New Year, New Craft?

The start of a new year provides a chance to ponder the 365 days ahead of us. The sales of gym memberships and juicers go through the roof. New notebooks are bought to be filled with adventures, and new hobbies are researched.

This excitement over what could be is incredibly infectious. It’s a time of imagining and allowing one's mind to accept that anything is possible. It’s a time for goal-making and goal-finalising. It’s a time to look at what you’ve done, and a chance to continue on the path or change directions.  

To add to this excitement, LBB has posed the question - “What do your craft resolutions look like?” 

In finding out, we spoke to creatives from all walks of their careers about what they plan to do with their craft for 2024. 

Elle Bullen - partner - Bullfrog 

According to ChatGPT, a fitting New Year's resolution for an advertising copywriter wanting to better their craft is to “diversify skills and stay current with industry trends. Specifically, focus on mastering emerging platforms, employ data-driven optimisation techniques, enhance storytelling abilities, grasp visual communication principles, and understand user experience.”

Which isn’t wrong. But it’s also about as inspiring as toenail maintenance. 

And while I will probably use that very platform to proof these ramblings, my New Year’s resolution this year is to use my brain rather than bots when it’s time to craft copy that people actually want to read. 

And because every creative brain needs inspiration, I plan to soak it up from anywhere and everywhere - weird Google reviews, the never-ending word pile you have to scroll past before getting to an online recipe, deep subreddits about cults, the books that have been next to my bed for two years, the Wednesday AND the Saturday Aldi special buys, fortune cookies en masse, everything on my shampoo bottle, Nora Roberts' back catalogue, the long plaques under stuff in the museum, and the deserted Facebook pages of colleagues who forgot to delete them.

Steve Leadbeater - head of design and craft - Clemenger BBDO  

It feels like there’s no such thing as business as usual when technology and client demands change so quickly. Maybe that’s why the fundamentals of designing communications can get lost in the noise.

It sounds obvious, but I want to create work that has the best chance of delivering our message. For me, it helps to think of the audience as distracted, fatigued, and even suspicious. When designing for this audience things need to be crystal clear to function.

But make no mistake, the discipline of designing for clarity isn’t joyless. Far from it. Fun goes a looooong way in the process and the design itself. This year I plan to play more. 

The age-old battle between design that’s ‘cool’ and ‘unanimously tolerated’ continues to rage. They’re both dangerous. It should be what serves the idea and the delivery of it. I’ll be handling design trends with care this year. Though they push us forward and help us understand the visual landscape, when they get in the way of the idea they’re offensively hollow. 

Sometimes the best work comes from giving up while also not giving in. Yes, absorb the brief on paper. Create an ‘appropriate’ response. But then, I ignore the research and just go with my gut. This is where the exciting stuff happens. For some reason this tends to only work after the initial slog... 

My hope is that designing in 2024 will be less about tools and more about care.

Jess McLure - art director & designer - Paper Moose

The art of imperfection.

You know when you see a piece of art, design or craft that is irresistibly textural you have to touch it? You might lean in for inspection. Perhaps a little too close, and you go cross-eyed. Dizzy with excitement, you take a snap. You know full well you’ll forget the photo exists, but you take it anyway. You take it because 

1) your pinterest board is a hot mess but… 

2) you want to embed this magnificent piece of visual candy into your brain, hoping it will inspire your next creative project. Maybe this isn’t a normal reaction, but it's how my weirdo art director brain responds to handmade imperfection. 

99% of my work is done on screen these days – concepting, scamps, moodboards, mock ups etc. aided with AI. And I’m not complaining, it’s certainly efficient. But sometimes it’s a little too perfect when it comes to craft. There’s something emotional and arresting about work that’s a little imperfect. It feels authentic, unique, and it always has a surprising visual element. I can’t help but fall in love with a beautifully lettered headline, where each juicy letter could stand as its own artwork. Or an illustrated key visual or animation that’s coloured in ferociously with markers, pencils, or crayon (digital or analogue). Whatever the medium, I think we have a wonderful opportunity to elevate our ideas with a hand-made quality. A quality that makes you double take followed by an overwhelming urge to photograph the thing! So that’s my goal for this year. To embrace humanising the craft. And to continue filling up my phone with inspo’ I’ve been gawking at. 

Georgie Parchert - copywriter - Innocean 

When your job title is ‘creative’, you go to work with the expectation to be just that. And most of the time, I am. And I love it. The downside? Putting all your “best ideas ever” to bed when things inevitably fall over, because of clients, budgets or just plain bad luck.

Enter 2024: the year of not relying on my work to be my only creative outlet. This was the best, and most obvious, piece of advice I received in 2023. Taking the pressure off work and finding new ways to be creative that aren’t strictly copywriting, not only for myself but for the sake of continuing to love my job.

 I plan to do this in two ways: something new and something different.

Something new. Picking up a paintbrush and closing down my laptop. If I’m branching outside of work for creativity, I’m starting with a completely new medium.

Something different. Masterclasses. From screenplays and children’s books to poetry, maybe even slam! poetry! I’ll be taking more writing courses that aren’t tied to advertising.

Alex Creamer - creative director - Interbrand Australia

I’ve always found making time within a project for solo or group thinking to be invaluable. Truth be told, that was harder than ever in 2023—not surprising when we consider the economic challenges, with budgets tightening and projects invariably getting shorter in response. This year I’m keen to carve out more moments to listen and think. The best work comes when there’s space and time for everyone’s voice to be heard, and I’m keen to make more room wherever possible for this to happen in 2024.

In ’23, we partnered with nature company Unyoked to investigate if the normal ways we operate today are conducive to developing original and creative work. We’ve been asking questions like: Are things like technology, emails and teams a help or a hinderance? Can stepping out of the office change the way we see things? Does working alone help us push thinking, or stifle it? Can having access to nature help us stay refreshed and inspired?

The report will launch early this year, but in the meantime we’ll keep challenging and experimenting with the ways we work to understand what makes the perfect environment for creative excellence.

I want to explore! In recent years, I’ve found hobbies like gardening on the weekends to be a good balance to my day job. It helps me reset and reflect on things that might have sprouted (sorry) during the week. But there is only so much inspiration to be found at the bottom of a flower pot. So this year I want to get out more and stay on top of exhibitions, movies and the like—take in something new every weekend!

Naturally we need to continue to harness the opportunities that AI will bring; how it intertwines with our processes more seamlessly and how we can use it in a responsible yet creative way.

As the antidote to the political and economic challenges of the past 3-4 years, I think we’ll continue to see friendly, personality-led brands take centre stage. This might pull from the comforts and familiarity of nostalgia, or through character brands and personified assets. We’ve seen this already with the Apple Vision Pro ad that reflects on goggles-gone-by before fast-forwarding to the present day. The rebrand of Reddit is another good example, opting to elevate Snoo, their avatar/logo, into a fully blown mascot.

Liam Annert - sound designer - Rumble 

This year I’d like to create more sounds from scratch instead of relying on existing sound libraries to find the perfect sound. There’s something exciting about recording your own sounds for a project as you can get it just the way you want it from the source, instead of editing it to perfection until it sounds right. It’s also a great opportunity to play around with different recording techniques and see what really works and what doesn’t. With that in mind, I’d also like to master more of the plugins we have at our disposal. I’d say at the moment I don’t use about 30% of the plugins on our system. Starting out, there was nothing quite like buying a new plug-in and just experimenting with it for hours to understand its capabilities and characteristics.

I think this year will see more and more AI-generated voiceovers finding their way onto projects. I heard some pretty convincing ones last year that made me second guess whether they were real or generated. I think they’re great for guides to cut edits too for timing purposes but I’m certain that it won’t replace professionals. There is a certain skill to the craft of voice overs that a computer can’t replicate, and a human connection with creatives that is simply non-existent through the use of AI. After all, we’re talking to fellow humans and not robots.

Meg Drummond - senior creative producer - Mighty Sound 

Moving into the new year in the realm of production I would love to truly maximise and explore new techniques and technologies that will enhance the quality and efficiency of our production team and the way we run our day-to-day operations

As a creative, singer, songwriter, and VO artist, I would love to explore different styles or genres to diversify my portfolio by collaborating with some new composers and musicians this year.

I have seen an increasing demand for authentic, conversational connection, this is becoming more and more apparent in creative narrative across the media and entertainment industries. I always find it fascinating to observe a rise in the popularity of specific music production techniques or genres. I look forward to what the next wave is going to hold.

It’s a bit nerdy but my guilty pleasure is doing online courses and workshops to learn new skills, this spans across all departments for me from production to performing. I also think it’s super important to stay updated on industry trends and incorporate new techniques into my workflow. I have been on the outskirts for a while of delving into really understanding the algorithms of social media. I just finished a course and have found it fascinating just how much there is to learn and what differences you can make quite easily that can have a huge impact on your online presence.

A big thing for me for 2024 is to see more art installations and live shows and to write physically! 

It’s becoming a lost art form. I think I would like to sub out technology and pick up a pen to write cards and letters to people this year. Love notes and mixtapes were one my generation’s simple beauties. There is something quite lovely about the process of revisiting this nostalgic artform and appreciating the time that things took to create things from the heart when there wasn’t the technology to make things so convenient.