Welcome to The Creative Brief. Your newsletter to help you be more creative and stay inspired.

• 📚 Two Design Books I Love

• ⛳️ Epic Art Direction from Lacoste

• ❤️ Gorgeous Cafe Brand Design

• 📈 Brand Building Workshop

• ⚡️ 10 Links to Level Up Your Visuals

The Process Five

This is one of my favorite new brand design books that I just bought.

The Process Five is the latest installment in the series from The Brand Identity.

Featuring 344 pages of designs from some of the leading design shops in the world. Seeing brand work from Pentagram, Rabbit Hole, and Carla Palette is always wonderful, but what makes this book so special in my opinion is we're seeing over 500 pieces of sketches, mock ups, iterations, and never before seen insights into the process that all led up to the final design work.

Logo Modernism

If you only pick up one logo design book in your entire life, it should probably be Logo Modernism by Jens Mülle, An absolute gold mine of logos and corporate identity.

It's over 400 pages, almost eight pounds, and has 6,000 logos ranging from 1940 to 1980.

My favorite part about owning this book, is the form factor. This book is enormous, and flipping through the oversized pages always feels special.

1980’s Lacoste Art Direction

Vintage art direction + concepting from Lacoste is something special. Telling a story about their brand using surrealism, clever angles, colors, shapes, and motifs.

Elegance and simplicity. Thoughtful sportiness. Early Lacoste print ads are a great example of how considerate art direction, combined with consistent branding, can create a powerful and lasting image.

Brand Building Workshop

Class is in session ✌️ ❤️

Join me on Sept 23rd for some real tactical digital brand building game.

Over the last 2.5 years I have been working to really grow my personal brand. I have tried all kinds of strategies and tactics with varying degrees of failure and success... and then it clicked. The results have been pretty wild to be honest, and I’ve built up an audience of over 200K followers across Linkedin, TikTok, and Meta.

Excited to announce that I am hosting a Digital Brand Building workshop on September 23rd with a small group to share the strategies I use that work.

Who is this for? Anyone who wants to grow their brand online. Creatives. Marketers. Entrepreneurs. Makers.

Why am I qualified to host this? I have been fortunate throughout my career that companies like Nike, Adobe, and Netflix have entrusted me with their creative output. I have also taught creative workshops at places like Harvard, Rutgers, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Learn more + RSVP at https://www.creativescookbook.com/

Hope to see you there!
✌️ ❤️

10 Links to Level Up Your Visuals

All of the most successful art directors + creative directors I know have a running catalog of gorgeous images, gifs, logos, layouts, and ideas they can pull from at a moments notice.

Having truly excellent visual reference material is an extremely important part of being a professional creative human. It helps you ideate and solidify your creative thinking, and it helps you and your clients align on a vision before you actually go and make the thing.

In no particular order here are 10 of my favorite resources to help you level up your mood board game.

The Essential Design - https://theessential.design/
Savee - https://savee.it/
OffGrid - https://www.offgrid-design.co/
Arena - https://www.are.na/
Art of the Title - https://www.artofthetitle.com/
Doing Cool Stuff - https://www.doingcoolstuff.xyz/
Visual Cache - https://visualcache.com/
Eyecandy - https://eyecannndy.com/
Design Everywhere - https://designeverywhere.co/
Fonts In Use - https://fontsinuse.com/

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Thank you for supporting the content. Always striving to deliver as much value in these emails as possible and hope you found something new and inspiring in this issue!

Talk soon,
Z