A conversation with Hook’s creative, design, and motion directors
Following our conversation with Hook’s leadership team, we caught up with our creative leads to discuss how they’re defining the future of creative production and ensuring high-level craft thrives within a shifting industry landscape.
Let’s start with introductions. If you could describe your department in just a couple of words, what would you say?
Paul LaFleur, Design Director: We make pretty pictures.
Nick Lerum, Motion Director: Oof, two words is tough. How about "Pixel Puppeteers." We make those pixels dance!
Bryan Dávila, Design Director: We're high-performance, pragmatic and kind. We work like a high-performance racing team—we know each role, and we cover from the start to the delivery.
Logan Bell, Creative Director: We establish the conceptual and messaging framework for the majority of creative materials we make for clients, essentially translating business objectives into digestible ads that consumers interact with every day.
What foundational skill, unrelated to software or specific trends, do you think is most critical for success in the creative industry today?
Nick: Good taste. With generative AI, it's trivially easy to generate concepts, scripts, videos and designs. But most of it's trash. The skill of quickly sorting through a large amount of material and being able to spot what's interesting, what's working…that's going to become more and more valuable.
How do you measure success in a project beyond standard KPIs?
Nick: Is the team proud of it? Did we work together well? Is the client delighted and do they want to share it with their boss and all their coworkers? If the answer is yes, the project is a success in my book.
Paul: Client retention is the clearest sign of success. When a client finishes a project and immediately returns for another—or advocates for our team behind closed doors—it shows we’ve succeeded on every level. This helps prove that we value our client relationships as highly as our craft and dedication to their brand.
Logan: Metrics aside, a positive client experience is our ultimate priority. Beyond providing effective creative solutions, we want to ensure clients feel heard and supported throughout a project’s cycle.
Bryan: Strong client relationships and partnerships are key indicators of success. The better our relationship, the more we create the runway for our ideas to flourish. Client trust is what allows us to create ideas that solve the problem in a beautiful way.
As an extension of a brand’s creative team, how do you build and nurture strong, multi-year partnerships with their in-house team?
Paul: Do good work, and be good people. Of course, we want to nail the briefs early on and showcase our understanding of their brand, but ultimately, it’s equally important to be good people. The best client relationships we’ve had were because we lived the mantra of “be everyone’s favorite agency.” Being yourself showcases your personality and makes that emotional connection with your clients. That takes good work and turns it into a great relationship that lasts a long time.
Logan: Clients recognize when their agency partners are mutually invested in their brand’s success. When we implement learnings, proactively anticipate needs, and identify strategic efficiencies, clients soon realize that our level of investment in the brand mirrors their own.
How is your department proactively integrating new technologies—like AI or automation—to drive creative efficiency without sacrificing the human element of craft?
Logan: The team faced our very own ‘John Henry moment’ with AI this year, and quickly realized that we didn’t have to compete with the technology, but instead leveraged it to amplify our own craft. By using generated results as a creative foundation, members have learned to enhance their work, leading to better overall outcomes in ideation, visual design, and messaging. It also became clear that being a ‘prompt engineer’ is now essential to every team member’s repertoire.
Paul: Our teams are effectively using AI and automation across entire project lifecycles, from tackling administrative tasks to shaping creative concepts and executing full campaigns. This integration has included creating custom in-house QA/QC tools that can check specs, naming, and dimensions for thousands of assets in minutes. We’ve also leveraged existing technologies to quickly generate social videos and digital ad key art using client-specific platforms.
Bryan: We see AI as a way to enhance our productivity and iterate faster by focusing on creating a clear, well-defined vision and using AI to materialize ideas that we could only dream of in the past. We pride ourselves on crafting and engineering prompts that create high-quality outputs, working together to put strategy, creative and design as our forefront.
How do you ensure that a design is not only aesthetically pleasing but also effectively solves the client's problem?
Bryan: We check our egos at the door and keep our eyes open. The best solutions come from direct collaboration and openness. So we serve the idea and the solution that solves the problem. And we do that with innovation, design principles, room for experimentation and pushing ourselves to come up with new ways to make something work beautifully.
Paul: My approach is to start by working backwards. First, collect every visual element needed to meet the brief—this includes UI graphics, icons, and photography. This initial step ensures that all core problems of a brief are addressed. Once the functional foundation is set, you can enhance the visuals by applying a specific style or aesthetic. This refinement must not only be visually pleasing but also perfectly aligned with the intended medium, the target audience, and the overall brand identity.
How do you actively foster an environment where team members feel empowered to take calculated creative risks and learn from failure?
Bryan: As a team, we see failures as opportunities, and by doing so, we free ourselves from judgment. We help each other when we feel stuck and push forward as a team. The only way to make new ideas is to not be afraid of them—that’s where true creativity unlocks.
Nick: I think part of being an attentive manager is finding opportunities for the people on your team that will require them to push out of their comfort zone and into new territory. But the difficulty needs to be calibrated so that it's not too far out of reach. As a manager, I always try to have a "Plan B" in mind ahead of time. Maybe a scaled-back approach that can be executed quickly, or maybe a more senior teammate that can step in and help out if things start to go sideways. You want to engineer the conditions so that failure is not catastrophic. It's ok to fall off the couch. It's not ok to fall off the roof.
Paul: Continuous testing and exploration should be an ongoing expectation for your teams. Encourage them to create variations on even the simplest assets to push their creative skills and foster new approaches. Waiting for a large, high-stakes project to take a risk is often a recipe for failure. Instead, by integrating curiosity and exploration into everyday briefs and small tasks, you naturally prime your team to apply that mindset to every deliverable they encounter, no matter the scale of the project.
Logan: While new projects are strategically connected to past projects, it’s the process of exploration, iteration, and supportive feedback loops that ultimately drives improvement.
What is one small detail, technique, or standard of execution that you are personally championing this year to raise the bar on the agency’s overall creative craft?
Paul: Intradepartment collaboration. It’s a workflow we plan to continue next year, prioritizing it for all suitable projects. We've seen overwhelming success by pairing designers of various skill levels on large, craft-focused projects this year. This approach has allowed designers to immediately bounce ideas off each other, learn quickly in our remote-first environment, and solve problems together, which has naturally led to growth in both their hard and soft skills.
Bryan: Each designer has their own take and perspective on the world. We all come from different places, and the best solutions come from how we connect those ideas together. So it’s important that we work hard on refining our taste and knowledge of everyday things. Increasing our understanding of culture is our best ally: the more we know it, the more we can bend it and create from a place that's honest and fresh.
Curious about the strategic vision behind our work? Catch up on the first part of our interview series featuring our department leads here.