BookSmarts: The Midnight Library
It’s been a while since we spent some time reading for inspiration. Over the years since we wrote the very first BookSmarts journal, we’ve worked our way through a ton of books to take a moment away from the digital world and escape to find inspiration in a different format.
This year we’re making sure we take some extra time to pick up more books and step outside the visual world for a few moments to get inspired. The first book we finished this year is just outside our comfort zone of reading non-fiction, as Matt Haug‘s ‘The Midnight Library” sits under philosophical fiction.
“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you.” ― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
When we’re deep in the creative world working on our projects we tend to get lost in thought and move in many different creative dimensions. It’s something we have to do to continue to push our creative agency outside the boundaries that usually limit creative works during the exchange from agency to brand. It’s these alternative worlds we look for, dream about, and explore like in our Aerospoke creations.
Taken from our Aerospike video series. Here we explore an alternative world split by the horizon.
In “The Midnight Library,” Matt Haig takes you on a journey into a world where the lead character has the ability to choose a book from a library and then live multiple lives that are written in the book. This concept has been playing around in our heads ever since reading The Midnight Library and gives us so many ideas of how we could take another approach to our creative ideas and even our daily routines.
As soon as we got deep into this book we were asking ourselves many different questions. How can we create our next visual story that can take someone to the alternative life they’re dreaming of in a few seconds of watching? What moments can we add to each creation that makes the person dream bigger than they thought they could and inspire them to take action?
Taken from our Aerospike video series. Here we explore a polarized world’s colliding with each other.
Our work highlights brands that have decades of influence on the world’s culture, most of which have gone outside the creative norms and created something unique. These brands are the backbone of many influential advertising campaigns and pioneer cultural movements and we’re humbled to now be part of their story.
We create unique work and offer a whole new take on creativity here at RIOT, not to be different, but to question and challenge the way things are done and tell the most honest stories possible. We’re inspired by “The Midnight Library” as it has helped us to keep thinking differently while creating – keeping the alternative in mind yet always staying true to who we are as a Creative Agency and who the brand is we’re collaborating with.
