Old Hat Creative

Number four on the list of Old Hat's Big Six guiding principles is "The Rule of Thomas Crapper."  For those that don't know who Thomas Crapper is, you can probably guess by looking at his last name.  And from here on out, you'll probably never forget what he's known for.  Some people say that he invented the toilet.  He didn't... but he did invent the ballcock which to me is even funnier.  Basically, his innovations paved the way for the toilet as we know it.  And his name will forever be associated with crapping.  What if his last name had been Miller?  Would we call our toilets "millers" and talk about having to go take a "mill"?

Aaaaaaanyway, the point here is that we all remember Thomas Crapper because of his last name.  At Old Hat, we have a last name as well.  It's "Creative."  People call us "Old Hat"... shoot, we call ourselves "Old Hat" for the most part.  Just like I'm sure most people called ol' Mr. Crapper, "Tommy" most of the time.  But he will always be known as Crapper.  Well, we want to be known by our last name too.  Some firms focus on turning out cookie-cutter products en masse and they are quite profitable in doing so.  And I'm not criticizing those that do.  That's A way of doing business.  But I want to be known as being creative.  I want people to associate us with turning out completely new solutions to every challenge.  I don't want our primary focus to be on churning out the same thing to every university or professional sports program.  I want to look at their needs and generate something completely custom to their needs.  That's not to say that we don't have products.  We do more than three or four hundred schedule posters every year.  And that's definitely a product.  But we do our best to find the most creative way to present that information every time we do it.  Same with our videos, animations and websites.  So even if we are churning out a product, how can we make it the most creative product around?

That's the purpose of this guiding principle.  It's a challenge to our staff to make sure they are being creative.  If I wanted to be in business to turn out the same product day-after-day, I'd be producing ballcocks and in a hundred years people would be saying they needed to go sit on their Logsdon and drop a Log.  Oh, wait...

So Big Six #4 summarized... Be Creative in everything you do.  EVERYTHING!

TEAR DOWN THE WALL!

As a side note to the above, I think a key to having an environment that is conducive to creativity is to remove as many walls as possible and get people interacting.  Collaboration is key to our success and anything that hinders the ability to collaborate is a problem.  Therefore when designing our new space, I ended up tearing out numerous walls in the area of our building that we were moving to.  And the new space is awesome.  Divisions are divided by chest-high bookshelves rather than walls.  So when people in web are sitting, they have some level of privacy from the print folks.  But when you stand up, you can see from one end of the office to the other.  Another thing I tried to do (and I stole this from Steve Jobs) is put bathrooms at one end and the lounge at the other.  So two areas where people are going to want to go pretty often are at opposite ends and it requires them to walk past all of their co-workers to get there.  So if Kevin wants to go grab a soda or heat up his lunch, he has to walk past the print dept., my office, Robert's office, Kelby's desk, etc.  And if Tracie wants to go to the Logsdon, she has to walk past print, video and web to get there.  Boom, donkey!

This is how it looked before:

This is how it looked after we tore down the walls:

Then we added some carpet... STRIPES!

And then we moved in: