A series of articles I’m considering is a focus on the creative and technical journey I’ve experienced over the past five years.
It’s during this time where I was tasked to build a digital team and capability set for an advertising agency. I can equate the journey to an Everest ascent, ultimately “losing” several team members and experiencing countless periods of self-doubt, before reaching the “summit.” The summit became a virtual marker for change and not the “pinnacle” I had originally foreseen.
This “history” is important to document and fully understand, as it’s the education I gained from this journey that is materially more important than the end-result, not to mention the countless design and technical artifacts created during this timeframe.
This latter point is worth emphasizing. Things that one creates rarely stand the test of time. This is particularly true in the digital space where a project’s half-life is typically between 6 and 12 months, with a complete dissolution of the original product within 3-4 years. Design artifacts have an even shorter half-life, and project artifacts represent a blip on the radar.
Given this context, it’s important that one take a much broader perspective into one’s work. Focus less on the final outcome, and more on understanding, and refining the methodology used to realize that outcome. In time, the level of effort required to achieve a similar outcome will be less, and the resulting quality and content will be substantially greater.
But this is just one level of refinement. There are, in my view, countless levels that go beyond this, which I’ll do my best to explore in the weeks and months to come.