Play is essential to creativity. It fuels joy, curiosity, and the ideas that move work forward.
Approaching design with playfulness keeps the work human and emotionally resonant.
Treating AI as a tool for exploration, not a replacement, helps us stay imaginative and people first.
How joy and creativity foster a healthier work environment
Back in the office after reconnecting with our full design team at the Brand New Conference in Pittsburgh, I’m looking at a mural on our wall that represents one of our company’s core cultural tenets: “Everyone deserves to come to work and be happy.”
That message connects nicely with one of the conference’s central themes — the importance of play. While play and happiness aren’t the same thing, they’re deeply related, and both are critical to fostering a healthy, productive team.
Creativity is a non-linear process, and great ideas often emerge from unexpected detours. Just as play is essential to childhood development, it remains just as important for adults. It reduces stress, sharpens cognitive function, strengthens connections, and makes room for the kind of thinking that good creative work depends on. Several of the conference speakers explored this idea in powerful ways.
Paolo Catalla, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Semi:Formal, spoke about how play humanizes our work. He explained that it isn’t the opposite of professionalism; rather, it’s an essential part of defining ideas.
Ren Rigby, Global Chief Brand Officer at R/GA, shared a deeply personal story about reconnecting with their childhood interests as a way back to their own creative identity. It was a moving reminder to revisit those moments in our lives when the world felt full of wonder and possibility.
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Designers get to shape the world around us, and that’s worth taking seriously. By making time to play, enjoy life, and reconnect with our inner child, we not only strengthen our creativity; we also honor that message on our wall. When everyone comes to work with a sense of joy, curiosity, and play, happiness naturally follows.
Insights
Insight
Interjecting play, purpose, and possibility into brand work
In many ways, we’re all living through one of those moments right now. As AI continues to redefine what it means to be a designer, several speakers encouraged us to approach it with curiosity and playfulness — to treat it as a tool for exploration, not a substitute for human creativity. What makes us designers isn’t our mastery of tools. It’s our unique perspective. Design and branding are about capturing and expressing emotion, and that work is best done by another human.
