The strongest ideas rarely arrive from a single direction. They come from an ongoing conversation between two impulses. One is creative: expansive and instinctive, inviting me to notice and to gather. This shows me all the doors waiting to be unlocked. The other is strategic: intentional and clarifying, inviting me to investigate to decide what actually matters. This helps me identify which door to walk through. Creativity and strategy are equally important and constantly informing each other to build unmistakable and identifiable brands.
Ideas start with a seed, something small and personal. A phrase overheard that contains poignant emotion. A pattern on packaging that draws attention in a grocery aisle. The feel of a texture that stays for longer than it should. These instances may seem insignificant at the time, but they tend to become exactly what guides my thinking. Creativity for me has always been a way of tuning into the world to find the bits that are itching to be scratched. Every day, I push myself to trust my instincts and follow them even if I don’t know what it will turn into.
Strategy plays the part of understanding and steering creative ideas. When I shift into a strategic mindset, the questions become: What does this behaviour reveal about the audience’s desire? Why does this colour palette resonate? How does this tone of voice shift the way someone might interpret the brand? Creativity reveals possibility, and strategy focuses its purpose by turning these ideas into something clear, grounded and purposeful. Strategic thinking is the act of shaping creative ideas so they begin to carry meaning.
Collage art is the creative medium that mirrors this process of creativity and strategy coming together. Collaging begins with fragments. Nothing starts as a blank page. You collect pieces from magazines, newspapers, flyers, packaging, ribbons, receipts — anything that you can physically cut. You are constantly pulling from the world around you, guided by instinct, unsure of where anything will fit. Then slowly, you begin moving things around, noticing the relationships between shapes, colours and textures. The work comes together not because the pieces were designed to belong, but because you made decisions about which ones should.
It’s this mindset that I approach branding with.
Research is its own collage. At the start of any new project, phase one is gathering. And the gathering must happen sans any judgement. I look at culture, behaviour, language, patterns, trends, tensions, and more. I talk to people. I observe how they speak about their needs and frustrations. I note the contradictions that appear in interviews or the emotional signals buried inside offhand comments. I try to notice the things between the lines. Much like the table full of scraps that forms the beginning of a collage, strategy begins with an almost overwhelming amount of material. The job is to identify what belongs and why, and to find the emotional thread running through all the noise. That sensitivity to constructing coherence from fragments is something personal expression through collage taught me long before strategy did.
This relationship between my personal creative exploration and strategic clarity came together in my project “100 Hidden Poems.”
“100 Hidden Poems” began as a simple observation: I was surrounded by single-use packaging, the kind of disposable material we all overlook. These objects are covered in functional language: instructions, claims, warnings, timestamps, and selling points. But hidden inside this jargon were fragments of language that felt unintentionally poetic. The project became an attempt to uncover the verse that lives inside the everyday.
Using blackout poetry, I began to isolate and rearrange these fragments of language. A line meant to describe freshness became something hopeful. A cautionary sentence became unexpectedly tender. A dry product description turned into a small, reflective moment. Sometimes I paired the text with cut-out images. Sometimes the words stood alone. What emerged were tiny stories stitched from the language of consumption, reframed in a way that offered more depth than the packaging did.
Working on Hidden Poems changed the way I saw brand language. It reminded me that even the most functional copy has the potential to hold emotion. I found unexpected pockets of poetry hidden inside their matter-of-fact tone. It reassured me that the role of a strategist is to uncover meaning, never to create it. You begin with what already exists: the behaviour that your audience exhibits, the truths of your product or service, the cultural signals that inform the context it exists in. You read between the lines and find the pieces that carry weight. Then you assemble them into something distinct and expressive.
This is why personal creative practice is so essential to how I work. It keeps me close to the instincts that first drew me in and reminds me to give space to these little ideas that arrive quietly.
The more I explore my own creative identity and practice, the better I understand how to build one for a brand. Creativity teaches me to see what others may miss – and sometimes even hunt for those very overlooked things. It reduces my tolerance for allowing ideas to float in ambiguity. It helps me find true, human, emotional resonance by searching in these unexpected places for unexpected connections.
With creativity and strategy together, brands veer away from feeling like surface-level systems and start feeling like layered constructions. They gain texture and quirk. They become unmistakable in their identity. And for me, that is the aim of my creative and strategic work: to build something that feels differentiated and clear enough to stand on its own.
This understanding has guided me through the years and continues to do so. Creativity opens the world. Strategy shapes it. The work lies in learning how to let both lead, in different moments, and in trusting that the ideas that begin quietly often end up speaking the loudest.
(Views are personal)
