“Bravery Pays” – How and Why Designers Should Pursue Bolder Creative Ideas

Our weekly design/leader interview series ends with the same prompt. “Complete this sentence – ‘I wish more clients…’”

 

At least half of the answers feature the same handful of words – bolder, braver, risks.

 

Across these interviews, and many other conversations with designers, a picture of frustration emerges. Of nervous clients making playing it safe. Of designers forced to rein in their ideas. And of a creative culture where things look the same.

 

The Pentagram partner Natasha Jen recently wrote a blistering piece linking the design industry’s struggles to its desperate attempts to be taken more seriously in the boardroom.

 

“Design has assimilated – but the assimilation was not mutual,” Jen wrote. “Designers now speak business fluently. But business has not learned to see design. It still treats form as polish, emotion as indulgence and ambiguity as inefficiency.”

 

This results, she explained, in “a monoculture of metrics.”

 

“Brands are engineered, optimised, tested, templated. They perform. But they no longer resonate. Somewhere along the way, the visual intelligence of design – its rhythm, tension, friction – was replaced by a vocabulary of efficiency. And we accepted it because we thought that was the price of relevance.”

 

Designer Al Lucca came to similar conclusions in this excellent essay. But he also pointed the finger at a generation of UX design leaders who were complicit in design’s de-clawing.

 

According to Lucca, they “endlessly preached” a series of damaging messages – “Process over craft. Frameworks over creativity. Scalability over intuition. They prioritised mechanical execution and efficiency while forgetting the soul of design.”

 

As they rose up the ranks, this mindset was passed on to the teams they built and the new leaders they elevated, he believes.

 

“It led to a cycle of mediocrity – safe work over bold ideas. Decisions became about pleasing everyone instead of making strong creative choices.

 

“But when every design decision has to be backed by data or user feedback, where does that leave room for intuition? For creative leaps that don’t fit neatly into a metrics dashboard?”

 

This shift “sucked the life out of design,” he says, diminishing its power to “surprise, challenge, and provoke.”

 

Follow Jen or Lucca’s diagnosis – or many like them – and everyone loses out.

 

Designers start to self-censor and feel unable to propose bigger, bolder ideas. The type of work that gets made narrows and flattens. And paradoxically, in an attempt to create more commercially palatable design that drives clear impact, its potential impact is inhibited.

 

Are clients really conservative?

And yet, clients aren’t necessarily the conservative handbrake on brave creative design work.

 

According to this year’s What Clients Think report, 40% of clients said they would like their agency to push more boundaries. That’s slightly up from last year’s 36%, but it suggests that a sizeable chunk of the market are not just open to bolder ideas, but actively waiting to see more of this sort of thinking.

 

And 45% wish clients would be “bolder in their viewpoint” – they want to be challenged by the creatives they work with.

 

Anecdotally, we hear the same thing.

 

When we asked a group of design leaders in January what they hoped to see from their design teams this year, Diageo’s Jeremy Lindley called for “brave creative that stretches our thinking to reach the opportunities ahead of us.”

 

“Brave creative,” he said, “is always the answer.”

“The most risky thing is to do what everyone else is doing.”

Before we go on, it’s worth defining what we mean by brave or bold creative work. Clearly there is no objective yardstick – what might feel very out-there for one brand might seem quite run-of-the-mill for another.

 

But in speaking with designers and clients, two main definitions emerge, which can exist on their own, or in conjunction with each other.

 

- Work which challenges, extends or expands the brief, rather than just delivers what has been asked for. Here the “bravery” comes via strategy – often going back to first principles and suggesting to a client that they don’t actually need a new identity, but should instead redesign their product, for example.

- Work which is “brave” in its execution. This might take the form of visual, tonal or experiential choices that stand out from category norms or received wisdom around how we design apps, or shops, or magazines etc.

 

It seems, from the What Clients Think report, that clients are open to both, although saying that in the abstract and committing to that in the midst of a real project are two different things.

 

And Ragged Edge co-founder Max Ottignon points out that there are some projects where you don’t want or need to be brave.

 

“There are some areas where short-term predictability is smart,” he says, citing digital product design and performance marketing as examples. “They have different objectives and require different strategies. It’s not brave to ignore that, it’s irrational.”

 

But in branding, Ottingon believes, “bravery pays.”

 

“Doing what everyone else does is often an easier sell, but when you’re trying to build a brand it’s a fast-track to mediocrity,” he says. “Most advertising is boring. Most brands blend in. But brands that stand out get noticed and remembered. And brands that get noticed and remembered are more likely to get chosen.”

 

Longer-term connections

For Household CEO Julie Oxberry, bravery is also the order of the day in experiential work. The London-based studio works across retail, entertainment and hospitality, and Oxberry is a firm believer that fortune favours the bold.

 

“Brave creative goes deeper to make more rewarding connections,” she says. “It’s the work we do to turn customers into fans.”

 

She cites the studio’s recent Netflix Bites work as a good example. The multi-sensory dining experience in Las Vegas invited fans to step into spaces inspired by the streaming giant’s biggest shows, from Bridgerton and Squid Game to Stranger Things, complete with tailored menus.

 

“It was brave because it challenged the ROI model of the restaurant in favour of deeper engagement and shareability,” Oxberry explains.

Like Ottignon, she believes that brave creative work works on two timeframes, driving immediate cut-through and longer-lasting associations.

 

“Brave creative has a longer shelf life,” Oxberry says. “It builds loyalty, not just awareness, because people remember how it made them feel. It’s especially valuable when a brand is entering a new phase, speaking to a new audience, or needs to disrupt its own narrative to stay relevant.”

 

For Orlagh Marnane, it’s down to both clients and designers to help push bolder ideas. She runs The Mix Dublin, Pernod Ricard’s in-house creative agency, and believes that challenging the brief can be the best place to start.

 

“In such a competitive market, with regular pitches and tighter budgets, there can be a lot of pressure on agencies to nail the brief quickly and give the client exactly what they asked for,” she says. “But sometimes what a client asked for isn’t what they need – often the best ideas can come from left-field or an often overlooked truth.”

 

She appreciates that proposing something bold can feel like “a bit of a gamble” and that selling in a bigger idea across the brand’s internal stakeholders eats up time and energy.

 

But, Marnane explains, if you can build trust and understanding on both sides, you create space for richer conversations and better outcomes.

 

“Once you have that two way street, that is when the ideas and the work get really interesting,” she says.

How to sell in braver creative work

Marnane encourages designers to “really immerse themselves” in the brand, avoid assumptions and understand the core business problem they are being asked to solve.

 

“Always ask yourself – is this idea addressing that problem? If it isn’t, start again.”

 

For Max Ottignon, it’s crucial to separate the ideas of bravery and risk.

 

“Clients conflate bravery with risk. And recklessness. That’s understandable. Our job is to demonstrate that it’s often the opposite that’s true. The most risky thing is to do what everyone else is doing. Particularly if you can’t outspend them.

 

“That’s a rational argument and should be argued accordingly. And it has to be made consistently from day one. The worst time to be arguing for bravery is as you show a client the work. By then it’s far, far too late.”

 

Julie Oxberry agrees. “Staying safe is often the bigger risk,” she says. “Bold work isn’t reckless; it’s measured and will bring greater returns.”

 

Despite all the headwinds the design industry is facing, it feels like there is an opportunity to reset the thinking around brave creative work.

 

Designers want to do it. Many clients want to commission it. And when AI is good – and getting better – at creating work that’s safe and samey, designers should lean into the things that make their work irreplaceable.

 

“If design is to remain strategic, it needs to reclaim its human core,” Lucca writes. “Intuition, storytelling, and artistry are what make design transformative. Without them, we risk turning it into just another assembly line of soulless deliverables.”