Brand and creative expression

What does creative expression actually mean for a brand right now? It’s a question I keep coming back to, especially when so many businesses are starting to look and sound the same, and AI is only accelerating that. It’s everywhere right now, and if I’m honest, I’m about as bored of the AI conversation as everyone else is. Last week I was at a workshop on paid ads across Google and Meta, and both platforms are now actively pushing AI-driven content ahead of anything made by humans, which says a lot about how hard big tech is driving its own AI systems. I’m not a doomsdayer about it, I think it’s a great tool for efficiency and it’ll keep growing into a creativity tool too, so long as you’re feeding it the right content rather than treating it as your only creator. What bothers me is big tech deciding for us that AI-made content gets pushed over anything we’ve actually made ourselves.

Which brings me back to that question. Quite apart from AI, something I’ve actively been doing for the last ten years is exploring different ways of creative expression that don’t tie me to a screen. I’ve dabbled in a lot of things, from creative writing (a few short stories, and I’m two-thirds of the way through a fictional thriller) to guitar (though after close to 20 years, “dabbled” isn’t quite right), dancing, printmaking, blog writing, and embroidery. Most recently, I’ve picked the camera back up to relearn skills I hadn’t used in years.

That photography sojourn has got me genuinely excited. My teacher, award-winning photographer Sara Knight, has had us experimenting with a few different techniques, and on a cold September night, one of those was painting with light. Bear with me here, because I hadn’t properly picked up a camera in about 20 years. I learned photography back at TAFE, building my own pinhole camera and shooting on film, my mum’s Ricoh loaded with Kodak 400. We had two tasks: use a lightsaber to create interesting light and pattern, then use sparklers to write words or draw pictures. Both were fun, both made you think on your feet, and both had to happen inside a 25-second window. Trying to write backwards was genuinely challenging, about as challenging as singing and playing guitar at the same time, which is bloody hard.

One of my sparkler attempts was the words “rock and roll,” scrawled across a brick wall in gestural orange light, letters overlapping, nowhere near straight. It’s probably my favourite shot from the whole night, because it’s rough. It’s not trying to be perfect. There’s something in that rawness that feels more like me than a clean, polished image ever could, twenty-odd years of guitar in hand, rock and roll running through how I think about brand and creativity generally. It’s also the kind of image AI would never make, because AI irons things out. It smooths out the rough bits. And the unclean, grittiness is the whole point. It’s real life. And one of the things I wanted from the start with my brand was a true representation of what the business is built on but also how it best encapsulates my approach with my clients.

It got me thinking about what I do every day for clients, and for my own business: building brands. Creative expression is one part of that. How do you paint a picture of your business? What does it say about it? The planning, the output, how it all comes together to support what you actually need to do. Yes, you can go down the AI route, and if you’re cash-strapped and that’s all you can afford, why wouldn’t you. But if you’re a business with budget, and you want to stand out rather than blend into every other ad out there (these days it’s hard pressed to tell the difference between a kebab shop’s flyer and the local dentist’s), then you need to think about creative expression for your brand.

This is where I see it play out with clients all the time. A logo designed a decade ago that’s never been touched since. Visuals across the website, socials and print that don’t look like they belong to the same business, let alone say anything about who that business actually is. A brand that’s grown and changed while its identity stayed exactly where it started. And now, with an internet increasingly full of AI-generated sameness, it’s even easier to blend in and even harder to be remembered.

Brand isn’t just visual, but that’s the focus for today. What is it about yours that should stand out? Is it your colours, your style, the way your photographs are taken, the colour grading, the grittiness or the cleanliness of it (mine, clearly, leans toward the gestural sparkler end), whatever it is that makes you different from everyone else in your category. If your logo or visuals haven’t kept pace with where your business actually is today, that’s a gap worth closing.

If any of that sounds familiar, and you’ve got budget to invest in getting it right, whether that’s a logo rebrand or visuals that finally match who you are, book in a Clarity Call and let’s find out what’s different about you.