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guess who's a certified creative strategist? this girl 🙋🏻♀️
ten weeks that genuinely changed how i think about ad creative, briefs, and everything in between. i started as just a designer. i grew into a creative strategist and i'm really proud of that.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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VANA Data Moments campaign. Strategy, creative direction & design for a social media + ad campaign. With this we set out to highlight moments of data creation in everyday life, connecting the audience with Vana's data-ownership mission.
Every brand project I take on has a moment I'm working toward.
It's not the logo reveal. It's not the color palette. It's the moment the client reads the Big Idea for the first time and says, yes, that's exactly it.
The Big Idea is the single sentence, phrase, or concept that everything else in the brand is built around. It's not a tagline. It's not a mission statement. It's the irreducible truth at the center of what the business does and why it matters.
Most brands skip this step entirely. They go straight from strategy to visuals and wonder why the whole thing feels somehow off even when it looks good.
For NYC TaxAbate Advisors the Big Idea was two words: What's yours.
The tax abatement that belongs to your building. The savings your board has never claimed. The value that was always there, waiting for someone to go and get it.
Those two words shaped the logo concept, the website copy, the CTA structure, and even the tone of every page. Not because we kept referring back to them consciously, but because once you have a Big Idea that strong, every good decision naturally aligns with it and every bad decision feels immediately wrong.
For the Irish Institute of Medical Herbalists the Big Idea was about rootedness and lineage. The idea that herbal medicine in Ireland has an ancient, unbroken tradition that the institute is the custodian of. That gave us the Ogham script mark, one of the oldest writing systems in Irish history, as the foundation for the logo.
Two completely different businesses. Two completely different Big Ideas. Both arrived at through the same process: understanding what's irreducibly true about the business before picking up a design tool.
That “Big Idea” moment is such a strong lens for brand work. When the concept clicks before the visuals do, every later decision feels much more intentional.
what is the difference between creative director, art director, creative startegist, branding strategist?
Roughly: strategists decide what the brand should say and why, directors decide how it looks and sounds saying it. Art director owns the craft of one execution, creative director owns the idea across all of them; brand strategist sits at positioning level, creative strategist...