4 Creative Moments That Change Culture

MTV Launch Ad

Launched in 1981, this ‘radio with pictures’ channel – as it was apparently described in the original pitch – single-handedly invented the music video. After its first ad campaign starring Mick Jagger (who was reportedly paid $1 for his hard work), the channel did the 80s equivalent of going viral, as people across the US called their cable companies to tell them, “I want my MTV.” Quickly, record labels were persuaded to invest in big-budget promos to land airtime on the 24/7 music channel, and so the music video was born. Thanks to MTV, the format went on to become a rite of progression for directors of all kinds, as well as an outlet for creative experimentation and provocation.

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Apple, Think Different Ad

In 1997, Apple raised its glass to ‘the crazy ones’ and fundamentally changed how everyone thought about computers and technology. TBWA\Chiat\Day came up with the commercial, which paired black-and-white imagery of historic dreamers, thinkers and creatives such as Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart and Jim Henson with a spoken manifesto that celebrated “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently”. In the advert, Apple tacitly aligned itself with these visionary rulebreakers, at a time when the company was struggling – it was popular with creatives, but not so much with everyone else. Steve Jobs apparently hated the first version of the spot, describing it as “advertising agency shit”, but eventually came round to it. Within a year the company’s stock price had tripled, and the campaign became one of the most talked-about of the decade, and far beyond.

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Photoshop

There’s barely a creative person in the world that hasn’t felt the influence of Photoshop. It’s become a central element of many disciplines, completely revolutionizing how work of all kinds gets made. It first came into being in 1988, developed by brothers John and Thomas Knoll – Thomas still works at Adobe, while John is at Industrial Light & Magic. The software’s first use was for the James Cameron thriller The Abyss, with the production team using an unreleased version of the software to edit storyboards. Two years later it was unleashed on the public, eventually earning itself the brand-name-turned-verb status that tech companies everywhere lust after.

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Comic Sans Font

Perhaps the most notorious font of all time, Comic Sans has enjoyed a 25-year reign of typographic infamy – and it’s still enraging designers. The typeface was originally designed for the Microsoft Bob user interface, to appear alongside Rover the dog (a canine precursor to Clippy). Its designer, Vincent Connare, noticed that Times New Roman didn’t feel right being used inside Rover’s speech bubbles, and designed Comic Sans as a replacement. It was created too late to ship with the software, but it made its entry to the world in 1995, when it was released with the Windows 95 operating system. That, along with the arrival of desktop publishing, guaranteed its place in culture. Love it or hate it, it’s remained one of the most recognisable typefaces in the world, used by people everywhere, for everything. And its creator is philosophical about some of the abuse it’s received from the design industry, telling CR that “every designer secretly wishes they had designed Comic Sans”.