RIDE THE SNAKE®

Thoughts on creativity & personality 
︎ by Rui, Fart Director, Creative hermit leading brand design




I'm making an effort to force myself to write about this, and to reflect and rationalise things I have been mainly doing on impulse.

So here are some thoughts around unfiltered creativity, brand, company personality, culture and chaos/fun.

Rome was not built in a day, but then again, it was also not destroyed in one neither, just because you have a good culture does not mean you should take it for granted, the group of individuals all rowing in the same direction feels like something magical, and you almost forget you work in a B2B financial s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶u̶p̶ scaleup, but if you dont take care of it, it will go away just as quickly, and then you are back to the reality of just being another one working on some financial software as a service, great. ︎

Personally, i have never experienced hypergrowth in a company before and having our colleague base increase at such an intense rate. Waves of very talented strangers joining month after month. I find it very odd, for a lot of reasons, one being how it affects and shapes internal culture. I think the Art Snake is basically concentrated personality, a sample of us as a brand, culture, peoples, and a good way to speed run that experience somehow.

Wait wtf are you talking about?

Right right, sorry, okay, so about 2 years ago we started a sort of a internal blog for experiments, wastelands, graveyard & joke arena, it got called ART SNAKE® and i still don't know why Pete® called it the that, neither does he and thats just fine.

At first we uploaded experiments and what we were exploring around rebranding Pleo, we eventually realised there is no way 4 hands would ever have the means to finish something like that and the guys at Koto® got brought in. Interesting enough the Snake® ended up becoming an important source of reference and inspiration for them, with time it became more of a place to showcase work the team was doing internally but also a place for our internal memes, jokes, beautifully designed rants, or shitpost generalia. I was surprised when i started noticing “non-creative” departments were actually waiting and asking for the next posts, and how somehow we had an an audience, from the sales husslers to compliance, devs to People Ops.

I wish i had a grand finalle and a super intersting way to end this, but i don’t, ( hey! its taken me ages to even finish this as is... ) what I will say is do not underestimate how important a little thing like a internal blog can be but also try not to overthink things and have some fun ?

Alright!

Here are some highlights from the Snake across the years  ✔︎