Brave by name, brave by nature – Signwriter and Lettering Artist, Rachel E Millar paints a bold new mural in our meeting room.

Many moons ago (about 6 years, to be exact) a Graphic Designer left his job with a 2 week old baby at home and just £1000 in the bank. A lot of people said he was crazy, but we like to think he was brave – which is just as well, because he’s our boss, Andrew.

Be Brave

Brave by name, brave by nature – for us, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission, so don’t be afraid to do things differently. As long as there’s a reason for it, push that big red button.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with artists (including Craig Black and Richard Davies) to bring our brand values to life in the MadeBrave studio. This time, we enlisted the help of Rachel E Millar to work her magic in our meeting room on the brand value that inspired our name all that time ago.

“In everything we do, we need to do something we’re not comfortable with in order to learn from it. I turn up to almost every job and there’s something totally different about it that I’ve never done before and every time you learn from that. So I think that bravery comes into making mistakes and trying your best.” — Rachel E Millar

For us, bravery is about being who you are and being okay with the fact that some people dig it, some people don’t. From a brand perspective, as our Andrew says, “it’s better to have 500 people who love your brand, than 1000 people who like it”. Part of this means having a stance on something and being true to that stance through everything that you do – both inside and out. The only way to make sure that stance (or value) is alive throughout your brand is to get everyone involved excited and on board.

“Being brave for me personally means, not being afraid to try new ways of doing things, trusting my own instincts to know when to try something new and not being afraid to say, “That didn’t work. Why didn’t it work? What have I learned from it?” And what can I take away from it? It’s not always the bold and big decisions, it’s also about living and breathing it every day.”— Hannah (our Production Manager)

Like Hannah said, it’s the everyday stuff that really matters and we wanted to put this mural on the wall as a daily reminder to always stick to our gut and do things differently in every single decision that we make – big, or small. That goes for how we act towards each other, to the brave ideas that we pitch to our clients (like maybe, putting a giant toy bus in the middle of Glasgow’s George Square, for example).

When it came to designing the mural, Rachel started off with small thumbnail drawings on graph paper with some annotations at the side that help her to remember references or which colours to use – which always comes in pretty handy. From there, she took inspiration from vintage computer games (especially Super Mario) which you can see from the flag at the top and overall, created something that’s 1) playful and 2) takes the bored out of boredroom (we know that’s not how you spell it, but let’s just roll with it on this one).

Let’s just say – she smashed it on all levels. Check it out!

“It was a brilliant experience! At first, it was quite nerve-wracking being filmed, but it was great to have someone to chat to the whole time. They did a great job at putting me at ease and the whole MadeBrave office is so chilled out and friendly. I really enjoyed spending some time there and creating something unique for their boardroom space.” — Rachel E Millar