I was going to make a boring sticker. I ended up putting a unicorn.

This is a small post about a small decision. A sticker. However, while I was making it — between the first sober version and the second full of glitter — I realized that this same decision is repeated, exactly the same, in each step of the creative work. The sticker didn't matter. What didn't matter was not the question behind it. So I write it, in case it helps someone.

The first sticker

I started with the sensible version. Cream background, black letters, a couple of splashes of color to suggest the brand, a button with the CTA — "I want to sign up for the course →" — and the domain in small below. Composite. Clean. Professional. Decent typographic design.

I looked at her for a long time. It was a sticker good. It was going to work. He was going to say exactly what he was supposed to say. If I printed it out and left it on the table, people would look at a course, read the title, read the subtitle, and paste it—maybe—somewhere respectful of the laptop. Next to the GitHub logo. Next to the minimalist sticker of the favorite coffee shop. As a good citizen of contemporary design.

And still. Even so. Something inside me kept leaving me with the feeling that that first sticker, perfectly correct, wasn't saying what it was supposed to say. Like when you write an impeccable email, you reread it, and you notice that the most important thing is missing — that it is not you who is writing, but the professional version that borrowed your voice on a Friday afternoon.

The moment I changed my mind

I was about to hit send to printer. The uploaded file. The approved budget. It would have been so easy to end there — everyone would have understood, everyone would have agreed. "Good sticker, looks elegant". And the topic would have been over.

And suddenly the question appeared, with the cleanliness with which important questions arrive. The question was — and I'm going to write it exactly as I thought of it:

"If I teach a course to unlock creativity, and my sticker looks like the sticker of an advanced Excel course, what the hell am I doing?"

It is not a rhetorical question. It is very operational. If you sell a course on creative exuberance, on allowing yourself to imagine, on stopping doing everything right, on bringing back the kid who drew unicorns in the margins of the math notebook — and then you put out the most sensible merchandising in the world — you're contradicting the product before selling it. You are telling the person: "my course invites you to break the correction, but look how well I have behaved in the presentation."

There is a word for that. It's called inconsistency. And inconsistency is not bad because it is ugly — it is bad because it shows. Even if people don't verbalize it, they feel it. A person may not be able to tell you why your sticker bores them, but the hand that was going to peel it off and stick it somewhere stops. Without knowing why, he doesn't hit her.

The little idea that opened everything

My wife (or whoever it was, it doesn't matter) had told me a couple of times, half jokingly, something that I immediately forgot because it sounded childish: "this is missing a unicorn". I laughed. I said things like "you can't sell an adult course with a unicorn." I defended the sober sticker like a good professional.

Until one day — the day I was going to send it to print — I thought: What if I take it a little further?

That phrase, “what if I take it a little further?”, is probably the most important question in creative work. Most worthwhile creative things are the “a little further” version of something that was already good enough. The song you stopped right after the chorus. The cover you left before the fourth color. The email you sent without the last sentence, the one that was real. The text where you didn't dare to use the strange metaphor and chose the dresser. The piece of art where you stopped out of respect for the client and left the extra detail for home.

take it to the extreme

Once I made the decision — let's go for the crazy version — a funny thing happened. The next five hours were not "design." They were game. Golden typography with a brown border, like the logos on the posters of the bad '90s movies that we love so much. A unicorn riding with colored mane on the left. A rainbow behind. Little white stars scattered like on the magic cards you bought at kiosks. Holographic glitter finish. An iridescent background. An opt-in button with a gradient that looks like melted candy. And my domain in purple letters below, as if it were the stamp of a stationery brand from the 80s.

Each separate decision is excessive. Together they are a statement. The statement is: "This course is not about doing everything well. It is about reminding you that you know how to do strange things".

There was a moment, while I was designing it, when I thought, "this is too much." And the answer I gave myself was, "no, that's exactly the point." Too much is the word the reasonable adult uses to describe anything that dares not ask permission. Too much is where life is worth remembering.

The channel is also the message

Marshall McLuhan He said that famous phrase in 1964: the medium is the message — the medium is the message. It is often cited a lot and little understood. What McLuhan was saying is very simple: The way you deliver something is part of what you say.. It's not just important that you say. It is important in what you say it

If you deliver an idea about creativity on a boring sticker, the person receives two contradictory messages: the explicit ("sign up for this creativity course") and the implicit ("but don't expect anything exuberant to happen: our merchandising proves it"). The implicit message always wins. Because the human brain trusts what it sees rather than what it reads.

If you deliver the same idea on a sticker with a unicorn riding a holographic rainbow, the two messages coincide: the explicit and the implicit point in the same direction. The person thinks, without thinking about it: "ah, these people are not going to give me the typical corporate-creativity speech. These people believe it".

And that small coincidence between the what and the how is what separates the merchandising that stays in a drawer from the merchandising that sticks on the laptop. You save the boring sticker. You paste the sticker with the unicorn. And from there — from your coffee neighbor's laptop — people look at her. The question. "Hey, what's that?". And the conversation begins.

What a sticker says without saying it

Let's go back to the unicorn sticker and see what it says without saying anything explicit. Look at the set as if you found it stuck on someone's laptop:

• The unicorn He says, "I haven't taken myself seriously seriously, and that's because I take my job very seriously."
• The holographic rainbow says, "I'm going to give myself permission to like things that a reasonable adult would have dismissed."
• The glitter He says: "I'm going to use materials that most people dismiss as childish, because it turns out that imagination is that material."
• golden letters with border They say: "I'm going to quote the posters from my childhood without irony, without cultural disguise, just because."
• The button with gradient He says: "I'm not selling you seriousness. I'm inviting you to something you want."
• The irregular shape of the sticker He says, "I don't fit into the grid, what about you?"

Five things, together, in a three-inch object. And they all say the same thing: remind yourself that you can reimagine. The boring sticker didn't say anything like that. The boring sticker only remembered to communicate the name of the course.

The metaphor with creative work in general

Here's the part I'm really interested in telling you — because the sticker is just the excuse.

The gesture I took with the sticker is exactly the same gesture that any serious creative job calls for. Almost any creative project starts with a version correct. A solid, sensible, executable idea. That first version is the one that the adult brain produces automatically — because the adult brain is trained not to make mistakes in public.

And then the real creative work begins with a single question: "What if I take it a little further?". Not much further — just enough so that the result stops being anything and starts being yours.

I see it all the time in students of the course. They start writing morning pages. The first weeks they write correct things. Things you would understand if you read them (they are not read, but they could be read). At some point in the fourth or fifth week — it always happens — they write something that scares them a little. Something they didn't expect. Something they probably wouldn't teach. And from that moment on, the morning pages become useful. Before they were hygiene. Now they are material.

The same with dates with the artist. First dates are to the right museum, to the right bookstore, to the right café. Until one week a student allows herself to go to the grocery store to buy old candies. Or to the ceramics workshop where her mother took her as a child. Or to the roundabout where she kissed a boy who no longer exists. And from there the appointments with the artist change their quality. They stop being cultural education and begin to be fuel.

The stickers are the same. I had made a museum sticker. When I gave myself permission to make it a trail sticker, everything fell into place.

A note on the fear of appearing corny

Complete honesty: part of the reason I almost took the boring sticker was fear. Specific fear of appearing corny. For a colleague — someone with good taste, someone with judgment — to see the unicorn sticker and think "Oh, what a shame, before this boy had aesthetic dignity".

Cornishness is the perfect alibi for the reasonable adult. We use it to protect ourselves from anything that dares direct emotion. We label everything that throws us off due to excess affection as cheesy. It is the corral that sophistication built to put everything it does not dare to feel.

But if you look closely, kitsch is not an aesthetic problem. It is a social judgment. Saying "this is cheesy" means "this makes me uncomfortable and I'm going to pretend it's because it's inelegant, when in reality it's because I'm not up to the affection it's asking for."

There are things that are really cheesy — the cheap cheesiness that copies emotional gestures without feeling them. But most of the things we dismiss as cheesy are simply things that dare to be warm without being embarrassed. A unicorn on a sticker, if the unicorn is made with love and says something consistent with what it sells, it is not corny. Is honest.

Once you realize that, you can no longer choose boring for fear of looking cheesy. The fear of kitsch is the adult version of the fear of making a fool of yourself. And at the end of your life you won't be regretting the times you seemed a little cheesy. You're going to regret the times you chose the sensible version when the memorable version was next to it.

What happened next

I printed the unicorn stickers at a printing company specialized in holographic vinyl — the iridescent finish that changes color when you rotate the sticker under the light. They cost a little more than the flat matte vinyl. Very little else. I received them. And the first time I held one in my hand, something very specific happened: I wanted to look at it. The sensible sticker would have been left on the table. I moved this one. I turned it. I tried it on the wall, on the refrigerator, on a notebook. Undecided. Just seeing it from different angles. (You've already seen it in the comparison above — the photo doesn't do it justice, in your hand it changes color when you turn it.)

That gesture — wanting to look at it — is the gesture that any creator seeks. You don't sell anything when the product stays in the person's hand without moving. You sell when the product causes movement. Lap. Ask. And the unicorn sticker causes that at the first opportunity.

But more importantly: when I started giving them away — at events, to students, to people who passed by my table — something new happened. People reacted. Before they would have said "ah, that's great, thank you." With this they say "hahaha, but how strong". And many times they stick it in front of me. That, in marketing, is the only thing that matters. That the sticker enters circulation. That it is seen. That the person sticks it where people look at it.

What this teaches about Your Artist's Path

If you've made it this far, you already know what I'm going to say, so I'll say it quickly. This is about your work, not mine.

Every day you make decisions in which there is a correct version and a memorable version. You almost always choose the right one. Not because you don't see the memorable one — you see it perfectly — but because the memorable one gives you a little shame, a little fear, a little "what are they going to think." The correct one is never embarrassing. But the correct one is not remembered either.

The course, The Artist's Path, Julia Cameron, the morning pages, the appointments with the artist — all of that, when looked at clearly, is about one thing. Stop automatically choosing the correct version. Of wondering, in every small step, "What if I take it a little further?". Not much further. Just a little. Just enough for your signature to appear.

The email you are about to send and it comes out too correct. The sentence you are about to leave unfinished. The project you have saved because "it's not time yet." The weird conversation that you've been avoiding for weeks because "what are they going to think?" The email to that person you admire but you don't dare. The comment you wanted to make and you let it pass. The weird way of doing your job that you have saved for "when I have more freedom."

All that is the boring sticker. And all of that has a unicorn version. The version a little further. The version that says something.

The small gesture that matters

This week I'm going to ask you for a small thing — the size of a sticker. I'm not going to ask you to rewrite your life. I'm going to ask you to take a decision you have pending. One where you already know which version is correct. One in which the correct version is already one step away from being executed.

And before you press the button — the shipment, the delivery, the “ok approved” — ask yourself the question. The only question. The one that changes everything:

What if I take it a little further?

Maybe the answer is "no, not this time." Okay. But maybe the answer is "yes, actually yes." And if yes, do it. Although it's a little embarrassing. Although it seems corny. Even if your cultured colleague is going to frown.

What appears on the other side is always, always, something that the correct version couldn't give you. And you learn it by doing. You learn it with a little sticker with a unicorn shining on your laptop. You learn it in everyday life.

That is the way. There is no other. And that's why this course is called what it is called.