[Ed. note: Once a month, Imprint sponsor Veer will offer tips for creative professionals.]
In our studio, we call it self-editing. That moment when you’re about to share a new idea, but you have second thoughts and keep it to yourself.
Our advice: be fearless. Some of your ideas will fall flat, but others will soar.
A creative team that cares about quality is a critical audience, out of necessity. But a good creative team is also collaborative, and sees new ideas as starting points for conversations. Nobody expects an great idea to arrive fully formed. Anything that sparks discussion has the potential to be reshaped by the group into something that works.
When self-editing happens at the team level, our advice is the same: be fearless. You might find that your fifth favorite idea is your client’s first choice, or that enthusiasm from your creative director is exactly the validation you need to pursue an idea further.
The best example from Veer’s history is a campaign called The Very Secret Order of Creatives Understanding, which narrowly escaped being discarded during brainstorming because “they’ll never go for it.”. It was later fished out of the discard pile, and went on to be extremely popular with our audience.
Grab your own copy of the Very Secret Order’s member handbook [PDF, 5.4 MB] which contains even more best practices, encouragement, and diversions for creatives.
