Finding meaning beyond the brief as a creative producer

In Victor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, he speaks of life’s primary motivational force as the “will to meaning”. This got me thinking about my own struggle to find meaning, especially in my creative work. Frankl, a psychotherapist, pioneered a therapeutic doctrine he called Logotherapy. The word logos, derived from Greek, denotes “meaning”. How ironic, I thought, as I had devoted so much of my life to making logos and in doing so, I had misplaced my own logos.

For me, there has always been a kind of suffocation in surviving as a freelance designer, what Frankl called existential frustration. Not the dramatic, crisis kind, but the slow erosion of self, the way you wake up one day and realise you have spent years building a life that is not yours. I did not hate my work and on the surface it had always seemed plausible. I just always felt like something was missing. It was a vacuum, a strange and conformist emptiness.

When we set out on a creative career, many of us are driven by a deep, internal spark. David Bowie said, “Never play to the gallery. Always remember that the reason you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it is terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations; they generally produce their worst work when they do that.”

Bowie often argued that being an artist requires a degree of social dysfunctionalism, a deep, perhaps irrational, urge to create. For a long time, I kept my design work and my love of art strictly separated, secretly afraid to fully pursue what I was meant to do. But the search for meaning eventually caught up with me.

I have come to realise that design is no longer a fixed discipline. My work is no longer defined by specific deliverables or static categories. My practice now moves fluidly between brand identity, full-stack web development and fine art. By adapting my skill stack, I ensure that the ideas and the meaning behind them remain the priority. The medium I choose, whether a responsive website or a charcoal drawing, is secondary to the vision. It is a way of working that finally honours the full scope of creativity, allowing me to execute concepts across disciplines without being bottlenecked.

I have come to appreciate that careers and lives are not straight lines. They are messy, loud, full of false starts and sudden stops. The scars are there, in the rust and the bent metal. But Frankl wrote that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning.

While standing in an empty shunting yard on the foothills of Devil’s Peak taking these photos, I realised that changing tracks to pursue this fluid creative practice has changed my relationship with myself, my past and my future. I have finally found my logos.