To be truly great, we have to understand the motivation of our clients, maintain constant two-way communication with shockingly uncreative people, get a firm handle on copywriting and how that craft exists symbiotically with the visual element, and foresee how the finished whole will be greater than the sum of the bits and pieces we spent hours obsessing over. All of these factors cascade into the final product.

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Web design has a bad reputation for being stylistically trendy and same-looking. Some guy does a parallax scrolling site, and now your boss wants you to add that to your corporate PR website for some reason. Glossy buttons, Gaussian Noise, linen texture, new things that look fake-old, then back to minimalism and flat colors as a reaction to the glossy noisy textured fake-old stuff...