A WilderLight Manifesto

TL;DR

What can business, branding, and marketing look like post-capitalism? WilderLight Creative is on a mission to find out. It is my hope that we can build a better world by building better businesses, ones that are radically authentic, creative, emotionally connected, and ethically driven.

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The mission of Wilderlight Creative, as best as I've been able to articulate it recently, is the quest to answer the question: what does marketing, branding, and business look like in a post-capitalist world? I've got a pretty clear picture running in my head of how the people in power—the billionaires, the tech bros, the oligarchs—want the next phase to look like. It's not one that I particularly enjoy, and not one that I can ethically and morally participate in support. And yet, I'm a graphic designer.

I love running my own business. I love marketing. I love the psychology, the emotional threads behind branding when it's not a carefully constructed trick to manipulate people into doing what you want them to do. I guess the question that I'm really asking is, what does business, branding, and marketing look like if we choose to care about humans? Really, truly, radically care about humans—about the human condition, about the actual quality of our lives, of all human lives around the world?

I feel adrift in the ocean of information, of perspectives, viewpoints, of policies and politics, and global war, and psychosis, depression, anxiety, fear, shame, anger, hatred. It doesn't take much energy to reach out and connect with those feelings; they're right there on my phone every single day. It's a whole lot harder to connect with the forces of love, creativity, whimsy, joy, color, expression, authenticity, being uniquely different and creating a world where you can be accepted for that—maybe even being accepted because you are different, not in spite of it. That would be a truly radical thing.

I find myself overwhelmed by where we are today versus the vision in my head of where I'd like for us to end up as a world, as a community. I know that none of it changes unless I choose to do things different, and the mission of WilderLight Creative is to help other people choose to do things different, too. So I'm working on content creation cycles that help you work in your strengths and support your challenges versus feeling like you've got to measure up to the machine, 'cause face facts, people, we have lost the race against the machines in the battle for attention.

It's my personal theory that those of us who are willing to step away from the conformity to maybe do things a bit slower, a bit harder, are willing to try a different path—a more authentic path—we are the ones who will stand out, form our own community, because I see them. I see you all in the comments of YouTube videos, the fear and the anger, my recent rediscovery of scrolling through Tumblr and seeing the incredible, incredible artwork, all hand-drawn, no AI in sight, because AI can't do what these illustrators are doing. It literally can't because it is so visually unique and so uniquely them.

I think in this world that we live in today, there's a whole lot more we can learn from the artists and the creatives who have traveled a challenging path of understanding who they are and doing it out loud. That's been my biggest block to calling myself an artist and doing truly creative work, is because I had no idea who I was. My entire repertoire of creative skills was entirely technical. I was incapable of creating self-expressive works.

That is courtesy of the high-control environment, both internal and external, that I was raised in, and the many layers of false self that I developed in order to protect myself and stay safe in that kind of environment. I grew up in a Southern Baptist conservative Christian home. It wasn't a cult, but it wasn't quite in reality. I was homeschooled. I went to the same church for a good portion of my life, lived in the same house for my entire life up until I left, the same people, the same community—everyone I was in contact with had the same ideas, the same ideals, the same ethics, the same religious background.

I had no idea how the world actually worked, and I had no idea who I actually was because little queer, neurodiverse me had been shamed and shut down and cast out so early on in order to receive love. Well, I don't know if you could call it love, but what I felt was love, safety, care, respect. I should have never have had to choose between love and authenticity, but I did.

It was only through creativity that I discovered that I was actually a person—a whole ass person with a whole ass personality that I had never met before in 30 years of living almost, because I had been cut off from it. It's become my belief that the most radical thing you can do is be exactly who you are, without fear, without shame, without reservation. And it's hard. It's fucking hard.

But it's possible, and it's a practice, and I get a little better at being myself every single day. To recap, Wilderlight Creative wants to help build a better world by building better businesses: not optimized ones, not AI-powered, but sustainable, human, accommodating, accepting, whimsical, joyful, satisfying, fulfilling. I want to bring all of my experience and love and genuine passion for the art of visual communication, otherwise known as graphic design and branding, to your radical idea for a new organization, for a new business, for a new community project, whatever it is.

That's why I'm here. Working with me as a creative director for your brand and your visual identity is different than just showing up with a creative brief for a designer. I am very much about the emotions behind a brand. Said even more clearly, what is the story your audience is telling about your business?

Technically, it's brand positioning: where in your client, your community, your audience's brain sits your business, what do they associate you with. My goal is to make sure that that story, that positioning, matches 100% with your authenticity, your ethics, your motives, your mission, and your vision. I'm not in the business of designing a brand that lies to people; I in fact fear that very reality.

I want to design brands for people who follow the philosophy of "do good, be good," that are personal, that are community-oriented, that are derived from their ethics, not divorced from them. I want to help independent creatives build systems and structures that suit whatever plane of neurospicy you're operating on. I've got my own version, most everyone I've ever interacted with in my life is on their own versions, and I've got a lot of experience figuring out how to plug and play different pieces to build a system that works—that actually works for you, and however your brain operates.

I want to stand as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community out loud and out proud for the first time really in my life, and say, "This is who I am, and I deserve to exist, and I never should have had to hide for almost 30 years," and neither should anybody else. Times are tough, the world is a scary place, but what I do have power in is connecting with a few more people a little bit deeper every day, and let's be boldly human together.

If you've got a new idea, a new business, a new concept, a new community you're trying to get off the ground, you need some strategic support, some creative direction, let's chat, let's talk, let's get something on the books, let's build a better world together. And always follow the Wilderlight.