The sketch that changed my career

A couple of weeks ago, Ted Leonhardt, Jessica Knapp and I hosted the first Cultural and Commercial Mix: a free, one-hour Zoom conversation open to anyone working in the creative industry.

There’s often an inherent tension between culture and commerce. Sometimes it feels like they go together about as well as oil and water…

We wanted to explore how both are essential ingredients in the creative professions – and how resolving any conflict between them is vital to our happiness and success.

Can cultural and commercial issues actually be more like peanut butter and jelly: distinct, but better together?

How the conversation began

Ted is a seasoned creative professional, having founded, run and sold The Leonhardt Group. He went on to become the Chief Creative Officer of Fitch Worldwide and President of Anthem. Nowadays, he’s an advisor, coach, writer and illustrator, based in Bellingham, near Seattle.

Our facilitator, Jessica, holds a PhD in interpersonal communication and works in media relations, client relations and speaker coaching. She’s based in Port Orchard, also in the Pacific Northwest.

I met Ted 15 years ago when I was running my design consultancy. In fact, I was one of Ted’s first advisory clients. I brought him to London to deliver a three-day programme designed to strengthen our client-relationship skills and confidence. 

Since then, we’ve become firm friends and regularly catch up, swapping stories.

On one occasion, Ted said:

“Hey, we should invite some more people to these conversations. They’re really good and useful – perhaps other people would like to join in too.”

So that’s what we did: a one-hour Zoom call with around a dozen creative business leaders from around the world, sharing stories.

My story

Those of you who know me, or read my articles, know that my focus is very much on the business side of design.

In one of our previous conversations, Ted asked a very pointed question:

“What prompted you to shift your focus from designing to the commercial side of design?”

I rambled away, giving a few general reasons, but Ted pressed me:

“No, no, no, when was the actual moment – what was the single thing that made you change?”

After some thought, I remembered a moment from my time as a junior designer.

I was redesigning a sauce bottle for one of Unilever’s food service businesses. It was back when maybe project timelines were a little longer – I think I had a week or so, working with a couple of other designers.

We were exploring lots of different designs, carefully crafting proportion and detail, then rendering them beautifully and applying the branding. We printed them out and mounted them on foamboards so we could stand them up in the presentation – as everyone did in those days.

The day before the client meeting, as we were busy finalising our presentation, I spotted my boss in the corner of the studio doodling. This wasn’t unusual, but then I noticed he was sketching a bottle. So I nudged my team-mates and we all rolled our eyes. He could never resist tinkering. To my junior designer’s eye, it contained all his usual clichés – big swoopy S-curves and ellipses.

We didn’t give it much thought, and the next day the boss left with our presentation boards, neatly wrapped up in their tissue paper, for the client meeting.

The rest of the team and I stayed behind at the studio. When he returned, we immediately asked how it went – and most importantly, which option did they like most?

He answered with a sheepish smile and pulled out his scrappy little drawing, explaining: 

“They chose this one.”

We were furious and couldn’t believe that, after all of our hard work polishing our beautifully refined and rendered designs, they had chosen what was effectively a sketch on a napkin!

But once I’d calmed down, I realised the episode had taught me several important lessons.

Lessons learned

I realised that the people doing the creative work need direct access to the client: to hear the brief, question it and understand the commercial objectives behind it.

So I needed to go to client briefings. Then I needed to be at the meetings to present our work.

I’ll never know whether all our designs were given equal weighting in the presentation, but I very much doubt it. I suspect that most of the meeting was spent looking at our boss’s napkin sketch, not our boards.

He had an inbuilt advantage in getting his design chosen, as he was the one having direct conversations with the clients. That meant he could get right to the heart of the challenge and really understand the client’s business objectives – not just the design requirements.

We were even more frustrated when we found that his design didn’t even follow the same constraints that we’d been given in our design brief! He’d gone ‘off piste’ and challenged those rules.

But ultimately, it was the right thing to do – it led to a design that they chose. As an agency, we’d succeeded. The client was happy: they’d chosen a design that went on to be produced on a huge scale around the world.

But I couldn’t help feeling that it had been a huge waste of the design team’s time. From a commercial point of view, we’d collectively spent several weeks of design time sketching and presenting work that wasn’t necessary.

More importantly, it was a real failure from an agency culture point of view. The rest of the design team and I were thoroughly demoralised. Why had we put all that effort into this project for nothing?

That was when I decided I needed to get closer to the client ‘action’.

We call ourselves design consultants, and I realised that I enjoyed the consulting part of that title – and the cut and thrust that comes with it – as much as I enjoyed the designing side.

Of course, it wasn’t that clear at the time, but I found that I stepped away from the ‘tools’ quite early in my career. Instead, I embraced the consulting side of the work, interacting with clients and directing design delivery.

That was my answer to Ted about the moment my interest in the commercial side of design arose.

Looking back, the lesson wasn’t simply that designers should attend more client meetings. It was that separating creative teams from commercial context creates two risks: wasted effort and damaged morale – and that when leaders step into the creative process late, even with a winning idea, they need to consider the cultural cost.

We plan to run more Cultural and Commercial Mix sessions. They’ll remain free, open to all and centred on shared stories.

Follow me here for details of the next session – we hope to see you there.

Was there a moment that changed how you think about the business side of design?

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Find out more about my Commercial Skills training programme here