Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

An interesting discussion started up on Facebook last night about the use of “Creative” both as a noun and as a job title.  I started posting a reply and realised it was getting so long that it had essentially turned into a blog post.  So Gez, I hope you don’t mind me me blogging about your Wall thread and appropriating some of your arguments while I’m at it.

While I’m generally pretty old-school when it comes to grammar, my gripe is not really with the new-fangled use of ‘creative’ as a noun (“I’m a Creative at XYZ Media Agency”).  My gripe is that people use it as a job title, on its own, with no qualification or explanation.

“I am a general purpose Creative.  I am a one-stop shop for all your creativity needs.”

There are a great many jobs (and not all of them in the arts) where creativity goes without saying.  My understanding of creativity is about making something original (or at least original as far as the creator is concerned; I don’t suppose it has to be entirely original in the grand scheme of things as I think that’s the definition of ‘genius’).  But anyway, there needs to be some kind of spark, a moment of “Ah-ha! That’s it!”, and a fair bit of autonomy over what you do and how you do it.

I daresay everyone at Rubber could list a fair few creative aspects to their job.  In fact, I can’t imagine any job being much fun unless it included a large chunk of creative license.

So how come the noun “Creative” has come to describe only a subset of such jobs?  By this I mean people in the visual arts and media.  Graphic designers, film directors and game designers are clearly creative (you’d hope), but they aren’t the very definition of the word.

Surely the point of a job title is to differentiate what you do from what other people do. You wouldn’t call yourself “a Competent” or “a Conscientious” – these are just parts of being good at your job.

If you call yourself “a Creative”, you might be implying that the rest of us aren’t capable of being creative, that our work doesn’t require it.  Or perhaps you’re saying that you provide some kind of latent, abstract creativity, but without any specific skill (be it painting, drawing, writing code or closing a deal) that would let you actually express it.  Either way, that single word seems like a pretty unhelpful title to me.