If everyone in the same room were given the task of defining creativity, a brand, or what daring means to them, we would probably not get two completely identical answers. Some would talk about risk, some about originality, some about the freedom to create something they have not tried before. Each of us looks at reality from a slightly different angle, which is precisely why we do not see the same possibilities in the same situation.
But beneath all those differences, we are much more alike than we like to think.
It was on this idea that Radim Malinic, founder of the London studio Brand Nu, built his talk Forever. Daring. Brands. at the 14th Branding Conference. Strategists, designers, copywriters, and the people who ultimately buy what they create together may have different jobs, experiences, and tastes, but they all enter that process as human beings. With fears, habits, a need for acceptance, curiosity, and a brain that will very often choose the familiar over the unexplored.
This is also where one of the more interesting paradoxes of the creative industry begins. We are constantly trying to get somewhere we have not been before, while using a map that is already familiar to us.
Malinic described this mechanism through the way our brain reacts to the unknown. The human brain contains around 86 billion neurons and an incredibly complex network of connections through which our decisions, fears, motivation, and memories are formed. And while we like to talk about creativity as something almost intuitive and free, one part of us is simultaneously constantly assessing, editing, and seeking safety.
As children, we find it much easier to let an idea go wherever it wants. We will draw a giraffe without worrying too much about whether it looks good enough. Adults are much quicker to judge. We begin editing an idea almost at the same time as we create it. That is why, Malinic said, we often choose familiar discomfort over unknown possibility.
In branding, this can look very familiar. We look for a new idea, but first open what has already worked. We want a different result, but use the same references, the same category codes, and the same ways of working. What was supposed to be a starting point can easily become a boundary.
For Malinic, daring is therefore not a call for every project to be more extreme, stranger, or riskier than the previous one. It is much simpler, but also more demanding: giving ourselves permission to try something whose outcome we still cannot guarantee.
The problem is that, as adults, we often wait for that permission to come from outside. We wait for a brief that will explicitly open up the space, a client who will say we can do it, enough experience to feel ready, or some kind of confirmation that it will not go wrong. And when we wait for that certainty to be complete, we can easily end up doing only what we already know how to do.
Malinic therefore drew a distinction between the question of how and the decision of now. We do not have to know every step before we begin. If we wait for the moment when we are completely ready for something, we will never even start a large part of the things we could do. And it is precisely here that his talk stops being a story only about brands.
Behind every brand we call bold are still people who, at some point, had to do something without any guarantee that it would work. Propose an idea that might not be accepted, take on a task they do not yet know how to solve, or go beyond the first safe version.
Malinic did not present risk as a question of character. Our brain naturally seeks safety and familiarity, so for him daring is above all a conscious decision not to let that automatic response make every decision for us. That is why permission also comes with acceptance: if we constantly measure our own value through other people’s approval, it becomes much harder to experiment, make mistakes, and learn something from them.
Only then is there enough room left for curiosity.
Malinic clearly distinguished it from distraction. Distraction seeks new stimulation, while curiosity leads us toward something we genuinely want to understand. That is precisely why good ideas often do not come while we are trying to produce them by force, but while we are walking, travelling, observing something with no obvious connection to the brief, or simply giving the brain enough space to wander.
For creatives, he said, sometimes part of the job is doing nothing visible. His own path through design, writing, publishing, and the Daring Forever podcast was largely created through exactly that kind of curiosity, through the need to follow the topics that pulled him further and, through them, encounter and share other people’s experiences.
The final part of that story is gratitude. Not as a way of making the process look prettier, but as an acceptance that creative work does not have to be easy in order to be valuable. A wrong direction, an unsuccessful version, or a project that forces us to learn something new are not necessarily deviations from the path. Often, they are exactly what that path is built through.
Malinic described the development of creative stages in life through three directions: inward, outward, forward. In the first stage, a creative person is focused on themselves. They feel they know best, want to prove their own idea, and believe people will hear it if they say it loudly enough. Later, the focus shifts outward: they listen to others, understand that the project is not there to validate their ego, and learn how to use their own knowledge to contribute to something larger than themselves. And then comes forward, the moment when the question shifts from “what can I make?” toward what we can open up for others through our experience, which stories we can pass on, and whose work we can make more visible.
One of the projects through which he demonstrated this was the work of Brand Nu for the French ice cream brand Extrême. The project began in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, with a brand whose existing identity needed to be thoroughly reconsidered. Together with partners, the team worked on new guidelines, colours, a communication system, and the slogan Take it to the Extreme, looking for a way to turn the idea of going “a little further than ordinary” into an entire visual world.
When they needed to create images that would look both delicious and almost artistic, they did not rely only on a method they already knew. They began painting with acrylics, mixing shades, and looking for a way to reconstruct different ice cream flavours through colour. The system developed alongside the number of flavours, and the result emerged precisely because, at the beginning, they did not have a predetermined process for how they would get there. Had they waited until they first knew how it was done, they probably would never have made it.
And this is where the circle of Malinic’s talk closes. Daring is not a trait that some creatives or brands simply have and others do not. It is a series of small moments in which we consciously refuse to let the familiar automatically decide for us. Permission to begin before we are completely ready. Acceptance that the process will not always look neat. Curiosity that takes us beyond the brief. Gratitude for experiences, including those we would most gladly skip.
Brands, in the end, cannot be brave on their own. Behind them are people who are afraid, assess, seek confirmation, make mistakes, learn, and try again. That is precisely why perhaps the most interesting part of the idea Forever. Daring. Brands. is the word “forever”.
And perhaps that is the most precise definition of daring forever: not the need to keep being braver, but the willingness never to decide to stop.
