Originally posted in my newsletter dated 3rd September 2023.

There is a tendency in commercial art to “create to brief”. That is, as a creative, you fulfil the brief you’ve been given, but don’t add much to it. If you work like this, your work is likely to be interchangeable with that of hundreds of other people. Presumably fun to experience once, but forgettable after that.

You see a tendency to do this in superhero comics, movies and kids’ films in particular because so many of those begin from a formula. I think, in part, rather than thinking about what you specifically can do with a concept/brief, you get into a cycle of thinking about what your audience wants from you and delivering to that expectation.

For one, that makes your work non-distinctive. But as a creator, it must also be frustrating to only work to some of your potential rather than all of it.

This came up both in a private conversation about lettering – someone newer than me asking how I think about a new lettering project – and in some discussions I initiated with writer friends about how to approach writing corporate comics without losing one’s creative impulse, and without sounding like a generic “house voice”, let’s say.

A lot of the advice I’ve given and received can get lost in the nitty-gritty – follow your heart, make all the creative choices you can, put parts of yourself in the story, approach it like you’d approach a creator-owned project on one hand, and subvert traditional structure, confound expectations, try different things on the other.

Thinking on this some more, there is a simpler and more elegant way to think about this – a lodestone, if you will. Why are you doing this and not someone else? What do you bring to this project that nobody else could in your place?

Basically: Why you and nobody else?

I feel having this at the back of my mind – stepping back once in a while and looking at the project with this as a lens – has allowed me to be more precise in my decision-making as a creator instead of either following whatever the newest trend is, or, alternatively, following my muse into self-indulgence (which I had a tendency towards in the past).

In commercial art, you need a way to keep your individual perspective, digest your influences, and yet produce something that is coherent and can be read by an audience outside of yourself.

What you want is not just all possible choices, but a specificity of choices.

Therefore: Why you and nobody else?