tough brief...
When I joined the fully remote team at AMP Agency, group creative director James Hough sent me a handy-dandy deck where each creative on his team got one slide to express who they were to others on the team. I thought: what a great tool to quickly, virtually meet folks! Then, I reread the email and saw that he had also made a request: I needed to create a slide for myself. ONE. SLIDE. To encapsulate moi?!!?
i contain multitudes, dude...
Properly flustered but ultimately determined, I took another breeze through the deck for inspiration. My favorite slides were from creatives who applied some information design to themselves. One art director created a visual "ball pit" of all her favorite things. That was fun. I'm fun! What should I do? I stared at my computer screen — the sole conduit for all of my creative work — and a concept from the Divine (or maybe Clippy) hit me.
"creativity" isn't a personality trait...
It's an operating system. And having the software isn't enough. You also need a good dial-up connection to the World Wide Web of human expression: all the books, movies, arts, crafts, inside jokes, and Olivia Rodrigo lyrics you can fit in your noggin. Great creatives are digital packrats, with hard drives full of inspo-data. Our job is to seek and consume expression across all mediums and file it away until we need it. When the right brief hits our inbox, we get out our scrambler, combining our caches of old into minty-fresh concepts of new. It's fun, passionate, RAM-heavy work. And it's never really done.
now loading...Shan OS
I'm Shan. A millennial, nostalgia-obsessed, chronically-online hard drive of influences. My mind is a Macintosh desktop computer circa 1997 — the year I had my first computer experience, aged six. On it, there's easy access to many things, including some of my favorite movies, music, and memes. I write many things, mostly poems and ads. I spent my first five years out of college running an arts non-profit with my friends. I was born in St. Paul during an infamous blizzard. I enjoy walking around Minneapolis Lakes, introducing myself to all the local dogs.
I've spent time learning and writing at The University of Minnesota, Le Collège International de Philosophie, Brainco Portfolio School, Words at Work, HealthPartners, Bolin Zweig, SixSpeed Marketing, Amp Agency, and The Audacious School of Astonishing Pursuits.
My inbox is open! Say hello anytime. 🤖 💻 👋🏼