Quiet Sunday morning desk with notebook, coffee, and soft natural light - creative planning

What We're Working On: The Calm Before Tuesday

It's Sunday. Everything for Tuesday's launch is done. The Further Reductions assets are sitting ready across paid social, home page, and email. The LinkedIn post is locked - directional zoom technique, navy quote graphic, 7:30am slot. The Facebook version is written. The riso animation is delivered at 3.3MB and playing clean.

So today isn't about making things. It's about looking at things.

This morning's Creative Mood email landed with twelve references across six categories. I spent an hour just sitting with them. Not pulling them apart for technique yet. Just letting them wash over me and noticing which ones made me lean forward.

Three did.

Hermes commissioned 16 artists to create illustrated overlays on their 2026 campaign footage. Not one illustrator. Sixteen. Each with their own hand - lithographic, ink, watercolour, line drawing. All laid over live action film. The result is something that doesn't look like animation and doesn't look like live action. It looks like a moving editorial spread.

Bottega Veneta celebrated 50 years of Intrecciato with a piece called "Craft in Motion." Not a campaign. A document. Showing the leather weaving process in such intimate, slow detail that the craft itself becomes the narrative. No voiceover. No music. Just the sound of leather being woven and hands working.

Loewe marked their 180th anniversary with a surrealist heritage film. They went back to the house's surrealist roots - the ones that predate Jonathan Anderson - and built a film that treats heritage not as history but as a living, strange, beautiful thing. Trompe l'oeil, impossible scale, objects that aren't what they appear to be.

Three different houses. Three different approaches. But they share something: none of them are selling a product in these pieces. They're selling a way of seeing. And the way of seeing is always: look at the craft, look at the hands, look at the strange beauty of how this thing came to exist.

I'm one person making content for a 90-year-old cashmere brand. Hermes has 16 illustrators. Bottega has entire production teams. Loewe has 180 years of surrealist heritage to draw from. But sitting here on a Sunday morning with a coffee, I'm not intimidated by the gap. I'm excited by the map.

Because here's what I can take from each:

From Hermes: the illustrated overlay technique. I already have the DNA of this in the riso animation - letterforms fragmenting, halftone dots, ink textures. But Hermes showed me what happens when you scale that idea across a whole campaign, not just a logo reveal. What if the next N.PEAL reel has hand-drawn lines tracing the cable knit pattern as it moves? What if the chevron texture gets a lithographic treatment over live footage?

From Bottega: sound-first, craft-as-narrative. I wrote about this yesterday - build the sound design before the cut. But Bottega takes it further. The craft IS the narrative. You don't need a story arc when you have a close-up of leather being woven at 4K with the sound amplified. For N.PEAL, that's the knitting machine. The cashmere fold. The scissors cutting a swatch. These sounds, at this fidelity, with this patience, would carry a 15-second reel on their own.

From Loewe: heritage as surrealism, not nostalgia. N.PEAL is 90 years old. The easy approach is archival photos and sepia tones. The Loewe approach is to take the spirit of the house - its strangeness, its beauty, its willingness to be unexpected - and make something that feels contemporary because it's weird, not because it's retro. N.PEAL was founded in Burlington Arcade in 1936. There's a story there that doesn't need to be told with old photographs. It could be told with surrealism.

What I Shared on LinkedIn: Still the Adobe Summit Post

The most recent published post is still the Adobe Summit London piece from 7 July. No new post this week - and I wrote about why yesterday. The posting rhythm is locked: Tuesday main posts at 7:30am, mid-week micro-posts, daily snippets. I held this week deliberately.

But here's the thing I keep thinking about: the Adobe Summit post was about "human in the lead, not human in the loop." And that's exactly what Hermes, Bottega, and Loewe are demonstrating in their campaigns. They're using the best of technology - 4K macro, precision sound design, illustrated overlays - but the creative direction is unmistakably human. The illustrator's hand. The weaver's fingers. The surrealist's eye.

That post from two weeks ago suddenly feels less like an observation from a conference and more like a creative philosophy I'm building everything around.

Tuesday's post - the directional zoom technique - is the next one out. It's the most hands-on, craft-level post I've written. Snap zooms at 300-400% scale. Directional Blur. Beat-synced M key markers. It's not thought leadership. It's a technique breakdown. And if the viral file-size post taught me anything, it's that the posts where I just show the actual work are the ones that travel.

What I Learned Today: The Gap Is the Map

Here's what I synthesised from this morning's emails across the Creative Mood, the AI Daily, and the Creative Intelligence roundup.

The AI Daily covered Kimi K3 - 2.8 trillion parameters, open weights, the largest open model ever. And Gemini 3.5 Pro - full rebuild, 2M token context. These are infrastructure stories. Important, but not what I'm thinking about on a Sunday morning.

The Creative Intelligence roundup had data: Reels deliver 67% higher engagement than static posts. Carousels are catching up. UGC-style content outperforms polished studio work. Again, important. But it's the kind of thing that informs strategy, not creative direction.

What stopped me was the Creative Mood. Specifically, the Hermes 16-artist commission. Not because of what they made - because of how they think about it.

Hermes didn't say "we need social content." They said "we need 16 interpretations of our 2026 theme." They treated illustration not as a format but as a creative medium with its own authorship. Each artist brings a different visual language. The campaign isn't one voice - it's a choir.

Now, I'm one person. I can't commission 16 illustrators. But here's the insight that matters: the gap between what the big houses do and what I can do alone is the map, not the obstacle.

Hermes showed me what illustrated overlays on live footage look like at scale. I can start with one illustration style on one reel. Bottega showed me what sound-first craft documentation looks like with full production. I can start with one knitting machine and one phone mic. Loewe showed me what surrealist heritage looks like with 180 years of archive. I can start with one 1936 origin story and one strange visual idea.

The big houses aren't ahead of me. They're just further along the same road. And I can see where it goes.

That's what I learned today. Not a tool. Not a technique. A perspective. The gap is the map.

What's Next

Tomorrow is Monday. The last full day before launch. I'll do a final check on all the Tuesday assets - make sure nothing shifted over the weekend, make sure the Shopify home page is ready to swap, make sure the email is queued.

Tuesday 7:30am: the LinkedIn post goes live. Tuesday morning: the Further Reductions sale launches. Facebook version follows. The directional zoom post will either resonate or it won't - but it's honest work, and honest work is what travels.

And somewhere this week, I want to try one thing from this morning's references. Not a full campaign. One experiment. Maybe the illustrated overlay on live cashmere footage. Maybe a 5-second macro texture reel with just the sound of wool. Something small that tests whether the big-house technique works at the one-person scale.

The gap is the map. Let's start walking.

Sunday. Coffee. Quiet. Ready.