Pari Purohit - Hardest Part About Being Creative Is Disciplining Your ‘Thinking’ (Design Entrepreneur)

 

I think all of us have our own hacks for this. The hardest part about being creative is that a lot of the work is ‘thinking’. And it’s extremely difficult to discipline our minds to stop thinking. It’s necessary to switch off, refuel and restart. Watch an episode of a show, take a nap, take a chai break, whatever that may be.

Tell us about your background and journey from an artist to starting Studio Glyph.
 
Looking back at my upbringing, innovative thinking was a large part of my nurture. My father was always tinkering with things, inventing creative ways to improve them or engineer them for higher efficiency. Watching him perhaps helped form my exploratory, creative bent of mind. Design for me has always been about optimisation, at its core. 

After studying at NID, which honed my thinking a great deal, I knew that this was where my passion and strength lay. And I discovered why design is such a perfect choice for me - it bridges left and right-brained thinking. Many in my peer group have switched streams, changed course, but I’ve never wavered, and never had a shadow of a doubt.
 
Naturally, as most fresh graduates do, I started right at the bottom of the ladder. I’ve been through my share of positions at companies large and small, worked with some great folks, and some not so great, done work I’m proud of and some that in retrospect wasn’t any good at all. Along the way unbeknownst to me, my entrepreneurial thinking was developing.
 
I realised that to be an effective designer, one needs to understand business. My interactions with clients (at the agencies I worked at) probed less the creative subjects and more the business side of things. In parallel, I also was privy to the grim side of the creative business as it existed- how agencies were viewed less as partners and more as manufacturers. 

I was asking too many questions- Why do you need a brochure, why do you need a new logo, what’s wrong with the business, etc. I rarely got satisfactory answers and found that the kind of partnerships that existed between clients and agencies was one-sided.
 
Over time this led to me getting jittery in the job that I had. I knew there was more I could do to help our clients. That a brochure didn’t hold the answer to all their problems, even though it seemed so at the time.
 
By this time I had moved up the ranks and it was harder to move companies since there were few positions available, at least ones that interested me. It was then I decided to work independently. At first as a freelancer, and as the positive response to my work grew, so did my team. And it’s been onward and upwards from there.
 
Today we’re a team of 8 people, and have worked with some of the biggest names in the country.
 
 
Can you talk about your creative process?
 
I can go on for hours about this. Our creative process is quite unromantic. It’s rooted in deep research, validation of hypothesis, customer behaviour, understanding markets and then devising creative solutions that address our business goals. 

It’s not extraordinary, and quite logical really. Our goal is to ensure our work is effective. To that end, our creative process really works for the businesses we partner with.
 
When you work with clear business objectives, it’s amazing how scientific creativity can be. There’s little room for whimsy.
 
 
How has social media marketing transformed your designs?

One of the rather apparent difference is that most brands are much more aggressive with their online presence and voice. There’s a strong shift from an emphasis on the tactile experience to the visual impact. 
 
We design a lot of packaging, and when I did it 10 years ago, we were tackling a multitude of retail scenarios. Now we’re competing with 1000s of thumbnails. The barriers to entry being much lower, credibility is always in question. Capturing peoples mental bandwidth has become a huge challenge, especially since attention spans have diminished. 

With ‘free shipping worldwide’, a local brand may now be competing with brands across the globe. So the design hurdles have increased geometrically. Equally well, so has technology, and how we think of media. It has compelled designers to reevaluate how they imagine brands to exist and flourish. Ten years ago we were designing to be experientially disruptive in different ways. 

We now need to think of how brands will survive algorithms of marketplaces, search engines and social media. The time and space to grab eyeballs and make a compelling case to purchase have reduced dramatically. It’s exciting if you have any bits of geekiness in you like I do. 
 
 
4. Talk about a creative block and how you overcome it?
 
I think all of us have our own hacks for this. The hardest part about being creative is that a lot of the work is ‘thinking’. And it’s extremely difficult to discipline our minds to stop thinking. It’s necessary to switch off, refuel and restart. Watch an episode of a show, take a nap, take a chai break, whatever that may be.
 
For me, the creative block is usually caused by attempting to attack a problem in the same way repeatedly. At such times I usually try and approach or think of a problem in an entirely different way. Playing devil's advocate really helps. Another trick I find that works for me is to put yourself in a specific type of customers shoes and imagine their behaviour.
 
Fundamentally though, I believe creativity for design and branding needs three key ingredients:

1. A High level of Empathy. To be able to relate, imagine experiences and motives of behaviour. To understand problems, not just of our customers, but fears that brands may have. 

2. Varied interests. You simply can’t come up with varied ideas if you are mono-dimensional in your passions. If you aren’t exposed to variety, or simply aren’t interested in it, how can you come up with variety?

3. Curiosity to challenge: To perennially have an innate need to get to the bottom of something or try something different- whether it is to do with our craft, or a perception, or a business idea/model anything.
 
 
What are the struggles of running an independent brand in this market?

There are quite a few. I'm going to list just a few.

a. It's a very crowded market out there in my field. And there is a very misguided understanding of quality. Wacky or 'fun' tends to win over sound and rational (yet creative) ideas for brands. So standing out becomes a bit challenging, because our success goes deeper than first impressions.

b. Clients perceive us differently because we are a boutique organisation. Either they think we are cheap, or we can be bullied into 'delivering' what they want. The fact is we care about the customer first, not even the client for that matter.

c. If your priorities are not PR, 'networking' and 'publicity', you can be invisible. At Glyph, we aren't very public, we prefer to devote most of our time to our work. Others do a lot of PR and use social media effectively to put themselves out there, and we admire that.
 
 
What advice do you have for anybody who has an interest in entering this field.

Being a successful graphic designer or brand consultant has nothing to do with 'starting your own studio'. Many feel that being a design entrepreneur is the epitome of success. It's not. If you find like-minded individuals to work with, you should focus on your craft and doing meaningful work. Especially without a minimum of at least 10 years of experience.
 
Secondly, always be curious and empathetic. You will only be effective as a designer if you have these two qualities. These two qualities are not restricted just to the design field. But they could lead to learning other things like entrepreneurship or consumer psychology.

Interviewed by - Shruti Gupta