Kiser Barnes thinks in patterns. Growing up across West Africa and the Middle East, living in New York, building brands from zero to IPO… his whole life and career has been an accumulation of different contexts and cultures.

Now Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Red Antler, he brings all of that context to one of the most demanding creative challenges: how do you define the future for brands that don’t even exist yet?

Above all else, Kiser is genuinely, infectiously curious – and therein lies the answer.

Creative excellence

How do you define creative excellence? Kiser broke it down with three things…

• The first is clarity of idea: the ability to take disparate creative perspectives and distil them into a coherent narrative.
• The second is unexpected craft; craft that shows up in differentiated ways across disciplines and touchpoints, creating richness where people don’t expect it.
• The third is cultural relevance. Beyond awareness of what’s happening in culture right now, but the ability to project into the future.

Future Magic

Red Antler has an ethos titled Future Magic: defining optimistic visions for the future. In a world of doomscrolling and uncertainty, Kaiser sees his role as a designer and creator as actively helping to shape what comes next.

“I want the future to be optimistic. I don’t want it to be dystopian. And I want to help frame brands and culture and community through that lens.”

This stance shapes everything from the brands they take on to the way Red Antler behave internally. Optimism means confidence, freedom, joy – and that means a push to create brands that make things better.

Failure and humility

The biggest creative failures in Kiser’s career have come from ego.

“Success is going from one failure to the next without a loss of enthusiasm.”

This is a Winston Churchill line he keeps coming back to. The creative process has to embrace failure, because that’s exactly where real experimentation happens. But we prefer Kiser’s own take…

“Singular perspectives don’t make creative work great. If you define the process through your ego and your assumptions, it’s really narrow.”

Building from the bottom up

Kaiser has a clear view on where the industry is heading in terms of creative leadership. The top-down model, where the creative director is singular and authoritative, is over. Culture happens bottom-up now.

Brands are being influenced by their consumers more than the other way round. And creative studios that don’t embrace that will produce work that looks like everything they’ve done before.

At Red Antler, he’s been brought in partly as a change agent; to diversify thinking and evolve.

“The moment you think that you’re perfect and what you do is perfect is the moment you start to fail in your creative career.”

Have a side quest

We love it when somebody has a wierd interview question that actually unearths something great. Kiser has one of the best: he asks “what’s your side quest?” The thing you’re obsessed with that has nothing to do with design.

Creatives who have compelling answers to that question are the ones who bring the most valuable references and the deepest creative brains. Kiser’s own side quests are rich in variety: he’s currently deep in Afrofuturism, a 60s movement around the African diaspora that projects cultural identity into science fiction, space and experimental music.

And that sums up Kiser’s approach; discover things. Explore them. Enjoy them. Create with that passion in your heart and those references in your mind. Project that vision into the future you actively want to create.

A fascinating leader with infectious ambition, this podcast will help you rethink your creative approach entirely – and you’ll be more ready for the future as a result.