David Schwen is a designer, stop-motion aficionado, and creative director at Dschwen, a creative studio based in Minneapolis. His ability to approach every project — personal and commercial alike — with a playful spirit is what makes his work uniquely distinctive and attracts big-name clients like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Toyota. He spoke with us about his creative process and why “play” is a necessary part of it.
Talk about your journey to becoming the creative you are today, and how the journey has influenced your work.
I honestly can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t making something with my hands. As a kid I would fill an entire piece of paper with an array of colors. Not one square inch was left blank. Expressing myself through my art is how I’ve always shown what’s going on inside of my head.
Moving up into grade school, while other kids ditched their crayons, I wanted to keep mine. I had some very influential people in my life that helped to support my passion for art. I would meet with my 3rd grade teacher, Jane Schmidt, at 7am before school for drawing lessons. My high school art teacher, Dave Guenther, later helped me hone my skills and give me hope that I could do this for a living. And my parents — Kent and Jodi — were always so-very-encouraging. I never heard the “how-are-you going-to-make-money-as-an-artist” line from them, because they believed in me. Without these people, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today.
What are a few favorite projects you’ve worked on?
I was contacted by Twitter to go out to Cannes, France to make some Vine animations for the Creativity Festival. There was no direction on what I had to make. And I was waiting for the ‘catch’ — but there wasn’t one. It was so amazing to be in an outdoor studio, right on the beach, creating things that I love to make anyway. The only tricky part was trying to find ways to shield the wind — doesn’t work well when you’re doing stop motion!
Creativity takes discipline, but at its heart, it is imagination — which involves play. How do you think about playfulness in your work?
I worked at different agencies around Minneapolis for almost 15 years before starting my own studio. While working at those places, I always had to spend my free time at home creating things for myself. Passion projects became a great release for me, because there weren’t any briefs or clients attached to them. I could play and create whatever I wanted.
Later, when I broke off on my own, brands started coming to me to “play” for them. A lot of the projects were social media based—it was an area that was still very fresh and unexplored. I could bring my uninhibited ideas to the projects for actual client work. It didn’t feel like work at all.
Talk about the pairing of creativity and playfulness — why is it important to have and employ both?
Imagine a world without creativity. Booooooooooooooooring. Art and creativity are what make us dreamers, and more than people just clocking in every day for work. Creativity makes us laugh and cry and laugh some more. When I’m working on projects, I always try to instill some element of playfulness. It comes from within, so it never feels forced. If I can brighten someone’s day just by adding a little smile when they see my work, I feel like I’ve succeeded.
How do you create space to play on a daily basis?
Our studio at Dschwen is filled with toys, fake food, video games, and a ping pong table. We try to keep an environment that is conducive to playfulness. I honestly enjoy coming into “work” every day. Sometimes our writer, Patrick Murphy, and I will take a break from ideating and play a few games of ping pong together. It’s important to keep things loose while working on projects.
“Playfulness” for a creative director like yourself can look a lot different than “playfulness” for an artist — there are different things at stake when time is literally money for your clients. What challenges do you face balancing the need to get things done with the desire to experiment and imagine?
It can definitely feel like an uphill battle trying to teach clients the importance of having more time on a project, but sometimes it’s just not an option. As a way to expedite my process for these instances, I have an idea board that I fill up with post-its of potential concepts to make for myself or for clients. If there is a quick turnaround on a project, I’ll look at the board and see if anything will work for that project. The most important part for me while working on projects is to only pitch ideas that I’m happy about and that express the playfulness I have inside of me.
Last question: what might your creative process look like without a spirit of playfulness?
I think if I didn’t have fun doing what I’m doing, it would definitely be reflected in my work. It’s not that I try hard to instill playfulness in my projects, it just naturally flows out on its own. Without “play” in my work, it would remind me a little of a doctor’s office, filled with boring art hanging on the beige walls. What fun would that be, right? I honestly never want to grow up.
Creativity& is an Open Book Communications project. It is a space to showcase artists/entrepreneurs/creative-people as real humans. We hope to show that it doesn’t just take creativity to make you a great creative; it takes a whole host of other things. And there are things that often go along with creativity that are rarely seen or talked about. We hope to draw that out from creatives — to inspire, generate conversations, and get their fans (and themselves) thinking about the creative process.
