We remember almost nothing we are told, and almost everything we feel.
David Kujda, Design & Creative Executive
I build multi-faceted creative organizations spanning design, research, brand, and creative content. Below is a small sampling of some of the content work. Work from global brand campaigns, product launches, films that make people feel something. I call them tiny booms.
Internal content teams within my organizing sphere have been consistent drivers of high performance. And like many organizations, high performant creative teams require an operational infrastructure scalable to the ambition of the work: modern tools, top-tier talent, the right agency partners and the space to excel. As an executive, I bridge the gap between creative vision, operations and business performance.
PayPal Future
I wanted the whole organization to feel something a roadmap couldn't. Money moving between people is rarely just a transaction. This film follows three stories of what really moves between people. Trust comes from being there when people need you and out of the way when they don't. The product appears for only seconds across three minutes of film. That restraint was important. It introduced the new design direction at PayPal, simpler, easier, and more human than anything we'd made before.
HomeAway Kyoto
At HomeAway we introduced the idea of Moment Makers, portraits of the people behind extraordinary vacation homes around the world. In the Kyoto film, a Japanese couple shares their home, and through it, a way of life the city has kept for centuries. Tea poured slowly. Light moving across tatami. The films, made with patience and composed with the same care as the world they portrayed. That is what the strongest brand stories do, they bring moments to life through the people who live it.
HomeAway Monsters
At HomeAway we faced a different storytelling problem: the marketplace itself. Fees, insurance, policies, the machinery homeowners needed to understand and mostly didn't. So a friendly cast of monsters did the work, acting it all out, short, cute and simple. The charm is delightful. When information is hard, it’s easy to add words. But with characters, suddenly the fine print was something people actually wanted to watch.
PayPal Water
At PayPal I led a new design language for the product and brand, drawn from nature. Water inspired the interactive motion system for its purity, its fluidity, the way it flows around a glass. We broke down water's properties and translated them into an motion language that was simple, functional and communicative. Every motion behavior carried meaning, communicating what just happened and what to do next, with the calm of something natural.
HomeAway Subway
Another film for HomeAway opens in a subway at rush hour, bodies pressing through turnstiles, papers flying, everyone racing somewhere. In the middle of it stands one woman, perfectly calm. She is already gone, imagining herself in the beachside home waiting at the end of the week. The video argues that vacations don't begin when you arrive, they begin the moment you can picture yourself there. This was shot in slow motion, her stillness suggestive of being somewhere else.
Dragonfly: A living design system
Dragonflies are nature's great survivors, ancient and adaptable. We named our design system after them. A system serving a moving marketplace has to expect chaos, so we built Dragonfly with simple constructs for inviting change, absorbing it, and staying unmistakably one thing. Long before AI, it was architecture built to adapt. This teaser introduces it: elements finding order, assembling into something alive.
Well organized, well communicated, well partnered. That is the job.
David Kujda Career Notes
I've spent my career inside technology companies proving that creative excellence is a growth instrument. The work sampled here shaped product strategy, rebuilt brands, and moved entire organizations. More importantly it elicited a sense of pride and wonder in the companies I represented.
Quality work requires purpose built into it, and I've built that environment again and again. Serious in-house capability: craft and standards that rival any in the industry, with the kind of fluency in a company's technology and its future that can only come from being inside it. A great studio is a living thing. It grows and contracts with the ambition of the work, drawing in the world's best talent and holding a core that carries the company's story through everything. Building that, and conducting it at the scale the world's largest companies demand, is a craft of its own. It's one I've spent my career mastering.
Great work is made of hard choices, and my job is to build teams with the talent and the courage to make them, then put everything we create in service of the brand and its customers. Work made that way carries an excellence you can feel proud of. It's what customers reward and what business grows on.
Tinybooms are those moments when small ideas and great teams collide, and the work takes off.
Get In Touch
If your organization is thinking about creative leadership, what to build, who to trust with it, I welcome that conversation. Reach out anytime.
Credits
PayPal
Producer, Andrew House
Writer, Kristen House
Creative Direction, Colin Grigson
Creative Direction & Design, Eric Olsen
Water Animation & 3D Artist, Esteban Diacono
HomeAway & VRBO
Director & Writer, David Bessenhoffer
Producer, Stuart Mydlow
Director of Photography, Michael Hurley
Monsters Animation & 3D Artist, Eden Soto