Creative Inspiration For The Week Ahead

Hey, friends! Happy Spring Break to those who celebrate. Hopefully, you can carve out some time for something creative. In that spirit, let’s get into it!

A lesson I’ve learned over and over again is that simple is not the same thing as easy.

Some of the most iconic brands in the world have really simple logos: Nike, Target, and Apple come to mind. A child could reproduce them accurately from memory with crayon and paper, but if you were to try to improve upon them with every tool at your disposal, you’d likely fail to meet that objective.

What’s impressive about those logos, and others like it, is that with only a few shapes and colors, they establish a completely unique identity that carries tremendous weight.

The post below, from PosterLad, similarly shares designs that do A LOT with a very little.

Each poster in the series contains minimal text and color, but like the logos mentioned above, they still accomplish what most could never achieve with unlimited resources.

View the full gallery below for inspiration in simplicity.

Takeaway: It’s tempting to use every tool and trick available to you as a creative, but some of the best work rejects more in favor of less.

I recently found a really cool logo by Ramin Nasibov on Threads. It features the number 32, and both the 3 and the 2 are constructed with negative space that interrupts the number forms. At first glance, it looks like a hip stencil-style numeral.

Upon closer inspection, though, you realize that when the logo is rotated 180 degrees, it looks identical to its pre-rotated state. See the image and animation below:

I have no idea what this logo is for, but it’s so cool, it’d almost be worth building an entire brand around just to use it.

I’m a sucker for logos with hidden meaning. FedEx’s hidden arrow between the “E” and “x,” Baskin Robbins’ hidden “31” in the “B” and “R,” the Hartford Whalers hidden “H” between the whale’s tail and the “W”, and the “m” and “b” in the Milwaukee Brewers’ baseball mit logo, these are the things that get me pumped.

What I like most about logos like these is the element of surprise that hits you sometimes even years after first viewing them. They’re little Easter eggs hidden in plain sight. If the goal of logo design is to make an impact, these examples certainly do.

Takeaway: Sometimes subtlety speaks louder than the obvious.

In a recent podcast interview, David Heinemeier Hansson, more commonly known as DHH in tech and entrepreneurship circles, discussed the early days of his startup, 37signals, during which he built the project management tool Basecamp.

For context, 37signals was not venture-backed. He and his cofounder, Jason Fried, had bootstrapped the business and were growing on the back of revenue from client work. As such, they had to be scrappy and make decisions under financial realities that their better-funded peers could ignore.

At 15:33, DHH discusses their need to make payroll as a primary reason he chose the technical stack upon which their software empire was built, stating:

“I could not use the same technology that everyone else was using, because I had a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth of the capacity. Therefore, I had to use something else. I had to use something, or come up with something, that allowed me as an individual programmer and technical person in the whole operation to build Basecamp by myself, on the technical side.”

Listen to the full interview below:

Compared to industry practices, DHH went against the grain. He didn’t do things “the way they were supposed to be done” or how they had been done in the past. Instead, he did things that worked and pleased his customers, all while building a business he would be happy to work in for his entire professional career.

To this day, 37signals is known for defying convention and marching to a beat of its own drum. As a private company, there’s no way of knowing just how successful they’ve been, but considering DHH’s hobby of racecar driving, it’s safe to assume they’ve done quite well.

Takeaway: DHH reminds us that it’s wise to question conventional wisdom and ask if there might be another way.

One of my goals is to foster a greater sense of community with this newsletter. As such, I’d love to know what creative things you are up to and to feature them here.

Drop me a line via email or in the comments below to let me know what you have cooking. Can’t wait to hear about it.

Until next time,

—Mike