally gave language to why some teams work, and others quietly self-destruct. It’s not a personality test. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s just a way to figure out how people show up when the work actually starts.
It’s been effectively eleven years since we launched FoxFuel, and honestly, I’ve never struggled with the vision. Yes, I probably should have done this at the ten-year mark, but doing this on 11 is a nice homage to Spinal Tap.
After enough years as a creative director, you accept two things. No one is entirely sure what you do. You are absolutely certain you are doing it wrong at least 30 percent of the time.
Christmas is strange. We cover our homes in lights, glitter, and tiny figurines, and somehow call it tradition. We made five mood boards to lean into that glorious chaos. Some are charming, some are chaotic.
If you look at the world’s most recognizable logos completely out of context, they’re almost hilariously unrelated to the companies behind them. A swoosh isn’t a shoe. A bitten apple isn’t a computer. A mermaid has never brewed a cup of coffee in her life.
In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a frame doesn’t just exist. It feels like a painting that stood up, stretched, and walked onto the set.
I finished The Bear a few months ago, and I keep thinking about it in the most inconvenient places. It’s not a show that changes your life, but it does make you notice the chaos behind the craft and the obsession it takes to make something work.
Somewhere along the way, agencies decided that the more you suffer, the better the work. The late nights, the seventh round of “quick tweaks,” the group Slack chat that never sleeps, all of it celebrated like a badge of honor.
Every few years, designers panic like it’s the end of the world. People who think design means picking a PowerPoint template are writing think pieces about creativity’s demise. But the more I hear about the future of design, the more I think about its past.
It usually starts with silence. A designer hears the brief, nods, disappears, and reemerges four days later with something beautiful, emotional, cinematic, and completely wrong.