Meaningful Creations

EDITION 15 / 2026

Hey Reader!

What brands stick in your head? I'm willing to bet that it's not the ones that do everything "right" and stick to the rules, but rather the ones that somehow manage to do things a little different. And this is not just me being rebellious. (Well, maybe a little 😜)

Unpopular opinion

Every second designer online wants to teach us the "rules': Sans-serif fonts are modern and clean. Serifs are elegant and traditional. Pink is feminine. Black is serious. Green means eco-friendly. Neon feels loud. Certain colours are "luxury," certain ones aren't. There's a whole unspoken rulebook we all absorb through osmosis, and honestly... it really annoys me when designers talk about these things as if they are immutable laws. 🤨

Becuase here's what I know to be true after decades as an art director and brand designer: a sans-serif can be devastatingly elegant when it's paired with the right spacing and layout. Neon green can look expensive AF when it's held inside a restrained, disciplined design system. A playful hand-drawn element can sit next to serious editorial typography and suddenly the whole thing has personality AND gravitas.

The contradictions are what make us look twice.

And I think this is a trap a lot of us fall into when we're building our own brand materials. We look at what other people in our space are doing, we clock the "rules" of our industry, and we subconsciously quietly file down the interesting edges of ourselves to fit in. We pick the safe font. The expected palette. The tone everyone else is using. It's completely understandable - but then we wonder why our brand doesn't feel like us.

So this week I want to nudge you toward the opposite. Go look at brands that break the rules on purpose and figure out why it works. Is it because the contradiction is anchored by strong fundamentals everywhere else? Is it because the "wrong" element is used with real intention, not by accident? And then look at where it doesn't work, because that's just as instructive. Where does a contradiction tip over into confusing? Where does it feel like a mistake instead of a choice?

Because the goal isn't contradiction for the sake of it. The goal is knowing the rules well enough to bend the ones that make your brand feel more like you, ALLOWING you to be authentic.

Here's a few questions to consider: What contradictions do you carry? Are you a serious strategist who's also genuinely playful? A minimalist who secretly loves a bit of maximalist joy? A calm, considered person whose favourite colour is hot pink? Those combinations ARE your brand. They're the thing no competitor can copy, because no competitor is you.

The brands I remember, the ones I quietly admire, they've all leaned into something uniquely THEM. And it makes them impossible to confuse with anyone else.

You better work, batch

This week's tutorial is one I think a lot of people will find super useful: a simple way to batch a whole month (or year!) of carousel posts using Canva's Bulk Create tool.

If you've made a carousel before, you'll know the drill. Design the front page, build out the info slide layout, duplicate it a few times, then copy and paste content into every single one. It's not complicated, it just quietly eats your afternoon.

So this week I'm walking through how to set up one reusable, on-brand carousel template, connect it to a simple content source, and let Bulk Create handle the batching for you. One template in, a whole month of finished, ready-to-post carousels out, in just a couple of clicks.

Check out the video live on my channel now.

This week I want to share something I discovered online and that I thought was soooo cool: the sculptures of Shen Lie-yi, a Hangzhou-based artist and professor at the China Academy of Art.

His signature series, Rain, looks exactly like it sounds: water pooling and rippling across the surface of stone slabs. Except there's no water - it's solid granite, just carved and polished until it holds the perfect illusion of something soft and flowing, frozen mid-ripple.

In Chinese philosophy, water represents yin, softness, the thing that yields; and stone represents yang, hardness, the thing that resists. Shen spent years learning to carve one, so it convincingly becomes the other, and that's the tension the work lives in. It's alchemy. 😁

He's worked in wood, stainless steel and other materials too, always circling back to that same push and pull between hard and soft, liquid and solid.

It actually reinforces what we talked about earlier - the contradictions in who we are, the soft bits next to the hard ones, are usually what make us and our our work interesting, not something to iron out. You don't need to resolve every contradiction in yourself...rather experiment with including it. The surprising bits are exactly what people remember.

Anyway, check out his work on Instagram or his website and tell him I sent ya.😉