"Holiday" Party?

What should a corporation call their Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / holiday / party? This was the question The Advisory Board Company was asking itself in 2016. They eventually decided to bypass the whole complex issue and chose a theme that was completely unrelated to any tradition. I was brought on to help them imagine what a "Pop After Dark" themed party would be like.

Below are a few options I pitched, and the final version can be found here.

Source: https://nate-smith-z6hq.squarespace.com/#/...

Absurd Brainstorming

My brothers both recently got married and I decided that the most appropriate Christmas gift for the recently hitched love birds would be a collection of Calvin and Hobbes books. Upon flipping through them I was filled with nostalgia and reminded how brilliant Bill Watterson is.

This comic in particular got me thinking about the absurd and it’s place in creative work. In it Calvin’s says, “We laugh at nonsense.” But I would change it to, “We laugh at what we think is nonsense.”

We laugh when we think something is absurd, but sometimes we find it is, “so crazy it just might work”. Isn’t that what creativity is? It is the truth that comes out of exploring the fringes of the possible. It is making the transition from the natural reaction of laughing, to sincerely engaging the absurd possibilities.