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

What is in this week’s issue?
📸 Nikon Versus AI
📚 Resource of the Week
🎵 Branding a Symphony

Nikon Versus AI

This campaign from Nikon is brilliant.

Going head to head with generative AI and encouraging the viewer “Don’t give up on the real world.”

The campaign, called “Natural Intelligence” pairs fantastic and very real images shot on Nikon cameras with a fictitious prompt that might be used in Midjourney or Adobe Firefly.

”A latte skatepark in the middle of the desert in Mars”

“A realistic Minecraft cliff at the seashore in winter season”

“A mutant umbrella tree shaped like a nuclear bomb explosion”

Carlos Tolmos, the chief operating officer of Circus Grey Peru shared the campaign was born from an increasingly harsh reality for photographers.

“Artificial intelligence has taken over pop culture,” Tolmos shared, and expressed that some clients are more interested in AI-generated work that real-life or hand-crafted creative.

“That’s why Nikon in Peru decided to take a stand and support the real over the artificial.”

Resource of the Week

Earlier this year the good people at Smith & Diction shared a fantastic resource.

They shared a beautifully designed Figma board of how they present their brand design work and process with clients.

Go take this thing for a spin and you can even make an editable copy for you to customize as a jumping-off point for your next pitch.

View the Figma presentation here.

Branding a Symphony

Last year one of the oldest performing arts organizations in the state of Texas reimagined its branding.

The new logo mark for Houston Symphony evokes the movement of a musical performance as it pushes up and to the right, mimicking the movement of the bow of a violin or cello.

"The typeface, Veronesi, was selected to represent the Trajanesque letters carved into the facade of the building in 1966. The rising left bar of the icon is the neck of a cello. The crossbar is a bow, but it casts a shadow on the descending right bar of the H. The crossbar and heavy right bar are a freeway and an overpass; Houston is nothing if not a city of freeways."

One thing that is fantastic about this new logo design is it feels like it could be a new musical notation, and fits seamlessly within other musical symbols.

Credit to Austin TX based FÖDA™ for the stellar work 🎵

What are your thoughts on the updated Houston Symphony identity?