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This blog is brought to you by Gigi Morrison, Junior Creative Director at Girlilla Marketing.

As we sit halfway through 2025, I’ve tasked myself with convincing anyone willing to read this blog to reimagine their priorities and include refreshing their creative among them.

I’d feel dishonest not mentioning that I’m a creative director with a lifelong passion for visual art. My shampoo, shave cream, and body wash bottles are a cohesive pastel color palette, and that will never change. Does that make this blog grossly self-aggrandizing? I guess you’ll have to read it and let me know. :)

When I joined Girlilla full-time as a hybrid creative-marketing coordinator, we were outsourcing all of our creative work to freelancers. I slowly took over a workload that spanned multiple teams and many clients. It started with simple edits: swapping a date on a tour graphic or optimizing a social header when a platform changed with no warning. But over time, one-off edits turned into designing graphics from scratch. I joined the occasional meeting and got looped in on a few email threads each month to explain the difference between a .pdf and a .psd.

Fast forward a handful of years and I frequently rebrand clients, develop identity systems for tours, oversee visuals through entire product launches, and more. While my skill set has grown and my creative direction has evolved, my perspective on visual identity has remained unchanged: it is non-negotiable.

Five years ago, when the world shut down, we took to our phones in a whole new way to avoid feelings of isolation. Videos of feta melting into penne noodles convinced us to start cooking. We watched as companies with products experienced through taste and smell learned to capture a visceral sensory experience in a 15-second video, forever trapped behind a pane of glass.

I remember stumbling across a small-batch perfumery at the time that sold its product entirely online. It intrigued me because their entire business model was built around selling a product via marketing channels intended for every sense except smell. Their secret? Flawless creative direction.

Flawless creative direction isn’t just pretty branding and cinematic ads: It’s storytelling. It’s a deep understanding of the humans behind the product and a deep understanding of the humans receiving the product. It’s fueled by coffee, conversations, and passion, and balanced by pragmatism, an aptitude for licensing, and tabs kept on the bottom line. Heavy emphasis on the licensing part.

These days everyone is a creative. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the workforce who hasn’t opened Canva to whip up a last-minute sale graphic or thrown together a TikTok in CapCut. I encourage everyone I work with to create assets and come to me for revisions or answers to software questions. There are few things as empowering as the act of creating. But I’ve noticed a devaluing of traditional design as the unintended side effect of accessible creative software. Why pay a designer to make your single art when you can make it yourself in Canva?

That’s a great question, I’m so glad you asked! Did you choose to use a picture of a chair for your single cover because the first line of your song references sitting down? Your creative director would ask you if the song is really about the chair or the family member who sat in it. Did you market your handmade goods with an AI-generated photo of the great outdoors? Your creative director would point out the conflict of values between by-hand production and machine-generated promotional content. Did you receive blurry print-on-demand posters for your upcoming store event? Your creative director could’ve explained the difference between the dpi required for digital vs the dpi required for print.

It’s never a question of can; it’s always a question of should.

And beyond that, it’s a question of values. As a creative, it deeply confuses me when artists and makers with resources cut corners on their creative. I don’t need to ask what that tells your audience. We both know it tells them they’re consumers, not humans. But what does it say about you?

Everybody has a budget, and measuring the ROI of creative work isn’t always straightforward. But when Girlilla rebranded in 2023, the conversation wasn’t about the bottom line. The conversation was about company culture. I asked the girls if they felt our logo captured our collective vibe. The answer was no, so we rebranded.

It’s the top of Q4. You’re probably sitting down with your team in the coming weeks to look at the numbers and rescope for next year. Maybe it’s time to have a conversation about approaching a trained creative. If your budget is limited, tell them! The beauty of a creative is that they can find a way to work within your budget, while elevating and unifying your visuals. Whether it’s creating a simple brand guide and integrating it into your Canva, so the visuals you create on your own are consistent, or fully taking over the creative workload and helping you step into a new era. I promise investing in creative will always be worth it.

Hit me up anytime.
Gigi

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