The truth behind building brave brands at scale - Simon Dixon

Summary

Mindful Creative Podcast Summary: "The Truth Behind Building Brave Brands at Scale" featuring Simon Dixon

Introduction

In this insightful episode of Mindful Creative with Radim Malinic, host Radim Malinic engages in a deep conversation with Simon Dixon, a renowned designer, creative director, and strategic thinker. Released on December 2, 2024, the episode delves into the intricacies of building bold and brave brands in today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving design landscape. Drawing from his extensive experience of over three decades, Simon shares his perspectives on creativity, managing change, and maintaining authenticity amidst industry noise.

Simon Dixon's Background

Simon Dixon introduces himself as a co-founder of DixonBaxi, a design and branding agency established in 2001. With nearly 24 years of experience, DixonBaxi has collaborated with iconic brands such as Netflix, AC Milan, and Hulu, spanning various sectors including sports, entertainment, media, and technology.

Evolution of the Design Industry

Simon reflects on the significant transformation of the design industry over the past two decades. Starting as a graphic designer working on record labels and CD covers, he never anticipated the complexity and scale his work would achieve. He emphasizes the importance of adaptability, stating:

“If we were working like we did 25 years ago, we would be redundant now.” [07:26]

Values and Principles in Design

Central to Simon’s approach is a steadfast set of values that guide his creative processes. He highlights the importance of creating work that is expressive, democratized, and designed for a broad audience. Key values include:

• Creating for Progress and Learning: “Creating something that moves you further... designing at scale and designing for everybody.” [09:58]
• Collaboration and Respect: Viewing clients as partners and fostering an honorable, honest company culture.
• Optimism and Positivity: Maintaining a positive, self-controlled worldview to navigate challenges.

Handling Criticism and Public Feedback

Simon addresses the inevitability of criticism in the public domain, especially in the age of social media. He differentiates between feedback from the intended audience and negative comments from uninformed critics:

“If your work is working for the people you're designing for and you're progressing, everything else is just noise. It doesn't matter.” [20:18]

He advocates for focusing on meaningful feedback and disregarding baseless negativity, emphasizing the importance of self-validation over external opinions.

Rebranding and Future-Proofing

A significant portion of the discussion centers on rebranding and future-proofing brands. Simon explains that his team focuses on creating adaptive branding systems rather than one-off rebrands:

“We're creating an engine in the business of strategic engine, a creative engine that is more adaptive.” [24:31]

This approach ensures that brands remain relevant and flexible in response to technological advancements and social changes. He cautions against following fleeting trends, advocating for timeless design that stands out amidst a sea of sameness.

Team Growth and Management

Growing an agency like DixonBaxi requires evolving from being a solo designer to managing a diverse team. Simon shares his journey of learning to lead, manage, and collaborate effectively:

“If you're not great at managing people, don't manage people. Do something else.” [30:00]

He emphasizes the importance of hiring specialists for roles outside one’s expertise, such as finance and HR, to maintain focus on core creative work.

Personal Growth and Creativity

Simon discusses the balance between professional and personal life, highlighting his practices for maintaining mental well-being and fostering creativity. He shares his experience of creating a feature film as a personal sabbatical to rejuvenate his creative spirit:

“It made me feel different. It purged a lot of thoughts, cleaned me up, and a more optimistic and dynamic me came out of it.” [49:05]

Challenges in the Modern Creative World

Addressing contemporary challenges, Simon reflects on the complexities introduced by globalization, technology, and societal changes. He acknowledges the overwhelming nature of today’s world but remains optimistic about the capacity for collective creativity to solve large-scale problems:

“What tends to happen is people only deal with the problem when it becomes incredibly immediate and it's essential. But creativity can address bigger issues proactively.” [47:22]

Conclusion

Simon Dixon’s conversation with Radim Malinic offers a comprehensive look into the mindset and strategies required to build and sustain brave brands in a dynamic environment. His emphasis on core values, adaptability, and positive collaboration serves as a valuable guide for creatives navigating the complexities of the modern design industry.

Notable Quotes

1. On Progress Over Perfection

   “If your work is working for the people you're designing for and you're progressing, everything else is just noise. It doesn't matter.” [20:18]

2. On Adaptability

   “If we were working like we did 25 years ago, we would be redundant now.” [07:26]

3. On Values in Design

   “Creating something that moves you further... designing at scale and designing for everybody.” [09:58]

4. On Rebranding

   “We're creating an engine in the business of strategic engine, a creative engine that is more adaptive.” [24:31]

5. On Managing Teams

   “If you're not great at managing people, don't manage people. Do something else.” [30:00]

6. On Personal Growth

   “It made me feel different. It purged a lot of thoughts, cleaned me up, and a more optimistic and dynamic me came out of it.” [49:05]

Final Thoughts

This episode encapsulates the essence of mindful creativity and the resilience needed to thrive in the creative industry. Simon Dixon’s experiences and philosophies provide actionable insights for both novice and established creatives aiming to make meaningful contributions while maintaining personal and professional integrity.

Transcript

[Radim Malinic]

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[Simon Dixon]

And if your body of work is useful and has a decent reputation, not everything is going to be perfect. And not every single project you do is going to be 100%. But if your work is working for the people you're designing for and you look at your body of work and it's progressing and it's getting better and you're growing and you're learning and you're enjoying what you're doing, I think that's the thing to go after. Everything else is just noise. It doesn't matter.

[Radim Malinic]

Welcome to Mindful Creative Podcast, a show about understanding how to deal with the highs and lows of creative lives. My name is Radi Malinich and creativity changed my life, but it also nearly killed me. In this season, inspired by my book of the same title, I am talking to some of the most celebrated figures in the creative industry. In our candid conversations, my guests shared their experiences and how they overcame their challenges and struggles, how they learned to grow as creatives. A creative career in the 21st century can be overwhelming. I wanted to capture these honest and transparent conversations that might help you find that guiding light in your career. Thank you for joining me on this episode and taking the first or next step towards regaining control of your creative life. Are you ready? My guest today is a designer, creative director, and a strategic thinker exploring the overlap of creativity, design and technology. Over the last three decades, he's collaborated with some of the world's most iconic companies across sports, entertainment, media, the new economy, technology and beyond. In our conversation, he shares his insights about creative confidence, managing change, and maintaining authenticity in an increasingly noisy design industry. It's my pleasure to introduce Simon Dixon. Hey, Simon, it's nice to have you on the show. And how are you doing today?

[Simon Dixon]

Very, very well. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[Radim Malinic]

I'm pleased to have you because there's two reasons I wanted to have you on the show. One of them is obviously the incredible work which you've been doing with Dixon Baxie and in your career, but also about the generosity and the insights that you put out on LinkedIn in terms of insightful posts that helping novices and established people in the industry to actually understand a little bit more what we do and how we do it. However, before we get in our conversation, if someone may have not heard of you, how would you introduce yourself?

[Simon Dixon]

Okay, cool. My name is Simon Dixon. I'm one of the co founders of Dixon Baxi with the Povo Baxi. We founded the agency in 2001, so about to enter our 24th year. We're a designing branding agency that uses strategy, identity design systems and digital experiences to help some of the most iconic brands in the world connect to their audiences or the people that they serve. We work all over the world and some of our clients are people like Netflix, rac, Milan, Hulu. We work across entertainment, sports, lifestyle, technology businesses, service businesses, product businesses, and our feeling is if you're going to change something, you might as well change it for the better and change it enough to compete in the future. So a lot of the work we're doing for our clients is helping them retool to be relevant, useful and compete as the world changes through social changes, behavioral changes, attitudinal changes, technology changes. So there's a degree of future proofing to the work we do.

[Radim Malinic]

Did you ever think at the beginning of your career that you've been finding yourself 24 years later reeling off all these extra activities for brands?

[Simon Dixon]

We talked about this just before we started recording about how our industry's actually changed. So there is cultural and social and behavioral changes, the environment. So yeah, on the question you asked, it's I started as a graphic designer, so I designed for record labels and CD covers and things like that. Quite small scale things. But I really like the power of design to excite people and make them feel something and feel connected to it. I was just trying to be the very best designer I could be and I started my first agency when I was very young. I've always wanted to just make work that I think is as good as possible and challenging and exciting as possible, but for everybody. I like designing for all types of people. I always have done. So yeah, I never imagined I would be working at this level specifically. And if I look at what we actually do is highly complex at a very high level and there's a kind of elite level to working at this skill that I never imagined that we would be doing.

[Radim Malinic]

I love the phrase that you got on your website, says bold brands change the world and we help to make them.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, it's brave actually. But bold is also a good substitute. I've had debate with a few people whether it's bold or brave, but yeah, it is brave. Brands change the world. We basically help making them.

[Radim Malinic]

What did you say in one of your statements? You say you lead with desire to change things, not to conform.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, there's an interesting semantic to this. The reason that we say be brave is if you don't, if you're not curious, and this applies to creative individuals as well as companies if you're not curious. Embracing change, self learning, the world will start to change around you and people often are afraid of change. It's a scary thing if a new technology comes in, a new system. AI is doing that at the moment. It's giving people an existential kind of crisis about what's going to happen. But my feeling is if you have practiced tolerance for risk and you're willing to change how your practice works and you're willing to change things a little bit further, you can continue to be the edge, at the edge of where you're useful to people. So it's the risk of inaction is the problem. I think brands and companies and individuals who become entrenched in a certain way of working and that calcifies it. They find it harder as things change. So when you and I were talking earlier, we're talking about 25 year period. If we were working like we did 25 years ago, we would be redundant now. But of course when I started my agency, there was no social media, there was no applications, there's a few search engines in the Internet, but we didn't have intelligent technology, self driving cars, TikTok VR, all those things that are ubiquitous. So we've had to learn how our work lives in those new worlds and is useful and brands have to do the same thing.

[Radim Malinic]

I think the word change has been mentioned a few times already in this conversation. I think as you just said, like 25 years ago, if we have worked the same, if we have stuck to the same methods and same ways, I think we would be bored by now. Because I think what we've actually gained from the last 25 years is an incredible sort of technology Disneyland and opportunity land, where actually 25 years ago potentially we would wish we had and now we have it. Do you agree that it's sometimes quite a bit difficult to focus on keeping up with the change and understanding of what we do with all of it?

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, I think that's a very fair point. The way I look at it is. I have a particular set of principles and values that I use in the way I think about creativity. And they haven't changed. What has changed is how they're delivered. My passion for this type of work, I do, who I'd like to collaborate with in my team as well as externally. The effect of what we do, how it enters the world, the feeling it gives to people, those things are very similar to the things I did in my 20s. The difference is I reach a billion or 2 billion people now, rather than 200 or 500 people. So I've had to learn the skills of how to do that. But the joy of design, the power of creativity to improve things, communication to make things easier for people and give them access, the delight of things that work beautifully. Those things are all kind of hardwired. It's just the technologies facilitate to a certain extent. There's good and bad, though, of course, because the negative side is because everything's globalized and we see everything, it's easier for people to get to good, but not great. So originality is harder. There's also, as I was saying before, entrenchment of ideas where people don't celebrate difference enough, I don't think. And if someone has an idea, certainly on social media, they get stuck in a particular place and those bubbles make it different, difficult to have open and kind of additive conversations. So there's good and bad parts to the technology system that we operate. And I just try to focus on the things we can control and based on what we like to do, try and add some value by doing so.

[Radim Malinic]

You said you got the same values as you had back then? Yeah. I think being clear of your values almost seems like a sixth sense sometimes, because it's quite easy to be going with the flow. Someone says, I'll pay you, you need money, you do the work. Whereas having values really, I think, makes you stand out. So what are your values that have been with you for all the time?

[Simon Dixon]

It's things like creating something that moves you further. The idea that you can create very expressive and exciting work, which is very democratized and it's for everybody. So it's about designing at scale and designing for everybody. But it's also about having a good footprint, which is teaching people how to collaborate, teaching people how to develop their career journeys, seeing clients as partners rather than enemies, not working just for money, so working for the projects and having the strength to say no when it's not the type of work that you'd like to do. And I don't judge other people's work. What people choose to do is theirs, but we don't do certain things. And it's about, I think, having an optimistic and additive worldview. I think there's a lot of negativity in the world, much of which doesn't need to be there. And I think life is quite a precious and short thing. So I'd like to live it in a positive, optimistic and self controlled way. So I make the most of whatever I'm doing. So I'm a pragmatist, but I'm also an optimist and all of those things fuel the ability to have a way of working that suits how we work and not how an industry or society or people tell us to work. It's just what we choose to do. And of course within that you need to protect people, look after them, have an honorable company, be honest. There's some kind of base things, but I think you have to have that just as a base thing. I don't think that's a value, that's just how you carry yourself. And of course I make lots of mistakes. I've done lots of dumb, stupid things in my career and you try to learn from those and get better at your job.

[Radim Malinic]

Is there any highlights of your stupid mistakes? Is there anything that you happily share or would you rather buried under the carpet?

[Simon Dixon]

No, I don't really think about the past, I think about the future. The thing I think is I'm an aggregation of all my life experience and everything that's ever happened to me. So as I sit here now, I have an opportunity to use all of that experience with the next thing I'm doing versus looking back and analyzing a particular thing. I'm self aware enough to know what flaws I have, so I try to mitigate them with my strengths after a quick break.

[Radim Malinic]

If you're enjoying this podcast and would like more support and information on your creative journey, you can pick up one of my books to help you do just that. My titles cover branding, graphic design, illustration, all the way to career business advice with ideas how to navigate the highs and lows of the creative process. You can pick up signed paperbacks at no extra cost from my [e-mail] and we are shipping worldwide use code podcast for extra 10% off your order and you can find the links in the show notes. Any day should be a new book day. I mean that's very aware of yourself and of your presence because I think it takes time to understand who we are. What do we Stand for, make those mistakes, learn from them. Because yes, living in the present moment frees you up from the burden of the past. So you can actually focus on the moment of what you're doing. But when did you let go of the doubt? When did you realize I'm enough? This is what I'm creating. This is my agency, what we do. How did you do that? Because again, I think it takes time to grow into such mindset. It doesn't happen overnight. I've been telling people to define that enough. But it takes time.

[Simon Dixon]

I don't know. It does. I don't know. It does. It takes time for some people. So when I started my career, I didn't have permission of anybody to make anything. I just started an agency and I was 19 year old, 20 with two friends and dumb as a plank. I had no experience, I didn't go to university, I didn't go to school, no education. I just started working. But I never doubted that I had the right or the ability to create. I've never felt that I've had stress. If I stand up to talk in front of 3,000 people or I do a major presentation to a client and I have to prepare for that, I get the stress of the performance of that and doing a good job. But I've never had self doubt about my right to be a creator and my ability to do what I do because it's my ability to do what I do. And frankly, I don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks. It's nothing to do with them. I think there's a lot of heaviness to these conversations, I think, and a lot of what is imposter syndrome? And doubt is just the human condition of being uncertain in a particular moment. And I think it's okay to feel that. It's like when you're designing, sometimes you have to make crap work to get good work. And it's okay, it's fine. You just haven't found the things. I've always enjoyed the process of creating, but I've never felt I needed to actually doubt my, what's the word for it? My right to be who I am. But I have doubts in terms of shit. Maybe I've. This isn't good enough. Maybe I didn't perform well enough. But yeah, so that's how I see it. But I understand that other people see it a different way. And my answer to that is really about it's focusing on the things that you believe and you're good at and trusting that you have the Right to do what you do. Because I think a lot of people project an opinion, a strong opinion of an idea, but it's only their lived reality. It's not your lived reality. So I think it's about finding space that's true to you versus something that's projected by other people.

[Radim Malinic]

I fully agree with this. I think it might be, in my opinion, what you just described, a bit of a. Bit of a gift to feel so certain of your work and having that permission to be creative and actually not looking around, I'll just qualify.

[Simon Dixon]

I'm not certain about the work. I'm certain about my right to do the work and my place in the world. I do obviously get uncertain about the work, and we talk about that all the time, what the work feels like. So I do go through a lot of doubt and rack myself about, is the work good enough? Is it working? They're two separate things to me, in a sense. Oh, no, not please everyone. That doesn't work. You can't please everyone. That's not how people work. It's an interesting balance because what you're trying to do is create something that works for someone as opposed to everyone. But you need to work. It needs to be a kind of direct connection with people, but you need that connection to be something that's below. It's like a commonality that we all share. So when someone connects with it and it's relevant to them, they'll see the same thing as someone else, even if they're in Mexico City, they're in Japan and they're in Stockholm. So you're looking for kind of common themes of the style, the feeling, the benefits, the way it works and its relevance and meaning to people, so that they, wherever they are, it shows up in the right way for them and it's useful, interesting and delightful and all of those things. That's what you look for. I think the pressure is magnified because you do have real responsibility for that to work. But I think you have the responsibility for it to work if it's only one person as well. So it's not about the number of people. It's about respect for the people and designing something that won't necessarily work for every single person. And I think the other thing you're talking about there is the work being on view and people saying they like it or don't like it. And there's kind of two sets of people. There's the world at large that you're designing for, and then there's industry. Isn't There. If you design for any number of people globally, some people won't like what you do. That's just how it works. But what tends to happen is people's dislike of things is very instantaneous, very visceral, and it's very few people, but the volume on those people is very large. So if we launch a project and someone sends a message saying those wankers in London have designed this thing and it's shit, that's one person. But there's another 999 million people, or whatever the number is, who are interacting on a daily basis and have no idea we designed it, but are using it and it's useful to them and things like that. So I think it was invisible in a sense for the people we designed for. They can feel that someone cared about it, but they don't know anything about it. And then anybody in the industry that's kicking other people's work has no context of how that work was created and isn't actually the audience either. You just have to protect yourself by thinking about your own work and whether you like it. And it works for the people who design for. And if other people don't like it, then so be it. There's not much you can do about that. So it's better to focus on yourself rather than somebody else's opinion of your work, because they'll move their opinion to the next person the following week, in the following week. So it tends to be a short based thing. And I don't have much respect for people who kick other people's work in public.

[Radim Malinic]

I think the more we have these sort of reactions and then especially in a public domain, it almost makes you realize that how many broken people there are in the world, because the sort of anger or sort of reaction is a lack of eloquence. This sort of, this outburst is often rooted in some deep unhappiness. And I think this is something that hopefully through time we can actually almost advise designers or tell designers or creators, say, actually these kind of comments, they will pass. The society just moves on.

[Simon Dixon]

You can choose to be on the Internet. If somebody is ranting and raving, you can choose not to look at it. You don't have to. There's a kind of slight absurdity, I think, to a lot of social media where people heavily engage with the world and expect every single iteration of that relationship to be okay. It doesn't work like that. If you went to a pub on any given evening, there's always some person who's half drunk ranting in the corner. And the thing with that is you wouldn't sit next to that person and talk to them. You would sit somewhere else. You go into the lounge. But what happens is we have decided to consume that and give voice to it. So I just avoid it. And again, sometimes if I post something or say something, I'll get quite visceral responses, or people send me direct messages and I try to, like you say, I try to be empathetic, because I think the word you describe was pain, wasn't it? Which is they're projecting some sort of pain they have. And a lot of people feel very unsettled in the world. Once it gets to something which is abusive, racist, misogynistic, whatever, then you just have to switch that type of person off. You just have to disengage with them because you can't have a conversation or debate with them because they're too entrenched in their views. I just try to avoid any conflict if I possibly can and carry myself in a way that I think is as good as I possibly can. Though I obviously make lots of mistakes and try not to look at the sun when it's burning.

[Radim Malinic]

I think they say that if we have an encounter with a racist, the best thing is to ignore them, because all they want is to be in that power struggle. They want to impose more and more sort of fear or discomfort.

[Simon Dixon]

Sometimes you have to call people out and say, look, you're just being stupid. But in the realm of what we do, which is design, the feedback loop is very immediate and you have to get used to being on show. And I think what it is is you're an aggregation of all of your work, your body of work. And if your body of work is useful and has a decent reputation, not everything is going to be perfect and not every single project you do is going to be 100%. But if your work is working for the people you're designing for and you look at your body of work and it's progressing and it's getting better and you're growing and you're learning and you're enjoying what you're doing, I think that's the thing to go after. Everything else is just noise. It doesn't matter.

[Radim Malinic]

Do you think that the level of rebrands and the new refreshes and rebrands and kind of like it seems, of course we are in more hyperconnected world, that there's more channels and everyone's got more things to show, but with the rate of rebrands, are we going about it in the right way because it seems like sometimes people just put a refresh almost for the sake of a refresh. Of course, there's a lot more behind the scenes, but the rate of everyone that's coming up, it almost feels like a competition.

[Simon Dixon]

I'm not entirely sure about that. I know what you mean. There does seem to be an acceleration, but I think what's happened is there's been a huge growth in the number of people who create professionally and there's a lot of companies now that have greater reach through digital technologies, products and services that just didn't exist before. So degree it does create a bit of an arms race because of course, if a disruptor comes in, legacy businesses have to compete with that disruptor. So fintech was a good example. When fintech happened, the legacy businesses around that had to change. And that's going to happen with cryptocurrency. The same thing will happen that people will have to compete. I don't know, people rebrand too often because if you look at somebody, say a company we've rebranded, they haven't rebranded the year before or two years before, three years before, they've rebranded many, many years before. I think the rate with which companies are rebranding isn't necessarily always super fast. It's just there's more of them because there's more appetite to use the tools of branding and creativity to create meaning. Most businesses need to grow, so they need to reach greater audiences. Most people have a conveyor belt of audiences that are getting older, so they need to add young people to that. Most businesses as they grow and develop, calcify and get a bit stiff, so they need to retool to be relevant in the new world. A lot of businesses need to figure out how they talk through the various platforms and have a conversation interaction with people rather than a monologue, which is what it was traditionally. So a lot of work comes from that. Change of leadership means to have a different perspective and opinion on the world. Product changes, acquisition of businesses, cultural change, Covid technology change, they all mean businesses have to retool. So often there's a very good reason to do it and it's usually losing market share, losing relevance, being stuck. The business has lost innovation. It's nervous leadership changes. So it's usually a reaction to something.

[Radim Malinic]

What I like what you've been using is the word retooling rather than rebranding. I think that almost seems like you're sharpening what you've got in your pocket rather than necessarily, you know, Throwing everything out and starting again.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, that's what we believe. That's what we believe.

[Radim Malinic]

Yeah. Because I know that some of the work that you do with your studio is future proofing and I know you've done it with Channel four and I watched you doing a talk ages ago from Mark Hirens, which was an interesting talk about like how you work with Channel 4 about making sure that there's a future proofing. However, how much of a stressful exercise that is because how do you future proof a future that's about to happen?

[Simon Dixon]

What you're doing is basically creating an engine in the business of strategic engine, a creative engine that is more adaptive. So it has, it fixes and flexes, so you have fixed elements which in a sense give you the visual and structural language of the brand. So those commonalities that we understand, that's the brand, the semiotics of I know what it is. But then within that the creative engine is constantly making new things once you've changed that system. So if the system has theories underneath it, motion theories, design theories, ton of voice theories, those things can be used to make new things and adapt to contextual change. And that's what it's about. Traditionally, branding was a fixed state thing. You create a series of new assets and replicate them consistently, always. Then there was a change where brands had to interact with people. So there was a degree of personalization interaction. So brands became, they start to move, interact with people. Now it's hyper personalized, it's extremely tactical and it's much more user centric. So you have to build a brand that can work in that world. But of course at the point of entry, the marketing works differently to communications, which works differently to the product. But the feeling and the journey should all feel the same. So you should feel like it's all coming from the same place. So that's the systems that we create and if they add something new, it should work within that system. It's not 100% future proof, but it's an engine that should be at least adaptive to the world. And it will last as long as the product, the service or the business is useful and relevant to people. If we work with a company and then they just make terrible TV programs for five years, they won't do well. Or if they're a football team and they abuse their fans by charging them too much or not looking after them, then they won't do very well. So it has to be in relation to the business being a business that serves people well.

[Radim Malinic]

Let's zoom back in closer to home because what you've just been describing about future proofing makes me think of what you guys did with Dixon Baxi because there, as you said, there's a lot more people being creative. I think you can create bigger work with smaller teams these days and I think it just seems like there was an explosion in creativity and especially branding because it seems to be like an exercise designated just to studios and now you can be on your own and do amazing work. But with Dixon Bakse it retained the look and feel of the agency that you never tried to chase the trends or hang on to things that would be popular just to be getting the column inches or just like doing the work for it to be seen. Because I think it's quite easy to be trying to now please the Gen Z generation and doing things that look in a certain way whereas you retain the look and feel of Dixon Bugsy, which I feel and now in this day and age is remarkable. And what you do with done with your printed books and with the essentials and the thoughts that you put out on social, educate, inform people how the engine works behind the scenes is remarkable. So with the evolution of dp, were there ever temptation to be something different or was it hard to stay true to yourself?

[Simon Dixon]

The thing about having an agency for any length of time, remaining relevant is incredibly hard. And if you have an agency of any length of time and you you ascribe to a certain level of quality or excellence, that's really, really hard to do long term. So you can have bright spots where you can create for short period and shine very brightly. But if you haven't figured out a system underneath of how you see creativity long term and things that matter to you, it's a little bit harder, that's all. So we're constantly evolving entities. So we design for the thing we're designing for and the people we're designing for. We bring our hopefully our attitude and intensity and swagger and love of creating design that excites people but we make it fit for purpose. So AC Milan, the rebrand for that is AC Milan. It couldn't be Liverpool, it's specific to them. Or if we create something for. You mentioned Channel four, if you make something for Channel four, it needs to feel and be truthful to Channel four, not to a particular style. And I think when you follow style and trends a number of things happen is there's an ultimate cycle to that. So it's going to end very rapidly. You become part of a short period of Cultural change. And you also bring yourself down to the level of lots of other people because they're doing that as well. So you suddenly are in a kind of sea of other work, a sea of sameness. And that's just really, really boring.

[Radim Malinic]

You mentioned people. People are integral part of your business. You work with people for people. The challenges of growing a team, because you don't have to go too far on social media when there's an old school designer moaning about the fact that they now need to become a manager or like an HR person, but that's necessary for growth. Because of course people get in the industry for the same reason as you and I, because they're fascinated by music or fascinated by design. They want to do the thing all day, every day. Whereas to be growing into different almost iterations of your career or like growing as a person understanding humans for who they are and what they need, how did you find that journey from going from being cyberdictant graphic designer to actually saying, I'm going to be looking after a lot of people and make sure that this engine as a humanity part of element works? How was your growth and experience?

[Simon Dixon]

I think initially, even when you're young, you're very self obsessed. It's your job, you're learning about yourself. So it's like your music tastes, your style tastes, everything you do, it's really definitive and it's about you. And as you mature, you realize that you're part of something else. And certainly in design, if you work in a studio, you start to realize that's a collaborative thing, so you're collectively making something. But often that can be, certainly when you're younger, quite competitive because you want to do good work. But I think as you mature as a person, you start to realize that it's about how you interact with others and the effect you have on others that creates the ability for you to do what you want to do in the way you want to do it and be successful. So it's a process and it's like a baptism of fire. You've got to make lots of mistakes to get good at it. So I had to learn how to run a business, I had to learn how to look after people, I had to learn how to work at scale, how to learn how to work internationally, how to travel. You have to learn lots of things and as you mature, that's just part of the life experience. I think it depends on the person as well. Some people not suit it more, but might have a greater desire to do that. And other people might have a greater desire just to remain an independent designer. And I think one of the problems with the social you're talking about and the way people talk is they always assume their worldview is the worldview and it's not. There's like millions of ways of creating. You can have an agency, you can be single person, you can be designer your entire career, or you might want to be an ecd, you could be a producer. There's lots of ways of creating. So I think what you need to do is find the truth of the way you like to create based on how you are. And if you're not great at managing people, don't manage people. And if you're not great, if you don't want to manage people, don't manage people, do something else. So I think it's about making honest choices with yourself about the things that you'd like to do. Of course, we all have to do some things in our jobs and our careers, which we're not 100% brilliant at in the same way we are as designers. But it really depends on where you are in your journey and what you'd like to achieve.

[Radim Malinic]

I think use a perfect word to a self obsessed. And I think that's pretty much that ego driven, ambition driven sort of entry into the working world as a creative because you really want to change the world from how you see it. And as you said, then you mature and you realize, actually I'm a part of something totally bigger. And then you realize in the third stage of your career, actually this is about generosity because you feel so much more comfortable in your shoes. So I can give this away. I don't care if I get a credit, I don't care if I'm on a poster. I. I don't care, whatever. Let me just be part of this just to feel warm about the fact that you can have a sort of positive contribution. But I think what people get wrong about that next career growth, if they want to get bigger, because we all would like to work on bigger clients and bigger work and stuff, and then realize, actually, I only got two pairs of, I've got two hands and how can I do all of this? People do sometimes what you do, which is obviously grow the team. And as you said word learn about five times, you learn, learn, learn, or what people should do, they should buy back their time by actually staying creative about hiring people who do the admin stuff, who do the things that they don't have to actually let go of the work and see it that way. Because an opinionated or self observed designer would hire other designers hoping that basically he's cloning them, they're cloning themselves, which is impossible because everyone's got different takes. So if you're ruining the process and hoping that people will step in your shoes, then you might find yourself five hours briefing or feedbacking on something which you could have done in one hour whilst other people could be doing invoice chasing or calls or whatever. So I think there's different ways of actually having that mindset for people to be progressing in their own way and actually be content with it. Because I like to use the word learn and I want to know more about if you had any mentors, if you asked for help or like where did you go on that journey to teach yourself these things that made you ultimately grow and to get you to the position where you're today?

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, I'm basically self taught. I've never worked, I've only ever opened studios and built teams and stuff. So I'm basically institutionalized and self taught. But of course there's a lot of people we've worked with over the years who are highly skilled at what they do. People in finance, production, writing, strategists, designers, motion people, business experts. So I think it's about. I get most of my knowledge by reading or doing. They're the two things I do. I'll read long form about ideas and then I learnt. I've learned everything else by doing. But I'm a great believer in thinking about what you're going to do and why you're doing it and then deciding how to do it versus just doing it for the sake of it. So I'm constantly kind of fine tuning where I think that we need, we have knowledge gaps or we can improve things. So it's a constant, it's like thousands of small decisions make the engine. The other thing I've mentioned though is you mentioned about hiring people to do the things you don't want to do. Like you mentioned accountants for example. You can of course do that. And that's what all businesses do. When you grow, you hire people who do different disciplines to you, but you are ultimately responsible to them because they don't do the work independently. So you have to learn about how to communicate with somebody about the financial engine. You have to learn how to communicate about the deliverables and structural production of your company. You have to learn how to service clients and talk to people. That's where the learning and growth comes. Because a lot of designers are quite insular and focused on the creativity. But as soon as you hire people that don't do what you do or do do what you do, you have to learn how to help them get better and how that engine works so you will ultimately increase your skill set. So I couldn't run dicks and backs if I didn't understand how finance and growth hiring HR business worked. So you have to learn those things if you choose to do that thing.

[Radim Malinic]

You mentioned reading and learning via doing and you mentioned that you have time thinking what's to do. Do you sometimes feel that having time to think it's almost just the right words to use? I feel sort of privileged. But some people don't have time to think what they're going to do because they are stuck in that sort of survival instinct. How would you look after yourself? How do you think? Your terms of thing now, I would like to believe is different to your time to think 20 years ago.

[Simon Dixon]

Not really. Not really.

[Radim Malinic]

Okay, that's good.

[Simon Dixon]

Are you saying I'm busy and I were busier then?

[Radim Malinic]

I'm trying to talk about the cognitive space, like actually having a greater vision because you think differently to what you thought 20 years ago. You've got 20 years more experience than what you had 20 years ago.

[Simon Dixon]

That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. I suppose that's just how I am. I just create space myself to think. And at any given time you're under a lot of duress. Where does the work come from? Is the work good? Is everybody happy? What's happening with the economy? Will Donald Trump get into power? What's happening in this technology? I've got to learn how to have an AI assistant. There's loads of things I might have to do that are things that are happening at any given time, some of which are constant and some of which are like immediate. So there's two types, but then within that is what you'd like to do. So I think if you give yourself time to think, you're more likely to prioritize and give the right order to the decision making tree of the things you do. I think if you don't create that time and you just go from thing to thing, meeting to meeting, project to project, you get on a hamster wheel and it's harder to progress then. And it's really hard to see blind spots because if you don't see those blind spots, they're the things that kill you, they're the things that fuck you up. So you've got to give yourself time to process what's Happening, decide what to do with that and then go do it. Because it's only successful if you action what you think. So I just put lots of time in my schedule not to do anything. And I wander around. I might wander around the studio, have a cup of tea, and I'm thinking and I'm pottering, but my brain is processing at that point. It's just going, oh, maybe I'll do this, maybe I'll do that. How I actually just take the ideas is I talk to people. So I basically test ideas on people with by just talking. And I don't tell them I'm doing that. I just talk about them and I see how people react to them and then they start to solidify my mind. And obviously I've got a lot of trusted people I've worked with for a long time, so I can talk candidly to people about things, different people about different things, and I just talk to them and I use them as a sounding board and then I decide if it sounds okay and see how they react to it, and then I decide what to do with it.

[Radim Malinic]

Would those people be within the organization or do you have a sort of circle of trustees?

[Simon Dixon]

Got business partner up over? So obviously he's the most obvious sounding board. Our md, Rachel, she's the other sounding board for the business. But then there's lots of different people. I just talk about things to people I just happen to be with. And I have a lot of meetings. So I talk to 5, 600 people a year, like across different companies, businesses, talk to people all the time. I've got another four meetings today with different people around the world. Some might get business, some might not. Some might just people I'm chatting to. But I'm constantly taking a reading of what's going on with things and picking up bits of information and knowledge. So I find talking to people quite helpful.

[Radim Malinic]

Absolutely. Because I was going to ask you, like, how do you create that time? Was it like you said, you walk around and sounding things out? But in your personal life, do you take your work home? Are you good to leave it in the studio? Because of course you can't speak your thoughts, you can't control them. But are you good looking after your mental health? You sound like someone who's not too stressed.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, I definitely get stressed. Of course I do. I'm a highly natural and quite an intense person. Patient, quite intense and quite quiet. So I basically have two people. There is me at work and then there's me at home and I switch me on as I go to work. So there's a kind of another layer to me that is professional version of me which is much more outgoing, much more dynamic, very definitive about lots of things. But happy to change his mind. I just give myself the permission to act the way that I need to navigate what we need to do as an entity. But yeah, I can switch off. But the thing is the work life balance. I'm defined by what I do. I like being a creator, I like having an entity and I like what I do. So I don't need to go for a walk in the woods or go to a gallery to be re inspired. I don't work that way. I go for a run, I hang out with friends, go on holiday like normal people. I sit and read a book. But like my energy level for creativity is a constant thing. I'm constantly thinking about what I'd like to do, why am I doing it. And I don't switch it on and off. In that sense, if something comes to me, I'll think about it and then I'll stop thinking about it. I don't have to say this is Saturday, I shouldn't do that. Obviously if I'm hanging out with friends at a barbecue, that's the thing I'm into at the moment. So I won't think about work, my brain will just stop thinking about thinking about sausages and whatever. But yeah, I just am on. Like I'm just on. And I don't really need a lot of other input. So I don't need to look at lots of other things to decide what I'm going to do. I think about them in my head and invent them rather than see them and decide to do them.

[Radim Malinic]

Great. You talk about reading long form. What is the current things or what is the books that would have changed your view on creativity or life or looking after your mental health?

[Simon Dixon]

I tend to read about behavioral science, physics, things which are about the human condition, deep time cultural books, things which are about the greatest scale of humanity. I don't really read books about creativity. There's a few good ones. Obviously if you read Rick Rubin's book, it's a great book. Or you read Trillion Dollar Coach is a great book about mentoring business. That's a fantastic book. But they're limited in some senses because your lived reality in business is different. So a lot of the tips you get from those books about how to communicate, how to look after people or how to create, you decided your own version of that. So I won't create like Rick Rubin because it's not what I do. I love that he creates that way, and I get inspired by reading his book. But there's not a lot of what he does I would take to my world because I've already decided how I'd like to create. So I tend to read things which are more about the fundamentals of how the world works and how we work and the things that matter to me. And what it does is it kind of purges my mind. And then when I think about something that's work related, I just feel a little bit more sparkly.

[Radim Malinic]

I think the types of books that you mentioned, this is type of books that have crossed my reading list as well. And I found that I became a better creative and better human being and collaborator because of those books. Because you can read almost like the Ego Chamber books, or you can read like how to do this and how to do that as a creative person. But what we ultimately do, we work, as you mentioned, with your reach of 2 billion people, you work for other people. So you create something for some. Somebody else to fall in love, to be excited. And it's actually understanding how the business works, how the no human condition works, behavioral science, all of that together. This is what I think what makes a good creative, even better creative, because you understand yourself. And I believe I read somewhere that you said it just a second ago about that you go to High street to watch how people just behave when you go for a pub, or you don't have to necessarily go to the gallery. Because in my first book I wrote about a gallery versus High street. Because watching how people behave, what they buy, what carrier bag is the most chosen one, like, it's just having almost this view into sort of human interaction is ultimately, those are our audiences, those are our customers. We just want to understand how this works. Because you can stand in the gallery and have a piece to yourself and go, I will never be this good or in this gallery or in this museum. Whereas I can actually give something to this person in their hand because I'm creating work, but it's actually not commercially not accepted and produced.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, I mean, I used to go see Rothko's Seagram paintings fairly frequently. I used to live near the tip Modern. I go there on a Sunday morning when it was the most quiet so I could sit with them and look at them. And I used to enjoy just being with them. That's never actually strictly influenced any design work I've done, but it made me feel good about the fact that people create lots of different Ways. I think one of the things I find is that people say a lot of statements which get fixed in culture, in industry, in books, and various things, and they say them very, very definitively. But what I tend to do is when someone says something to me, I check it. You said many things to me specifically today, some of which I agree with and some I don't agree with. But the ones that I'm not sure about, I'll go check and I'll read up on them. Because I have an instinct that a lot of the time people are saying things that I've heard and not you specifically. I'm talking about other people now. They say things that they've heard and read and learned, but they've not figured out what the source of that is and the actual truth of it. And I think if you're designing for a lot of people, you need to get to the source and truth of what makes people, what motivates people and what they care about. So I spend a lot of time rooting back to something, and if someone says, oh, this has happened, I'll go, yeah, maybe, but maybe I should check that and make sure. And if they're 100% right, cracking. But if they're not, I'll learn something else. And I tend to root back to ideas, and I find that really helpful when I think about creating. For a lot of people, getting to.

[Radim Malinic]

The truth seems like a very obvious concept of what we need to do. Yet I sometimes feel that the information is so disorientating or so easily taken as a face value that you don't even think that the truth is behind it once you get there. It's like a concept of you don't have to invent anything. Like when you have that point.

[Simon Dixon]

Yeah, it's just what drives things. So if you get a creative brief, the brief is usually quite functional and it has a series of tasks and things that have come into it, but there's always something behind that. And it's the same with any kind of big idea. If you start to look at why that exists and then you look behind that and what's driving that, you actually get to the problem that you're solving. And that's what we do as a problem solvers. I don't think get to a fundamental truth. I don't know there is an actual fundamental truth, because everyone's lived experience is different. It's an aggregation of things. And I don't think what we do is pure. It's not a perfect discipline. It's Very messy, it's human driven, it's idiosyncratic. You're making the best of a lot of very, very complex moving parts. But if you get to, if you get back a few levels to the more fundamental problems and the bigger changes you need to make, the design and the systems and the strategies, they'll just be better, that's all.

[Radim Malinic]

What is the biggest challenge of our current ways of creativity or running an agency in a slightly semi broken world with conflicts popping up here and there all the time and having this turmoil of pandemic? What did you think that you're doing now that you would never thought you were doing, you would be doing 25, 24 years ago?

[Simon Dixon]

There's a lot, there's a lot of points in that one sentence. Yeah, it's good. Let's take the pandemic for a second. You said the world's broken and obviously, yeah, perception is, it's a difficult place for a lot of people. But there was a pandemic. And if that pandemic had happened 75 years ago, another 100 million people would have died. But in that moment, the entire planet decided collectively to lock down good and bad. Some were better than others, develop a vaccine, share that vaccine and save tens and tens of millions of lives across borders, instantly, everywhere. That is an amazing human achievement. It's an incredible human achievement. Now people moan about British government giving bungs to their friends and stuff like that, which you should rightly do. There's always going to be heinous people doing heinous things. But the idea that we, with great thinking, creativity and collective drive can solve the world's big problems makes it an exciting time to live, I think, because what tends to happen is people only deal with the problem when it becomes incredibly immediate and it's essential. There are good and bad parts to both those conversations. I don't know about what's different now. I think the world is more overwhelming than it was, I think. I think you've described it. There's a lot of tension on people. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of division, there's a lot of populist opinions which are incredibly unhealthy. So I tend to focus on the things where I think greater change and positivity are and try to live in those areas and wherever I can have a positive effect and try not to be crippled by the things I can't control.

[Radim Malinic]

Do I remember rightly that you make movies in your spare time?

[Simon Dixon]

I did, I did make a feature film yeah, in 2015, 16, I made a feature film. So it was a kind of inflection point in my career where I'd done an absolute ton of things in the design industry. So I've always been into film, and I wanted to give myself a greater creative challenge. So we basically set up a business to do that, and we produced, wrote, directed it, raised the money, ended up going to Tribeca and the Edinburgh Film Festival. So we did the kind of entire loop, and it was almost like a creative sabbatical. So I came back feeling very different, very engaged. I'm not going to have a career as a movie director. That's not really what I am. I might do another one down the line. But what it did do is just make me feel different. It purged a lot of thoughts, cleaned me up, and a more optimistic and dynamic me came out of it again.

[Radim Malinic]

It speaks volume about, like, how we can make the time the thing, like, how we can actually do different things. That sort of freshen up your mind, as you say, mini sabbatical. Because as a last sort of point before I let you go, you say it's okay to switch paths, whatever your age. Don't let anyone tell you different. And I think we live in the most exciting times when you can reinvent yourself as often as you would like. How does it apply to you?

[Simon Dixon]

I'm here like that snowball rolling and picking up snow, really, and just growing the same thing. If I want something, I'll do it. But in a sense, I've created an entity to allow me to exist in the way I want to exist. But the point is, I speak to a lot of people on a kind of daily basis, and they're told they can and can't do things. And my point is, it's very difficult to change jobs. You have people on mortgages, families. Not everybody has the same skill sets and talents. So it's quite difficult to make change in some instances. But there are so many different ways of working that you don't have to work at a company you don't like. You don't have to work in a discipline you don't like. And if there's a particular thing that might give you joy, you might have to sacrifice something to change to get that thing. But maybe it's worth doing. And that's the thing I always balance the sacrifice of the change. Is it worth it to me to get the thing I want? And that's the thing I always balance.

[Radim Malinic]

Fantastic. Simon, thank you. Thank you for challenging me on my points. I'm glad you disagree with yeah, I do.

[Simon Dixon]

So with great respect. It's not that I think you're instantly incorrect, it's just my worldview is slightly different.

[Radim Malinic]

I really cherish this conversation because I really appreciate what you guys achieve with Dictum Vaxi. It feels like it's growing stronger and stronger and it's entity and identity, it shines brighter because of the fragmented and noisy space of relying on trends. Congratulations what you achieved. And I looking forward to the next 24, 25 years of what you guys might achieve.

[Simon Dixon]

Thank you. That's very kind of you. And thanks for the questions. They're really incisive and interesting. Though I may appear to disagree in certain semantic points, I agree a lot with what you say. So thanks for making an interesting conversation. I appreciate it.

[Radim Malinic]

Thank you so much. Pleasure to have you. Hey, thank you for listening to this episode of Mindful Creative Podcast. I'd love to know your thoughts, questions or even suggestions, so please get in touch via the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me, Radim Malinic. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by Neil McKay from 7 Million Bikes podcast and the theme music was written and produced by Jack James. Thank you and I hope to see you on the next episode. Hey, just a quick note to say thank you for joining me on this episode. If this is your first time or you're a regular listener, please take a minute and rate the show on your chosen platform. A short review helps every show to be more visible to new listeners and provide them with value. So thank you for helping out. Thank you.