Nicholas Roope is a man of many jobs: he is the Founder and Creative Director of creative agency Poke, Jury Chair of The Lovie Awards and creates designer products at Hulger and Plumen. Here he tells us about his passion for good coffee, Instagram and art school...
Full name/job title:
Nicolas Roope, Founder/Creative Director of Poke, Jury Chair of The Lovie Awards and Co-Chair of Internet Week Europe. Founder/Creative Director of Hulger/Plumen.
What does your job involve?
I help form concepts and ideas that answer client problems and conundrums with a mix of logical strategy and lateral creativity. I am involved in anything and everything that allows Poke to do the most potent, progressive work we can.
As Lovie Awards Jury chair I make sure our judges are carefully selected, briefed and supported as their commitment and perspectives are the filter that surfaces the shortlists and winners. Juries need to be both fine-tuned and highly motivated to get through all the work and make the right calls as they do so. The good news is the quality and breadth of entries is very high so judges get a really interesting spread of work to experience through the judging process.
At Hulger/Plumen I have product ideas and then spend years developing them and then bringing them to life and offering them to markets.
Five things you couldn’t work without:
1. Notes app
“Notes” is one of the most used apps on my iPhone and certainly my most precious. I know it’s trendier and more cloudy to use Evernote but I find the lag-time tends to kill the moment of recording a thought. I lost all my notes once in a reinstall. It was a f**king horrible day.
2. Our Francino barista-style coffee machine
My body doesn’t know it’s morning until a double macchiato touches my lips. When the recession started to bite, Poke bought us all a coffee machine for Christmas. Since then it has probably saved us Pokers a million pounds on un-bought coffees.
3. Keynote
It used to be Photoshop, now it’s Keynote. I really operate in the realm of concepts and ideas, strategies and plans these days so I’m more likely to be writing a deck than visualising something. When you mix ideas, design, words, technologies, insights, data etc, everyone gets really lost. Keynote forces you to navigate this mess with simply articulated ideas that mobilise the support of all parties to make the nearly impossible happen.
4. Instagram
I’ve let my professional life “corrupt” my social networks. Well, all bar Instagram, where I’m more or less myself and where I have those nice intimate interactions with friends that remind me why everyone else engages with this stuff (for “fun” rather than “gain”). Very important to remember that.
5. My conceptual art education
Art gets such a bad rap for being un-vocational. Ironic for me because I use my learning from art school every day, as do many successful people who’ve followed that line. Walking into an empty studio in art school and having to figure out what to do and why to do it every day is terrifying but also enlightening. When you’ve learned not just to cope with that, but to synthesise those nascent concepts into meaningful work, you’re empowered to pull a million other tricky creative manoeuvres.
To be really creative you have to deal with loneliness and pointlessness and you need to be brutally honest and critical of your own thoughts and actions. It’s what makes great creators, inventors and entrepreneurs. One of my missions in life is to demonstrate how creativity isn’t this fluffy bullshit thing on the side, but the beating heart at the centre.
The Lovie Awards recognises the unique and resonant nature of the European Internet community. Entries for the Lovie Awards 2012 close on 21 September 2012. Enter now at www.lovieawards.eu – it only takes 10 minutes.
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