Thinking between the boxes
Tim Halloran, Creative Director + Brand Strategist
If you’re in a creative field, you’re probably sick of the phrase “think outside the box.” I’ve decided to boycott it. I’m pretty sure it was never a useful idiom in the first place. It’s like saying “don’t think of giraffes,” and then all you can think of are giraffes. For me, thinking between the boxes makes a better trope. It’s one I can actually work with—and live by.
The reality is that creativity is a team sport. Good ideas don’t simply spew forth as you sit by yourself in an empty room, at least not in any reliable way. The best recipe for creativity has three ingredients: people, trust, and play. And the more difference you can find between the people, the better.
Creative folks tend to specialize. There are choreographers and composers, poets and programmers, illustrators and information architects. It’s when different specialists come together, learn to trust each other, and start to play, that the brightest creative sparks fly between us. You get to take an insight from one discipline, apply it to a different one, and see what happens. You get to hybridize and catalyze. That’s when it gets magical. Yes, we’re thinking outside the boxes, but more importantly, we’re thinking between them.
The boxes I’ve known
Here’s my one-sentence resumé: NYU film school dropout turns freelance writer-photographer, edits liner notes for Rhino Records for a couple years, moves into the museum design field to produce interactive exhibitions, goes to Austria for his MFA, joins a creative agency as a brand strategist and leaves as a studio director, and then goes to the client side for 6 years to help launch and build a successful AI startup in Seattle. (Okay, so sometimes creative folks don’t specialize.)
It’s been a strange ride, and with any luck that strangeness will continue. I’ve been privileged to work with a diverse range of clients on a broad slate of projects, like:
- Service design for Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar store
- Interaction design for the world’s first socially conscious cruise line
- An immersive showroom and experience center for Airbus
- Interface design for Starbucks’ next-generation espresso machine
- A mini-series of international case study videos for Tableau
- A cultural museum for the Suquamish people, the tribe of Chief Seattle
- An award-winning visual search engine for the Smithsonian
When you travel between countries, it’s hard not to instinctively compare and contrast cultures. I’m always keen to observe which influences have been borrowed, and which ones don’t seem to translate. (Side note: it’s insane that Italy’s ice cream donut sandwiches haven’t become a stateside craze yet.)
The same is true when you travel between creative disciplines, like from science exhibits to enterprise software, or from performance art to artificial intelligence. You get to discover that for digital content strategy, a museum makes a much better model than a magazine. Or that for machine learning, dance tells a far better story than diagrams. You get to think between the boxes.
I’m always open to new adventures, so if you’re interested in thinking between the boxes with me, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email. Or if you want to take a deeper dive on the some of the projects described above, just keep on scrolling!
Textio: 2016–2022
I joined Seattle startup Textio as employee #18, their first Director of Marketing. Part designer, part strategist, and part blogger, I led the work to rebrand the company and competitively position our flagship product as we grew from monthly self-service individual subscriptions to six-figure annual enterprise contracts.
Over more than four years, my work has covered the brand spectrum, from a complete redesign of our brandmark to product naming, brand videos, marketing site design, sales collateral, data visualizations for press, and investor pitch decks.
I helped Textio invent and build a new category of enterprise software that we named augmented writing. It’s seen significant traction in the market, landing customers like Johnson & Johnson, Twitter, and McDonalds, while grabbing the attention of industry analysts and spawning new product competition in the commercial market segment.
Through two successful rounds of venture capital funding and growth of Textio to more than 150 employees, I’ve led the company’s efforts to infuse innovative, human-centered design thinking into everything we do by building a dedicated brand team and launching a popular weekly series of Brand Lab creative workshops for all employees. I was also asked by Textio’s cofounders to lead an effort to articulate a clear set of Textio core principles.
Textio’s category-defining innovations have earned coverage in publications like the New York Times, WIRED, and the Wall Street Journal, and garnered dozens of awards including the Forbes AI 50, the Webby Award for Best Use of Machine Learning, and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.
Here is what Kieran Snyder, Co-founder and CEO of Textio, wrote in her annual memo to employees at the end of 2017, describing the branding work that I’ve led since joining the company:
“Last year, we began an aggressive rebrand that touched all aspects of Textio. In 2017 we continued this work, and it has impacted our product, our marketing, our website, our logo, our visual language, our sales language, and even our office space design. It has given us augmented writing as a category. In every way, our brand work has been a key foundation for every other achievement outlined in this note. I don’t know of any other company at our stage that has done such sustained and successful work on brand.”
Hornall Anderson: 2014–2016
Prior to joining Textio I was co-director of the experience design studio at Seattle design agency Hornall Anderson, affectionately dubbed “Studio X.” Along with co-director Mark Buchalter and a team of seven interaction designers, technology specialists, and industrial designers, I led the agency’s digital and environmental design projects.
Studio X projects ranged broadly from corporate websites to videos and from retail service design to immersive product showrooms. Some of our clients included Airbus, Amazon, Starbucks, Tableau, the Mastercard Foundation, the Golden State Warriors, Fathom Cruises, and the Empire State Building.
(I’m incredibly proud of the work my team did on these projects. If you want to read what they thought of having me in a creative leadership role, have a look at this Top 10 list of anonymous performance review quotes!)
Storyline Studio: 2004–2014
As one of the co-founders of Storyline Studio, I worked closely with designers Bill Smith, Stuart Lee, and a small group of other regular collaborators on a wide range of corporate and museum design projects. Together we planned, designed, and oversaw construction of deeply immersive, interactive experiences for organizations like the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Suquamish Tribe, and The Annenberg Foundation.
Prior to helping start Storyline, I worked as an independent producer of interactive experiences for science and history museums. My work during these years involved clients such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Federal Reserve Bank, The National Cowgirl Museum, and the Bellevue Art Museum.
One more thing…
When I’m not designing or strategizing for work, I’m probably off somewhere exploring places and cultures that are new to me. Photography was my first love, and my camera still joins me everywhere I travel, although these days I’ve traded in my trusty old Canon for an iPhone. Click here to have a look at the “work” I do for fun.
