Tag: Oishii Creative

16
Aug

Dare To Vacation

Summer is quickly coming to an end.  And with friends and colleagues chasing the coming eclipse we’re talking in the office about the importance of vacation, time away from solving complex problems, working toward new solutions, an ordinary day at work.

Vacations, while important, are fraught with anxiety. Often times, I think I can’t be away from projects, clients, and deadlines.  At the same time,  I crave retreat time and the unfolding of my thoughts, habits, and routines, I’m anxious at stepping away from my devices. And I’m not alone.

With Americans working more hours than any other industrialized nation, and with research making it clear that all of our overworking isn’t getting us ahead, it’s time to take a look at our work/life balance.

As we’ve explored before, creative brains lose focus when they don’t get enough sleep and can greatly benefit from disconnecting. But in an industry where there’s a seemingly never-ending line of projects to finish and deadlines to meet, sometimes, things fall a little off balance. A recent study found that 87% of knowledge workers admit to working more than a typical 40-hour workweek, and 23.4% put in more than 50 hours a week. And 71% of responders admitted that they were unhappy about putting in the extra time. The corporate, and even creative, work cultures have unwittingly created an environment that is literally wearing us down.

As one of the founders of a creative company, I see the importance of maintaining work/life balance not only for myself and my own well-being but for our teams and employees. If we’re not setting a good example at the top, it’s likely the rest of the team won’t feel they have the freedom to take care of themselves as well. With that in mind, we put together a list of ways that we maintain work/life balance for ourselves and encourage our employees to follow:

Put Health First
From mental health to physical ailments and even sick family members, when our well-being is on the line, we must take the time to take care of ourselves (or our loved ones). From exercising and eating right to taking a sick day when we need to, in order to bring balance back to our lives, we need to put our health — and that of our employees — first.

Encourage Passion Projects
We are firm believers that passion projects drive innovation, and encouraging those passion projects for ourselves and our team members allows us all some much needed creative freedom and the ability to take a sanctioned break from our day-to-day. The result, hopefully, is that we’ll all feel re-inspired and reinvigorated.

Respect Creative and Personal Refresh Time
Creative companies tend to lead the corporate pack when it comes to setting examples for prioritizing the importance of “free time.  Reclaiming weekends and evening hours makes for happier and more productive employees. It’s simple, and yet many companies still cling to the ethical virtues of round the clock availability.  Certainly, emergencies happen, snafus occur, but establishing and maintaining clear signs around peoples’ free time sends a clear message, we can’t lose sight of our or our team’s humanity.

Promote Vacation Time
Maybe we can’t all offer unlimited vacation time, and there’s some controversy on whether or not it actually discourages employees from taking time off, but we can make it clear that vacation time is meant to be taken. From working with employees who never seem to use their two weeks, to touting the benefits of travel directly and taking our own vacations, we need to ensure that taking time off is seen as a worthy path to nurturing the creative soul.

That’s just a small list of how we can begin to incorporate better work/life balance into our days. How do you or your company encourage better living through less?

 

photo courtesy of Leio McLaren/Unsplash

02
Jul

Step 2: Why Your Company Needs to Build a Brain Trust

Now that we’ve talked about creative entrepreneurship, let’s build a brain trust, shall we?

It takes more than one person and half an idea, which is why entrepreneurs need to set art, imagination and design loose into the company. One’s particular if not unique talents are small in comparison to a generative, empowered brain trust. By setting talent into motion, they can systematize imagination and let art and strategic design help solve problems collaboratively.

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A company is only as good as its people. For imaginative and capable people, everything is a canvas for the imagination, to paraphrase Thoreau. But with not so capable people, ideas are a punishment to be endured. So, cultivating great talent means not only finding the right people, but also planning and building out a brain trust. As Steven Johnson has argued, most of us walk around with half ideas in our heads; and we need others to test our assumptions, put them into practice and, ultimately, accomplish our visions.

Talent who can create, spread and adopt ideas are integral to a brain trust. They animate the organization’s environment and shape its culture – no wonder creative teams need to be intellectually, creatively and temperamentally diverse. From loud to quiet, left to right-brained, logical to free-form, a blend of perspectives and skill-sets is what makes an exceptional creative team. While the process is a raucous bustle and tussle of talking, arguing and sharing, it’s how truly innovative ideas take root and grow.

We’ve built this into our culture. Transcending the design discipline to include social scientists, MBAs and humanities graduates, our brain trust is unconventionally dynamic and collaborative.

It’s not unusual, for example, for one person to question the purpose of the traditional upfront while another deconstructs a logo from a different perspective or investigates the history of lower thirds, transitions or swipes. As Johnson puts it, “chance favors the connected mind.”

10
Mar

Think Like A Tourist: Yurt Style

photo courtesy of ChoongChing, Flickr

photo courtesy of ChoongChing, Flickr

Think Like A Tourist: Find A Yurt

Creativity often flows through us and into our projects, campaigns and ideas. Part mystery and part an ability to focus intensely, creativity in popular consciousness remains a murky mystery to most. We may not know what creativity is exactly, but we do know we want it.

Neuroscience continues to pull apart what was once the mythical and peculiar brain activity of ideation, imagination, and creation. Early results suggest a small but powerful shift in our thinking. We should frame creativity through the lens of  “skill” rather than a character-based temperament, nature or disposition. Creativity isn’t something people epitomize or resemble, but a tangible skillset with corresponding characteristics.

And given our traditional definitions, thinkers and educators have focused less on how to sharpen creative thinking skills and more on the best ways to “funnel” our chaotic emotions, thoughts and unconscious snippets.

What cannot be studied or scanned in the neuroscience lab is curiosity. That quality we humans should always have; the desire, interest and hubris to tromp into our world and explore every crevice, and piece of technology or experience around us. #thinklikeayurt

Stepping out of the everyday world of deadlines, habits and our curated digital lives is a vital part of staying curious and interested. Oishii designer Amanda Trovela recently stepped out busy L.A. life and dropped into a yurt in Malibu. Yurts are tent-like structures that come from the ancient Turkic peoples. And while going nomadic isn’t necessarily what we should — or could — be doing full-time, yurt-living is an increasingly popular mode of escape as it is a symbol of individual freedom and clear-headed thinking in an age of enforced distraction.

We think yurt life is an excellent tool to Think Like A Tourist.

Are you ready to reinvigorate and #thinklikeayurt?

 

01
May

Bring Everyone Coffee…

Looking to make the next teamwork session more productive? Try making everyone coffee and bring to the meeting

Psychologist Sonya Lyubomirsky, sonjalyubomirsky.com, has studied happiness and has discovered the many  downstream benefits of cultivating a smile and generous emotions for your  work mates.  For creatives, where “producing” content is critical, feelings play a role in the process of idea generation.  Postive feelings about ones self and others fosters empathy which in turn allows the mind to flourish and generate ideas. So, pick up the coffee and let the ideas flow…

 

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29
Nov

Congratulations to the Inaugural SMMA winners!

Oishii Creative was honored to produce this open for the first annual Sports Media Marketing Awards (SMMA).

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23
Sep

Oishii and Otis

We recently collaborated with Ovation to help Otis students produce brand ID’s for the network. The challenge offered by Ovation was to test the creativity of students through ID’s that celebrated humanity and accessibility to the arts category. We are providing these next generation of designers access to our facilities and instruction to help get their ID’s broadcast ready, extending the traditional boundaries of the classroom to give them real-world/hands-on experience. We are excited to share their finished work in the coming weeks.

19
Jul

Oishii brings home a Gold and Silver

 

We came home with a Gold and Silver at Promax/BDA for our work with Ovation in the Integrated: Content Promotion categories. Our creative for the Free Tuesdays Campaign won Gold and inspired work by Retna for the American Revolutionaries Campaign brought home Silver.

 

01
Dec

Oishii Completes Moby’s New Music Video


Last year we had the pleasure of working with accomplished director, Mark Pellington on our NFL Coach Promo Campaign. He recently called us to design the graphics for Moby’s latest video. The new single One Time We Lived comes from his latest album Wait for Me. Matt Roe was the DP.  

06
Nov

AFI DigiFest at Mann Chinese Theater

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We were proud to donate our time to help the AFI Digital Content Lab and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation showcase their recent online strategy for engaging youth in a series of relevant environmental action challenges. For nearly twelve years, the AFI Digital Content Lab has been the premier R&D incubator for new forms of digital entertainment and cross-platform engagement opportunities. We worked with other volunteer mentors on the project including, Irmelin DiCaprio (CEO & Founder of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation), David Gale (EVP New Media at MTV), Matt Wolf (founder of Double20, a gaming company) and Philippe Cousteau (Co-Founder Earth Echo) to name a few. The strategy developed uses the power of distributed content across the many platforms that are now available (Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc) via multiple partner organizations.

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20
Oct

Oishii Creative’s Ismael Obregon Featured on TV


Ismael Obregon, Founder of Oishii Creative, was recently profiled on American Latino. On the program he shares thoughts on the creative process, trends in broadcast and web design and his famous grandfather.