The Neiman Adventures: The Creative Jungle

Hello, here’s Xand Griffin, with Part Two of The Neiman Internship Adventure. I’m an art director, and a large part of our job is concepting ideas. As this is my first internship, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even really know how advertisers go about creating ideas like “Got Milk” or “Just Do It”. Different agencies may have a different process, but ours is to write everything down and tack it to the wall. That way, no matter if an idea is stupid or brilliant or an idea starter, it’s there and you won’t ever have to backtrack.

You are on an adventure whenever you set out to create something, and you need to make sure you keep going forward. So you start at the beginning with a blank wall and no roads traveled. You start going down a road, and your wall starts to populate with different ways to go. The next step you need to make sure you know what roads you have to travel.

Collect yourself, and start to put the directions down into paths. If you see that a lot of your ideas have the feeling of accomplishment in them, put all of those ideas underneath the title of accomplishment. That’s one road you have now, the accomplishment road. Do the same with the rest of your ideas.  Because you’re curious, you’re going to want to know every direction you can go before you decide to go.

That’s the creative process here at Neiman in a nutshell. I’ve used it successfully, as the first campaign I worked on, I sat down looked at the wall full of ideas and came up with a idea that got presented at a client pitch. We got the business – and I learned something valuable about the creative jungle.