Creative Counts 24

Interview by Milk Team | with Shane Davis

What is being a creative director to you? And how is that different or similar to being an artist?

They're very different roles, actually. 'Creative director' is a term that gets thrown around a lot and can become cliché, but when positioned appropriately, it's an incredibly important role within a company.

To me, it means someone who holds a team together, fosters creative processes, and effectively manages collaboration to achieve meaningful outcomes. That's highly different from being an artist.

When you asked about collaboration, the first thing that popped into my head was anxiety, because collaboration can be challenging—especially when you come from a background as a designer who operates within their own head. It requires an entirely different mindset to step back, manage others, and inspire people when you really want to jump in and do the work yourself.

Early in developing these leadership roles, it's often harder to teach than to do. So it's a completely different skill set. But to direct in an impactful way, you really need to understand the creative artistic process yourself.

I feel like there's a tension between artists and creative direction. Many artists do have their own creative direction and style, but that doesn't mean they can direct other people or bring a team together.

Exactly. That differentiation is important, especially for younger people thinking about what careers they want to pursue.

What's the most unconventional or unexpected material or medium you've used in a design project, and how did it shape the final outcome?

Looking around this space we're in, I'm always proud of these steel dividers. We've received a good amount of appreciation for the design of this space, but it's actually incredibly humble. These dividers are just L-steel brackets—the way they would come straight from a local hardware store.

When we reached the finishing stages of this project, we were running low on resources and getting really scrappy. Initially, we had this idea to repurpose glass from the skylight as dividers, but it felt overwrought and a bit forced. Then I noticed these L-brackets lying around the construction site, being used as building material. I realized they were the perfect shape for dividers, and that's what they became.

A lot of my design gestures in both graphic and spatial design aim to reduce to the simplest possible solution. And interestingly, that approach resonates with people. We received all this design coverage for essentially using materials we bought at the local hardware store! Beauty and impact don't have to come through fancy materials—just intention and understanding of how your process translates to feeling when people experience the space.

I feel like the most impactful creativity often comes from a lack of resources.

Totally. Even these tables you're sitting on right now—the finishing is just linoleum you'd buy at an art supply store. It's all very humble stuff, partly due to resource constraints, but that's what makes it special.

As a creative director and graphic designer, how do you stay inspired and push boundaries in an industry that's constantly evolving?

The age we're in is very challenging for creatives, especially young ones coming up, because there's just so much content out there—so much amazing work that we see constantly on platforms like Instagram. It can be really intimidating.

While I definitely use precedents in both graphic design and space design, I try as much as possible not to look at them too much. It's intimidating because there's always an incredible image out there, and you always feel like you're falling short in comparison.

When we're instilling rigorous process in our own work, we've usually been working on a design for a period of time where we're getting perpetually bored of our own work. We're losing that initial shock value of experiencing an image or idea. So if you think about it, you're almost getting sick of your own idea, which is natural, while simultaneously being inundated with exciting new images. Your own ideas get devalued in that process.

So I try to stay away from endless scrolling and be really intentional about how I develop ideas. I encourage my team to create very focused presentations that walk us through their process—idea, inspiration, and how they break down that inspiration into something new.

So you guys are creative strategists in a way.

I think a lot of young designers can have good ideas but struggle to get to a finished product. Creating good work is something many people can do—you can find inspiration and move things around a page until it looks decent. But creating consistently great ideas is what separates a creative from a creative professional.

The difference is the ability to consistently produce really special, unique work, and that requires honing your process. Understanding the challenges, opportunities, and goals of what you're trying to do, gathering inspiration in a specific way (not just looking at random images), distilling what's important from those references, and then reconstructing something unique.

Things get interesting when you're not just emulating existing work but intersecting concepts with disparate ideas or inspirations that may seem dissonant or irrelevant. That's when new things start to manifest.

That reminds me of someone like Missy Elliott, who also avoided consuming too much external content during her creative process, yet she's one of the most innovative people in music videos.

She's probably a true artist. It's funny you mention her—the DJ played a Missy Elliott track the other night, and I hadn't heard her in forever. It was so cool.

I don't really consider myself an artist necessarily. If you give me a canvas and say "express yourself," I'm not even that interested, honestly. Maybe one day I will be, but I don't have this innate need to create for the sake of artistry. I'm more interested in design for solving problems or addressing specific conditions.

For me, inspiration is everywhere. One of the most beautiful things about living in a design space and designing daily is that you start to see the world as inspiration. If I'm deep in designing something, or even after a long photo shoot, I'll walk outside and feel like I'm tripping because every shape, form, color, geometry, the way objects interact—it all becomes these forms.

Living in that state of constantly consuming and then producing is how really interesting work emerges.

You mentioned deconstructivist architectural thinking as an influence. That seems connected to Virgil Abloh's approach too, who wasn't just designing clothes but thinking about innovation and problem-solving.

Virgil is an interesting reference because his foundation was in architecture. I think he applied that same architectural thinking to everything he did—that patient, rigorous, discursive process is very much rooted in architectural thinking, which Virgil was inspired by as well.

If you could design a dream space for a fictional character or a historical figure, who would it be and what would it look like?

I've been reading about Pythagoras—the Greek philosopher and mathematician. I've always been interested in numerology, sacred geometry, and mathematically-based design, as well as the interplay between mathematics in spiritual contexts and design contexts, which are deeply intertwined.

I don't have the aptitude for going super deep mathematically into my own design work, but it would be fascinating to create a space for someone like Pythagoras that explores the intersection between the mathematics of the universe, the mathematics of space, and all these connections between philosophy, actuality, music, and mathematics.

A lot of Pythagoras' fundamental realization about the mathematical rationality of the universe was inspired by a lute—seeing the mathematical dynamics of an instrument.

That's fascinating. Music is math, totally. Most people I know who are really good at music are also good at math.

Precisely.

If you had one thing to tell someone coming into the industry, what would it be?

I said this in an interview recently, and many people told me it was reassuring: It's really, really hard. There's a misconception in our times that when we see people succeeding, building, and creating, it looks glamorous and fluid. The truth is, if you want to operate at a high level and continuously evolve and improve, it's mentally and spiritually challenging to constantly push yourself to reach new plateaus in your work.

I think it's important that we demystify how easy it is. What we should be teaching people, beyond creative processes and self-help entrepreneurship tactics, is the will and strength to persevere through all the difficulties. It's just really hard.

You're the first person I've interviewed to admit that. There seems to be this idea that younger generations have been promised that things are easy—just go on social media, go to college (or don't), and you can be famous.

Exactly. It's hard to figure out what you want to do, who to talk to, how long to stay at a job, what projects to pick up, or when to move from internships to paid work.

But I'd also add something more optimistic: If you're on a path where you understand yourself and you're putting in the effort to grow, it might seem confusing when you're young, but at some point, you'll look back and realize it actually all made sense. That winding journey that felt like being lost was often exactly the path you needed to take to end up where you were meant to go.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

See more from Shane on Instagram, as well as at Public Records / Public Service.