Makisa Bronson
Makisa is a creative strategist, copywriter, and curator based in New York City.
She works as a brand strategist & copywriter at Practice, a Brooklyn-based creative firm, where she works alongside a passionate team to build and launch category-defining brands in ethical commerce. She also freelances out of STUDIO LI and is the co-founder and curator of The East Asian Graphics Archive. Her work and words have been featured in The Brand Identity, Creative Boom, Quartz, MaxiBestOf, and Dead Simple Site
Creative strategist, brand builder, writer, curator
Latest inspirations?
Film photography, blogs, Hanzi Kanzi Hanja book to flip through
Most surreal project?
All the brand building work at the firm I’m at - so insanely fun and inspirational, cool to have a hand in bringing all the brands to life from initial idea to launch
Creative habits?
Chronic Pinterest scroller, carrying around a journal for brainstorming and writing notes, reading and seeing the world through the lens of other peoples words and improving my craft
What is your creative process?
Research, understand then act
Haven’t landed on a formalized process yet
Usually start by understanding the problem by doing market research, talking to founders about the problems of their business
Understand where they’re coming from and the significance of the work
Then it varies - might go into moodboarding, with agency they start off with naming because it’s super early with the clients
Process of iterating between the verbal and visual
Not a designer, a strategist and copywriter so regardless of design team, will communicate iteratively to make sure that everything passes on to the next team
Brief is clear and work can be checked in and makes sense from all angles
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Market research is daunting, when in a hypersaturated market it can be overwhelming
Facing creative block, getting out of the funk
Personally haven’t faced challenges with iteration
Map out your creative journey
(1) Pre-creation - 15% including market research
(2) Creation - 60% including feedback ie. Hate direction 3, love direction 1
(3) Post-creation - 25%
Favorite design tools and why?
Are.na
Been curious about Cosmos
Curated.design - great examples of design
Ilovecreatives - internet gems section, really cool websites that are beautiful
Figma - for prototyping and decks, better for actual design
Notion - for planning
Google docs - for writing
Haven’t found the best tool for planning and design (combo of Notion/Figma)
When I’m trying to brainstorm for a project in a visual way, feels ungrounded in Figma when I throw a bunch of photos and try to connect them with words, feels untethered and just floating there, something I’m trying to iterate on
What’s your mood board creation process?
Agency has their own process run by design team
Creating playlist design for Brazilian pop music - mood boarding as integral research for creative production, dig into the genre and research history
Started in Miro, brought into Pinterest to bring in specific pieces from various sources, grouping them based on trends and patterns
When are you most inspired?
When I’m traveling in cities, soaking it all in and seeing all the cool design applications in the wild that exist in a cityscape
Where/how do you do your best work?
At night or in the early morning, with coffee
Thoughts on some new creative tool ideas?
- Actionable feedback tool - 10/10, once client requested a change and it’s implemented in how the client wants, make sure client is accurately communicating, would be extremely helpful as there’s a lot of time spent between back and forth between client team and creative team, free up a lot of time for designers and people managing a creative relationship (if a client has been given a deliverable, instead of them saying I want a specific change and the change happening, if they’re not fully satisfied maybe there’s 3 options by the generation tool ie. not happy with sky, here’s 3 auto generated things you might like if they don’t know how to change)
- Visual concepting tool - 11/10, extremely helpful as it’s hard to make the leap between idea/moodboard to getting started, how to distill the mood board into something actionable as it removes barrier to entry to getting started
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
Continually hone my craft and continually find my creative voice