to some degree, creativity just doesn’t rhyme with commercial work, with earning money.

Creativity is taking a large amount of decisions for yourself, often motivated by gut feelings or opaque brain processes. far too many decisions to run by a team, and far too vague of motivations to justify any of them if they are outside of the current window of accepted approaches.

That is not to say that commercial work can’t be creatively rich, there are tons of examples of amazing work, having a set of restrictions to work within often enables creativity, etc. but there is a contradiction present, one that is currently often navigated either by the commercial party handing over (more) cash, or the creative party taking on the role of a sales person, selling the commercial party on their idea by having them share in the gut feeling that motivated them in the first place.

I wonder how much creativity I could win back by becoming better at the sales pitch, or more specifically: what a sales pitch for a bold idea should look like. My first reaction is to frame it as not being that risky or out of left field, but I fear that might only work to frame it as operating on the same level as a less bold idea -except a little riskier-, which is a tradeoff the more risk-free approach will win 9/10 times.

Considering what I wrote down about adopting styles that are not your own from a place of curiosity: perhaps there is a case to be made for presenting a style or a set of restrictions that I would like to work within more early on instead of a defined look.