Best practices are the worst.
Why best practices are counter-creative.
I think we can all agree that creativity is about making things that are new. Ideas that are surprising. Unexpected. And fresh. It’s about making connections between disparate ideas that have never been made before. It’s about spinning facts and insights into human truths.
The opposite of creativity, to me, is what people lovingly refer to as best practices.
Best practices are about doing what has worked in the past. It’s about headlines that stick to a certain formula. It’s about looking at Google analytics and seeing how many people clicked on the right side of the page versus the left side of the page. It’s about including a letter in a direct mail piece because, for some reason, doing so will increase replies. It’s about creating elements of a certain size and color and placement because that’s what 63% of people have responded to. It’s about dropping a picture of a white paper into a banner ad because more people will click it. It’s why the logo on this site is in the upper left-hand corner of this page and why, when you click on it, you can be 99% certain it will take you to the homepage. It’s why the internet is, and always will be, a sea of relative sameness.
But let’s face it, folks: You’re never going to surprise or startle or capture the imagination of your audience if you execute experiences they’ve already lived through dozens or hundreds of times.
And just because something has worked in that past, that doesn’t mean it’s still going to be the best choice in the here and now.
Being slavish to best practices is the surest road to hack-ville I can think of. But you can’t completely ignore best practices either.
It all comes down to this: As creative professionals, we have a responsibility to know our craft. To study what works and prepare a mental catalog of all best practices. That’s the professional part of being a creative professional. The creative bit, however, means that there are times when you have to abandon best practices in search of better practices.
That’s my goal, anyway.
Grant Sanders is the Creative Director at Mintz + Hoke Advertising in Avon, CT. When he’s not in search of better practices, he makes a practice of commuting to his home on Nantucket Island each week to be with his kindergarten-teacher wife and black dog named, “Seven.”
