The power of the open brief

Applications are currently open for It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch – a talent showcase championing the next generation of creatives. To mark the occasion, we’re publishing a series of articles exploring what it means to be a creative starting out today. In this piece, we explore the power of the open brief in developing your individual creative approach...

The blank page. It’s every creative’s worst enemy. No matter how much practice or how many ideas you had before you sat down, a lack of inspiration can strike a creative at any time.

This rings especially true when you’re just starting out in your career; you’ve got the skills, sure, but it’s not always easy to figure out exactly how to apply them and fill up your portfolio. Luckily, there’s a solution.

Heard of creative briefs? Introducing the open brief; it’s got all of the fun of a ‘closed’ creative brief, but with less specific guidelines and requirements, allowing for a wider range of outcomes. Usually they are posed as competitions, or open calls, or just thought-starters (see our list of open briefs at the bottom of this article). But they can also be set by clients who are looking for a creative to take the kernel of an idea, and run with it.

They’re not just an exercise to get the juices flowing, either; lots of incredible creative projects start from open briefs. In fact, if not for a response to a 2007 university brief “put something into the public domain that makes people feel better about themselves”, you might not even be reading this article right now.

But why take our word for it? To find out why open briefs are so important, we spoke to three creatives with tons of experience in taking them on.

Graphic designer Anthony Burrill, artist Ramin Nazer and photographer Jutharat ‘Poupay’ Pinyodoonyachet talk about the importance of open briefs and the ones they’ve enjoyed working on, before giving us some advice on making the most out of them.

“Open briefs give talents the opportunity to show their best work without any limitation,” says Poupay Pinyodoonyachet. Born in Bangkok but currently residing in New York, Poupay thinks of open briefs as an opportunity for creatives to stay motivated and put their best foot forward. “I think whoever gives you an open brief, they must really trust you and be willing to take a risk on you, so you have to show your best,” she explains.

An open brief that Poupay recalls with fondness is one she carried out for Instagram and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The open brief put to a wide selection of creatives such as New York Nico and Kareem Rahma called for a “splash of colour” on New Yorkers’ daily commute, by taking photos of people on the subway.

“It sounded very easy, but making the images interesting was the most challenging part,” she says. The experience taught her a lot about flexibility in her approach.

“I learned that everyone needs to be flexible for open briefs and hope that things happen organically. It can be tense, but in the end, it can also be rewarding and magical.” Consider: how would you approach the same brief, in a way that expresses your individual creativity while fitting the format and brands involved?

When it comes to advice, Poupay relays to us a cautionary tale about another open brief – when she had the chance to work with a big client.

“The open brief was really fun – they really wanted me to be who I am,” she says, but Poupay ended up trying to make her production bigger to match the size of her client – renting equipment she had no experience using. “I screwed up,” she says. “That’s how I learned that I need to stay the way that I am.”

“I think it’s all about trust,” says Anthony Burrill of open briefs. For him, open briefs are a great opportunity for young creatives to find your confidence and your unique voice – especially in an industry that can be extremely focused on commercial projects.

“When you’re too prescriptive with a brief, then the creative feels constrained and there’s not enough room for exploration or expression,” he explains.

“It’s always the best thing when someone says: ‘just do your thing with it. Come up with some ideas and concepts, and we’ll see how it goes.’ I think sometimes people can say that, but they don’t always mean it.”

Famously, Anthony’s piece Work Hard and Be Nice to People was based on an open brief the designer set for himself to make his own manifesto (another one to consider for yourself, perhaps?), but in terms of favourites, he thinks of his work with Dutch creative Eric Kessels for Hans Brinker Budget Hotel decades earlier. “He’d seen some work that I’d done that he liked, and he didn’t even write a brief, really,” he recalls.

A brief chat and some suggested lines of copy later, Anthony had designed a set of 20 posters for the hotel. From there, his career took off – and with it, his confidence skyrocketed.

“Looking back, it was a real affirmation of my approach to making work,” he says. “So I learned to trust myself, and stick with what I wanted to do. It gave me more self belief and more confidence.”

If you’re a young creative making your way in the industry, Anthony recommends finding open briefs – and creatives – that align with your personal values.

“If you find an art director or a creative director or even somebody who wants to commission you, who can help you with that confidence, and feel like, ‘yeah, you can actually do this and you can make something interesting’ – those first steps set the tone for the rest of the work you want to do.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based animator and illustrator Ramin Nazer finds that open briefs can go against natural instincts when it comes to the creative process. “Creatives like to be free. They don’t want to be told what to do,” he explains. “But with open briefs, you have less clarity. It’s counter-intuitive, but limitation is actually very helpful in creativity.”

One of Ramin’s favourite briefs involved creating a mind map. “No restrictions – just to put the overall theme in the middle and then branch out several nodes. Then branch those out further,” he explains.

Choosing death as a central theme, Ramin branched out into different concepts like Oblivion, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory; eventually inspiring him to create his 2014 book After You Die. He talks about how that open brief taught him to “really branch out past the initial ten ideas you’d normally have”.

“We tend to fall in love with our early ideas, but if you keep pushing you’ll end up with a larger perspective. Sometimes your first idea is the right one, but wouldn’t you rather know for sure?”

When it comes to open briefs, Ramin recommends embracing a little bit of constraint. “Make up some rules for yourself and then play within those boundaries. Don’t be afraid of bad ideas,” he says.

“It’s funny. If I were asked about how to approach ‘closed briefs’, I would be telling you to embrace infinity. When asked about open briefs, I’m telling you to embrace limitation. I guess all advice is about reconciling the polarity and contradiction in everything.”

When left entirely to your own devices and the far reaches of your mind, that can be sometimes when it’s the most difficult to come up with ideas. It happens to creatives of all disciplines and levels of experience.

So the next time you’re going round in circles or struggling to fill that blank page (or blank portfolio), why not try the open brief on for size? Set yourself a challenge (or pick a few from what we’ve found for you below), and see what you can come up with.