Oren Meets World: creative direction 101: mastering briefs, strategy & design

In this video, we're gonna cover Creative Direction 101. We're gonna talk about building creative briefs and how to do those so that they work. We're gonna talk a bit about the creative process if you're generating a lot of assets. And we're gonna talk about how creative direction applies to things like making products interesting and creating ads. And this is a good topic because the term creative director has become very widely used. But really, in theory, it's about how do you make things interesting? And how do you tie all the pieces of the cultural conversation that are happening into decisions that you make inside product marketing and branding, all with the through line of design. So I've got a bunch of interesting examples and things to talk to. Everything from some products, some standout product direction from things like this Dries fragrance set we'll talk about. I'm gonna be unboxing some new product samples and talking about the creative direction there. I have a product I just got I was super stoked on. It's an awesome example of applying some creative strategy to product. And I'm actually gonna walk through a bunch of the creative I've been making with the design team, Darkroom, I work with. For my own brands, you can see the briefing process, you can see the creative that comes out of it, and you can see how designers and creative directors of brands can work together in a rhythm. But most importantly, we're actually gonna zone in on a couple key creative direction strategies. So you begin to build a toolkit that you can use for creative direction no matter what your field is. If you're a designer, videographer, a marketer, an entrepreneur, you can begin to look at these options and say, here's how I make things stand out. So without further ado, let's do it. So I'm gonna dive right into the value first. I'm gonna talk about creative direction strategies. So I like to think of almost every creative as someone who needs a toolkit. I made a previous video about this, about organizing and strategizing in your creative toolkit. But really, it's about including techniques, things you can do on any given campaign or product to make your stuff hit. And as a creative director, I've built out my toolkit over time. I've used it as a CMO, as a VP of marketing, as a product designer, as a consultant, in all kinds of different roles. I have a number of things that I go to, recurringly, to look at, is this how I can make this thing or that thing stand out? We're gonna walk through them exactly. So one of the easiest ones is the idea of scale. You can make almost anything inherently more interesting by making it really big or really small. And all of these I'm gonna talk about are concepts you can apply to your reference. Because we have all these videos about mood boarding or building up references. People build all these big boards. But what do you do with it? How do you make it original? You take your reference and you go through your toolkit and look at what you can apply to make it different. So for scale, and I've talked about this one, I believe, before, and I've done some short form videos on it. This is something that brands like Jacquemus use all the time. You see them use scale inside their social media content. They make really big objects. And that is just a technique that is attention-grabbing on camera. But then something really small, by virtue, is almost the same. Can you make the really cute version of something that exists already? After scale comes aesthetic. So for instance, if your brand has a really strong aesthetic, and if you have a creative direction angle to your brand, you probably wanna develop that aesthetic ahead of time. And by aesthetic, I mean Western, Gothic, a commonly known visual theme that ties all your things together. You can apply that aesthetic lens to any reference or idea. You can take a photo from a famous campaign and be like, hey, let's take the Western angle. Let's take our aesthetic approach to this. Can we do this same setup, but within our world of being built? Can we do it, if it's Gothic brand, like it's in all black, has these fonts and these treatments, but it's this concept we put on our mood board. So applying your aesthetic can become the toolkit. And this is different from the idea of beauty, which I'll get to now, where you take any existing idea and you drive it up a notch by saying, how do we make it as aesthetically pleasing as humanly possible? This is an angle, I'm gonna unbox some luggage here in a minute, that a brand I really enjoy took with one of their products. I'll use it as an example. Then we have the idea of transportation. It's not the best word for it, but you'll understand the concept when I break it down. How can you take a reference or take an idea and put it in a completely foreign place? This idea of having a runway show in the Mojave Desert or showing off a car on a glacier. These are things you see commonly in advertising. Things will be almost in a completely surreal environment. And by moving what's expected into somewhere unexpected, you immediately engage the viewer's mind. They know something's not quite right and they're intrigued. And then one of my favorites is this idea of clashing. How do you take two ideas and hit them together as harmony? Even if they don't quite work, there's something happening. And this works great if you have a bunch of references on your mood board and you say, I'm gonna combine two things to make something completely new. Or you can take an angle or a composition of something you love from one photo or one video set, but then combine it with a specific look or feel or setting or setup that you have somewhere else that brings it into this new thing. This is one of the easiest ones for people to digest. When you do build these big mood boards, you can go, here's all the things we like, how do we not just copy them? Okay, let's take X from this one, let's take Y from this one, and then really ask yourself, does that stand out? And we'll talk a bit about that line in some of the examples I'm gonna walk through. And then we have tension. How can you apply an emotion that makes people feel a little bit odd to anything that you're creating? Shame, fear, anger, ego. And I'm not saying this is the most moral way to go about that. If someone looks at something and they feel bad about themselves, then you are creating a feeling. If someone looks at it and they feel great, they feel supportive in their beliefs, even if they may feel weird about their beliefs, something that they've had tucked away, it's applying their ego, that's an idea. Fear, obviously a big component in marketing is any home security system. How can you make them feel that inside any campaign or anything that you do? All of these are tools that you have to take the ordinary and make them extraordinary. And the more that you understand and list out and begin to experiment with and try, the farther you go inside whatever you're putting together. So in that note, I'm gonna actually talk through a few products and just give a few examples, and then I'm gonna dive into some Figma boards and show some work. So first, I wanna talk about this semi-viral Dries Van Noten fragrance, the card that they have inside. They have these gorgeous luxury perfumes. And it is somewhat viral because I ripped this one up, so I'm holding it patched together a bit. They have this fragrance kit that just looks extremely beautiful. It's a set, it has that unique social friendly look and feel, and you see all these color patterns running behind it. What I wanna call out here is that this is a pretty much a normal perfume sampler too. I've seen a thousand like it, maybe a slight alternative of cap or variety. And when I rip open this packaging, you'll see that the only thing that's behind it is a literal gloss print card. And it's getting this effective presentation. So this is one I love to call out as an example because they're using the beauty angle. They said, hey, how do you take a normal fragrance sampler? How do you make it something aesthetically pleasing? But also everyone talks about, what is the cost? And obviously there's a ton of cost involved in any ornate perfume packaging, a huge part of that industry. This is a literal paper box, die cut to fit these in there with another piece of printed paper, like literally printed behind it with a color pattern on it. This is not an expensive piece of packaging for the set, especially for what they charge with it. And then all of the set just basically being a down sell to get you to then go buy the $230 bottle. This is just created with intention. Someone said, how do we take this and apply beauty to it? And they found a way to do that. All right, so next up, we are going to be unboxing some luggage. This is from July. They are an Australian luggage brand. They sell them in the U.S. Their claim to fame is Trump. They sell all kinds of regular luggage, but people like them. But I don't know if y'all have seen that. There's the meme of, what's his name? The guy from 30 Seconds to Mars, Jared Leto. And he's at a Gucci runway show and he sees someone walk by in the outfit and his jaw is dropped down and then he's wearing the outfit like three months later. That was me with this suitcase. Because I've begun to look at things like, all right, I can have any standard thing. I can have a Rimowa. I can have things that look a certain way. But when you're making content, you begin to think about what's gonna help a video hit. What are all those little things that could, even just the ownership of it, could potentially make anyone hang on for an extra half a second in a video? What can make a photo pop? And then when you're in a category that's as old as luggage and as competitive, where there's 100 brands. If you follow me on Instagram, you know I do a series called Product vs. Brand where I talk about luggage brands and break them down. And there's 100 luggage brands, many of which are mediocre. So July had a standout form factor, but they also then applied a standout aesthetic. So this is a gloss trunk. Trunk in a normal carry-on size. The gloss impacted this. And when I saw it in the ad, I had that same effect of like, ooh, what about that? In multiple colors. It's just an aesthetic choice that no one else is doing. Everything you see out there is matte, is subtle. This is decidedly unsubtle. Really standout. Has a number of colors if you don't wanna go full supreme red. I got the green one as well. That's like an emerald green. But they're saying, hey, we're gonna take the beauty angle in product with a simple technique that it just stands out in the market. It positions against everyone's subtle base colors and goes, that is super bright, while still incorporating their trademark trunk style. So it already has an aesthetic difference that the brand has with this beauty angle applied on top. And even if, you know, they offer this in your regular matte colors too. If this is too much, which it will be for a ton of people, then the downsell is it's getting people to look at the matte options. And they present them side by side in the advertisement, with their kind of natural contrast and a little option based for your personality type. So then next up, you may have seen I've been wearing these online a bit. This is a sample from my valuables brand for 2025. It's a set of baggy cargo pants that we are doing in this super unique textured fabric that you've probably seen in my videos. So I've been thinking about content I'm gonna do for that. And I'll bring this up inside the figma that we're gonna show in a minute. But it's like, all right, how do I make content around samples for my brand? Because I've noticed as I've been running this brand, I need to be building more hype for the products before they come out. I've never been a big hype up the drop person. I like to put things out and then sell them. But as a social media creator, thinking more from that angle as thinking from a brand perspective, I need to story tell better. And so part of what I want to do for all the new things I'm creating is document the sample journey more. So then my thought is, how do I creative direct that? Because I can sit here and be like, Oren, this is the sample I made. It's this and it's this and it's this. How do I apply an interesting angle to that? And so you'll see we came up with this idea, two ideas really, where we're gonna make almost like a carousel that documents the process of it. That's presented in a very aesthetic way. And then a video that goes with that in a complimentary aesthetic where it builds like an archive basically. Where I am instead of just talking through the sample, I'm talking through an archive. I'm going valuable sample 2025-003, the blank, blank, blank. It's doing the this, it's in this status. And then we're, you know, these are the changes we're gonna make before it goes live. And then having that as a record and then having a directory of all these things as they come alive. And then doing that in a carousel format and a video format and seeing what works. But that's me taking a common idea and then applying just a visual concept on top of it that matches the aesthetic of my brand. And the last thing I'm gonna talk about before we get into some screen sharing is this sample, which I haven't even opened, which is from Shift Global who are producing a bag. And this is gonna be a conversation about creative direction and technique. This is where we're just showing the frame of mind that goes into it. So there's two types of products, right? You can make a product just that looks one way or you can make a product that has some sort of interesting function. And then obviously in the best world, you do both. So far in the products I've created, I've just done a lot of things, t-shirts with cool designs on them. They're outlayed in various ways. But I also wanna make things I think have the potential to be more important, more interesting in someone's workflow. This is a vintage duffel bag that Shift has sampled. They did the design with me. They did all the technicals and stuff. They're excellent at it. We worked on concepts together. You'll notice the important thing about this product is this right here, the zipper angle. So this idea is that we are able to use this to put a full pair of shoes in and not touch anything else in the bag. That's what we're gonna test out in the sample. We said, hey, if you wanna carry shoes in your bag, we now have a whole section of this. You have a really nice luxury carry-all. You can carry around with this unique vintage feel. You can see what we did with this leather here, which is excellent. Making these straps, custom zippers, a valuable tag to make something really interesting. Obviously these on the bottom. But that's making a user choice plus the visual aesthetic we have of the brand. So whenever I go to create anything, you really wanna think through like what is that user journey of it? How can we make this really applicable? I know that the majority of dudes are just throwing shoes in their bag and that's probably not the best decision. Let's give them an easy way to do that. Let's also make something super social media friendly where anyone that owns this, they wanna make a video, unzip this and pull their shoes out, they have something unique. And then I'll tease this in a minute too. We're looking at like an over-the-shoulder bag that fits a full laptop inside there as well. That's our quick product unbox. Pop onto the computer. All right, so let's actually dive into some workflow here. So for my brand, I do a lot of the graphics with an agency called Darkroom. They have a service called Dark Art that I have a designer through. It's a couple thousand bucks a month but the biggest thing they have and the reason I use them is their designers have taste and are trained appropriately to their standards and they do ads for all these brands that you would know. We'll dive a bit into the actual workflow here. So here you'll see this is Notion where we actually create the stuff that we need. So there's an in-progress folder. This is the stuff we're working on now. There's a completed and archived folder. Every time I wanna make something new inside of this, in Notion, make a new page, populate a potential due date, what style of request it is, what the number of assets that I need are, et cetera, and I fill in a brief. So for instance, this is a brief type. This is one I just put in for the sample videos, the brief title, the ad type, the purpose, number of assets, the ratios, links to the content they're gonna use and any other info and then a bunch of the references. So then that gets put into the pipeline for people to work on. And so I'll call out that this is basically the format that you need if you're communicating with somebody. You need a way to give them a brief that has all the things that they need to know that you can then add lines to based on your workflow. This is the one I have with these guys through Notion, the last brand I was at where I was the SVP of marketing. I had about an eight-person team doing this kind of stuff. We did it in ClickUp. There was an intake form. There was a form that would go in and we could add it to designers' queues and we had a view of where everything was, everyone could look at, and people from other departments could request those assets. I could approve whether it would be done or not and we could work through things like that and we could put our own in there and everyone put their tasks in there as well so we could see one holistic system. You could do that in Notion, you could do that in ClickUp, you could do that in a day. I prefer Notion for a number of reasons. I have a lot of other workflow in here, et cetera, but I would basically include the title of the brief, the creative type, what the ask is, number of assets you need, where it's going, the ratios, the exact content people, make sure they put the links and stuff in, any references they have. This is Creative Briefs 101 and so there's more nuanced, interesting stuff you can do when you really get into it, but that's the core of it. But with that comes references and how you do refs. I'm gonna pop over here to Pinterest. So I have a shared Pinterest board with the designers on the project. We're looking at references of things that we wanna try, we think are interesting. It's like, okay, how could we pull something like this together? All these different ads. For instance, you'll see when I open up the emails, we actually did something like this, but a magazine. I have a lot of white background assets. This is just looking at different ways you could use them and deploy them. We have a bunch of these in here for conversation at all times. If you saw my video the other week where I was showing how I use Artlist stuff, this is kind of an example reference I've used for video. But it's important to keep these and use them both ways because I brief the designers to work on a specific design, but I also brief photographers when we're doing a shoot. So this reference is something the designer put in there. He wants to do something like this. When I go to make the brief for the next photo shoot for shoes, I'm gonna put this in there and be like, hey, please capture every angle I would need to get this kind of photo or to do this kind of design. He's gonna get their angles, they may put their own twist on it, may have a conversation about it, but then that will go over to the designer and they'll have the assets they need. This kind of flow is really important to keep the conversation going. And then if you get in a real workflow where you're a designer and you're photo folks, et cetera, and you are all on the same board, then you can really start to cook. But it's also totally fine to keep it like I have my photo team and I have the design team kind of separate. And you can see we do a lot of print ads and print ad styles, and so we have a lot of those kind of variants in here. Different things we look at, you'll see we have something based on this is a piece of creative we're working on now. You need to have a place that you can go to. If you want something new and you don't have an idea, let's actually go through and talk to some of those references. And you can look at them and you can say, all right, how do we make this kind of unique to us, right? How do we apply our brand kit to it? How do we apply those principles I mentioned before about tension or scale? How do we just use those visuals in our own? So after briefs are in, after references are pulled, then we're going over into the actual design. So for instance, this is a email segment in here. We have our email kit. So this is what I mean by a basis or a kit is this is all the things we use for emails. The fonts we use, this is the sizes, this is the buttons, this is the styles that we use, all easily referenceable. So if we decide to change them, we can change them in one place and update. And you'll see like that book I just mentioned, we're using like a magazine version of that here. This is more interesting than like a default product photo like this to have it be like a magazine shot with some of the sketches I have. So this is how we kind of take that idea and apply it into our own brand of what we're creating. And the designer will be able to look at it and say, hey, I pulled this from this reference. Like sometimes I'll include a reference in the brief. Sometimes I'll just be like whatever ideas you have and they'll go back to those shared boards and pull things with their own inspiration that they know we've agreed on. And you'll see how those emails will come alive. Similar, you saw some of those other graphic treatments in there. We've applied our own styles to this. So let's talk about stuff that's in process. So for instance, I want to make those sample carousels I mentioned before. I dropped in a bunch of kind of options and variants and graphics. It was like, hey, I want to think about this. And we jumped into a process for it where I said, hey, I want to, instead of just having a picture of a sample, I throw on some concrete. Let's make something. So we took some of these sticker graphics, something that we've kind of worked on prior, something we created for the brands. We have some elements we can use on different things. Okay, like, hey, how can we throw that in? Let's list out some key items for it. Let's design a timeline of where the product is at in like the design and creation stage. We can then do a call out for where it is. Potential graphic treatments, these are kind of car pieces here. We're pulling something together live from this idea of like, how do we make a more interesting sample carousel? Another one, you'll see this ComplexCon invite that we did, pull up that brief. So this was one where I saw this graphic, which I'm pretty sure is like AI or whatever. I was like, cool, this would be actually interesting. Back to like that transportation idea. Like, let's put a real person inside because I have a model shot in a very similar pose. And let's actually put the clothing items in there. So I listed out, hey, let's put the cap, let's put the sneakers, let's put the bag. We actually have all of our stickers, like I mentioned before. And so we created this as the invite and it's like, boom, the person's in there. So it's immediately like different and kind of intriguing. And people are like, are you making an action figure? And then I have all these items that are in there. We have the stickers and that became the invite for the event. But then taking it a step further into like the scale concept I mentioned earlier, it was like one of these comments here is me being like, how big could this go? Because I'm thinking, hey, maybe we put this as a 10 foot printout, like on the booth. Let's apply scale to this idea because people really liked it. Or maybe I could get like a plastic blister pack thing like this. And it could actually be a photo opportunity. Like that's where you begin to get that process going. You have that toolkit and say, oh, could I make a really big version of this for future events? Or, hey, people like this. What else can we do and incorporate from it? And you begin to see everything from, hey, those sticker designs, make it into everything to, hey, maybe we use this action figure concept and place it somewhere else in there. You begin to build a bit of a world. And another kind of thing to think about here is ads. Like if you are running ads, you need a ton of them. I'm putting new stuff into ASC all the time on Meta. And one of the things I saw, another YouTuber you may know, Dara, I'm not sure I've met her in person, but she makes YouTube about ads. And Facebook ads. And she had a reel like, hey, you need to be trying call-out ads. And so I was like, cool. I literally put that reel as the brief. It was like, and I put the call-outs for a bunch of my products in there and they tried it out with some different styles. Like these color range that we have, that we've had before. We did these kind of like almost like vintage ad, like oversized style as well. Again, with our kind of background in these different sizes. You can see how this ties to some of the other similar stuff that we have. And then this kind of newer look and feel here for these. And that's stuff that I'm immediately gonna test and I'm gonna drop into the Facebook campaigns. But you have to have that flow of like, we need new ads, we need new concepts. So if I see a video, I'm popping it in as a brief. If I see something on Pinterest or Arena or whatever, I'm saving it in a shared folder and I'm using that for a brief whenever we have it. But build up your references. Put a ton of stuff into briefs. You get it, you test it. Based on what works, you do more. These call-out ads work, then we'll try new visual styles. We'll try new products. We'll build this out. As you can see, it's already got a bunch of options, but we'll add more into what we can actually put together. But this is the idea of briefing and workflow and revisions and application. That is the basics of applying intention and direction to what you're creating. And the same exact thing works with when you're creating content, when you're creating reels or whatever. When you're in product development, when you're in design development, when you're in UI, it's just a good example that I have that I'm allowed to show. So anyway, I hope you found that interesting. This is kind of the one-on-one version of creative direction and how to do briefs. I'm gonna do a more advanced version of this. I'm thinking of doing that with a guest and someone who like, lives and breathes inside briefing. That'd probably do in the new year. And I'm definitely have more creative direction videos. One of the ones I'm working on putting together is actually pulling a bunch of like, different creative directors and their portfolios and their work to like, just show through a big archive. The way I did that like, hundred art direction references video. I did just do an art direction one-on-one video like the other week. It's easy to hunt down. It's very similar. Probably link it here at the end. That just thinks about that perspective. I'm trying to make sure as many of y'all as possible just get that basics of like, there's no schools that teach this, right? You basically learn on the job or you don't. I'm like, all right, how does the briefing process work? How do I use references? What are techniques I can do? What's a real life workflow? I'm gonna show as much of that as possible. So appreciate y'all watching my hyper newsletter, mail.hyperstudios.us talks about brand strategy and creative direction. If you wanna sign up for that, I have a bunch of products for sale at valuablestudios.com. As always, like and subscribe and appreciate y'all so much.