Sometimes creativity really can be child's play

Being a creative is easy. You just have to think of an idea that’s never been thought of before. Get it through the creative director, executive creative director and chief creative officer, who’ve seen every idea under the sun. 

Make sure the account team is happy. Make extra sure it’s within budget, on brief and achievable in the timings. Execute it in every media channel. Convince the client to buy it. And the client’s boss. 

And the client’s boss’s boss. Get it through research. And then your work gets made. 

We’re joking, of course. Getting something out the door is hard. That’s just part of the job. Fortunately, we’ve developed the thickest of skins to match. But the itch to get something good made intensifies every day (too many skin references?).

During a particularly dry patch several years ago, it felt more like a rash than an itch (definitely too many skin references now, we’ll stop). 

So rather than run the gauntlet and wait for permission to make something, we just went ahead and started a project for ourselves. Because we could.

And given that we have brains like children, it was the natural next step to make a children’s book. Now we realise we’re not the first creatives, and we certainly won’t be the last, to rattle off a kids’ book. But we like to think that this one’s a teeny tiny bit different. 

Because it’s a book where kids have to colour in the pages to finish the story. Yep, it’s interactive. And not in the zombie-face-up-against-the-iPad-screen-for-hours kinda way. 

The Designosaurs: the Day the Colours Washed Away is a rhyming story book featuring three friends called Rexi, Teri and Dip, who love to paint, draw and be creative. They live far, far away in the most colourful land. 

But then, one day – SPOILER ALERT – a huge storm comes along and washes all the colours away. Boooo!

It’s at this point the book switches from story to colouring book. With all the pages turning black and white, the Designosaurs invite the reader to help them colour the world back together again to complete the story and save the day. Yaaay!

We wrote and illustrated the entire book and lost count of the amount of amends we’ve done. Turns out that, without a deadline or account team, we could keep tweaking forever. 

Once we’d had the idea and got it all together, the next step was to actually make the thing. This is the moment where we’d like to pause and give thanks to all the producers out there who make stuff happen. 

It’s one thing to think of an idea, it’s a whole other thing to get it made.