The sound and look of story

(Or: Bringing Hyperactive Imagination to life, part 4)

In case you haven’t heard the big news, the Hyperactive Imagination podcast launches on October 18. (!!) Over the past few weeks, I’ve been walking you through my approach to the podcast’s development, which has been heavily influenced by my professional experiences and the way I work with my clients at Cause:Effect Creative.

The list of questions you need to answer when launching a podcast is very long, but today, I’m going to focus on how I approached two of the big ones.

1. How do I select guests?

By design, a podcast billing itself as a high-voltage channel for creativity offers a wide berth when it comes to topics and guests, so we are creating structure by focusing each season on its own theme.

For the first season, our theme is “Thunder Stories.” You’ll hear more about Thunder Stories when episode one debuts, but the basic concept is that we are bringing on individuals to talk about how they’ve found resonance in their lives. In fact, the first episode is my own Thunder Story, from my improbable arrival at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to my departure from Apple and the founding of The Land of Make+Believe.

If you’re developing your own podcast, I recommend identifying your themes and then wearing them as a lens into every conversation you have. As we’ve put the concept for Hyperactive Imagination together, I’ve been keeping it front of mind every time I’ve interacted with someone, professionally or personally. I landed many of my guests with variations of, “Hey, you have a fascinating story that more people need to hear — would you like to be on my show?”

It’s more than okay to start with a list of “dream guests.” But I would say this: the stories your audience needs to hear the most are the ones they haven’t heard yet. Be open to modifying that list at a moment’s notice as new people and new stories come into your life. If you’re fascinated by someone you meet, there’s a very good chance your audience will be, too.

2. What should it sound and look like?

There’s no right answer for what a podcast should sound and look like — creative diversity keeps life interesting, and podcasting is no different.

But what I didn’t realize going into this project was how deeply the audio and visual design would be intertwined with the content and mission of the podcast itself.

I imagine many podcasters save theme music for the week before launch. I get it — you want to get right into the content, and a detail like this can easily fall down the list of priorities.

But for me, it went a little differently. Commissioning theme music was practically the first thing I did.

I did this in part because it’s how my brain works — I get creatively energized when I’m surrounded by the creative energy of others. So I reached out to Songfinch, which put me in touch with an incredibly talented producer by the name of Landon Sears.

I immediately vibed with Landon’s style, and I briefed him on what I needed — a theme song, transitions, an outro, the works. What I got back from him blew me away.

It affected me so deeply that it actually changed the trajectory of the podcast. Landon set the bar so high, it elevated the standard by which everything else needed to be done. Hyperactive Imagination went from a side project to a highly-produced centerpiece.

For the visuals, I’d long been inspired by the interrobang — a punctuation mark that unites a question mark with an exclamation point in one character.

But for a word mark, the creative challenge was how to represent the concept of hyperactivity and creativity in a way that didn’t feel frenetic. Essentially, how to capture hyperactive, imaginative elegance?

Enter a font named Gilbert in honor of Gilbert Baker, the designer of the iconic Rainbow Flag.

Such a playful, colorful, imaginative spirit that stands for something so meaningful just felt right.

From there, I had fun playing with the exclamatory “eureka!” moment of creative inspiration to turn what would otherwise be a traditional “i” on its head. Which led to our brand mark…

However you approach your own branding work, I recommend remaining open to serendipity. (If Imagination were a deity, I believe Serendipity would be one of her many names.) If I’d remained rigid or fixated on what I thought was the “best” or “right” way to do things, ignoring Serendipity and her many open doors, I would never have ended up with a look and feel and sound that lights me up and keeps me going when the work gets hard. I wish the same for you, too.

Anita Stubenrauch is an ex-Apple creative and the founder of Cause:Effect Creative, an agency that helps brands express visionary ideas with poetic power. Want to contribute a poem or story to Hyperactive Imagination? Visit hyperactiveimagination.com and tap the floating red button that says “Leave a Message.”