My Grind with the ‘Sexy Straight Jacket’ Brief
Alright, so everyone’s been asking, or maybe no one has, but I gotta talk about this ‘Sexy Straight Jacket’ thing. Sounds kinda out there, right? Like some edgy concept. And yeah, on paper, or when the marketing folks threw it around, it had that shiny, ‘this is gonna be big’ vibe.
But let me tell you, actually trying to build something, to create something, under that banner? Whoa boy. It was less ‘sexy’ and a whole lot more ‘straight jacket,’ if you catch my drift. The kind that just squeezes all the actual good ideas out of you before they even see daylight.
We had this one project, I remember. The client, or maybe it was upper management, they kept using that phrase. “Make it like a sexy straight jacket!” they’d say. I swear, I still don’t fully know what they meant, but they wanted results. They wanted something that looked super slick, super appealing, super effortless. But the constraints? The limitations? The budget? The timeline? Those were the real straight jacket.
- We’d sketch out an idea that felt genuinely cool, innovative.
- Then we’d run it through the ‘Sexy Straight Jacket’ filter.
- And bam! “Nope, too expensive.” “Nope, not ‘on brand’ with the ‘sexy’ part.” “Nope, that’s too free, we need it more… controlled.”
It was like being asked to paint a masterpiece, but you’re only given one shade of grey and a toothbrush. And then they stand over your shoulder asking why it isn’t more vibrant and why you’re not using a proper brush, which they, of course, didn’t provide.
I spent weeks, man, weeks, trying to make sense of it. We’d have these long meetings, just going in circles. Trying to define “sexy” in their terms, while also navigating the “straight jacket” of what we were actually allowed to do. It was a mess. We churned out version after version. Each one felt more diluted, more compromised than the last. The “sexy” part just became this weird, forced aesthetic plastered onto something fundamentally rigid and uninspired because of all the restrictions.
You know why I remember this so clearly? Because after that whole fiasco, I saw the same pattern pop up in a couple of other places. Different projects, different buzzwords, but same energy. They’d sell you on this amazing, groundbreaking vision, but then tie your hands behind your back when it came to actually doing it. It’s like they wanted the idea of something cool, without understanding the work or freedom needed to make it real.
So yeah, that ‘Sexy Straight Jacket’ thing? It taught me a lot. Mostly about how some buzzwords are just fancy ways to describe a really frustrating box. And sometimes, no matter how ‘sexy’ they want the box to look, it’s still just a box. A very, very tight box. I got out of that particular line of work eventually. Needed more room to breathe, you know? Just had to.
