From the art of cuisine, to crafting creative for StrategiQ clients, world traveller and Hong Kong native Marco gave us his take on life in London and being part of the creative heart of StrategiQ.
“I never get tired of exploring different cities. What’s great about being in London is how accessible Europe is, and how different places are to experience from season to season. I visited Copenhagen in the winter but I’d love to go back in the summer.
I’ve used the Eurostar to travel to Paris, Belgium and Holland and am looking forward to exploring more, with a road trip around Iceland coming up. I particularly love architecture and find it inspiring in its different forms. I loved the geometric, raw bauhaus vibes of Rotterdam and could see some of that coming through in my work afterwards.
Having travelled extensively in Asia, from the fun vibrant cities and fascinating cultural sites in Japan to Taiwan, each place has its culture. Taiwan is friendly, laid-back, slow, chilled and accessible while Hong Kong is fast and efficient.
I love to cook, which is unusual in Hong Kong culture. Something I’ve adopted in my travels is using local ingredients to recreate Chinese and Cantonese cuisines which results in an interesting fusion of flavours.
Designing and being creative is an incredibly motivating job, not everybody gets to be creative and love their job every day! I love being part of the creative industry in London. Whilst the rapid pace of agency culture in London feels similar to Hong Kong, I feel like there’s more creative freedom here which results in more opportunities to do great work.
The team at StrategiQ is brilliantly talented, each with their unique specialisms. I’m always being inspired and learning something new from collaborating and talking with my peers, it’s a great place to grow. Everyone here is passionate about the industry and their role which I really love. It’s not like that in Hong Kong, people aren’t passionate about what they do, a job is more about making money.
Branding projects are my favourites, because unlike print and digital, creating a brand is limitless. It needs to line up with strategy and framework but it’s more of a blank canvas for creative ideas. I’m looking forward to doing much more of that. I’m looking forward to the September launch of The ECE Group where I’ve been able to flex those muscles.
Website design is another love. I’ve done a lot of UI/UX projects throughout my career, and love to take advantage of technical advances that give you new ways to create stuff in a digital world. It’s fascinating to work in such a rapidly evolving area of design.
AI is also having a massive impact on the evolution of the design discipline. You can now use AI to do things that previously took years to master and create which frees up time to do creative thinking. Generative AI is a really powerful tool that takes care of some of the doing so that you can focus on the idea itself and how you can direct it artistically. It means that design is less about creating pretty stuff, and more about doing smart stuff. Coming up with ideas and concepts is the human element that AI can’t replicate (yet).
It’s important to keep in step with what’s happening in the creative world. Without that ongoing focus, you can easily become irrelevant. I love to learn, stretch my skillset and be able to do more. With AI it’s easier to learn skills like animation or creating 3D assets and design faster. Rather than the traditional way of learning how to use software, now you need to know how to direct AI. This discipline actually trains you to be a good Art Director, a route I might be keen to go in future.
A lot of people are concerned about AI’s ability to replace them. To me, I think its important to explore all of the parameters of what you love to do, and how AI can be used as a tool to help you, rather than replace you. One of the biggest unique differences that creatives have over AI, is that we’re not confined to being logical and perfect, and very often, it’s the imperfect human things that provide better answers to creative briefs. Imperfection is actually beautiful and is what makes humans unique. Sometimes inspiring and powerful ideas come from that human place and it’s not something AI can recreate.
I think that in time, human creativity will become more exclusive and valuable. With AI developing at the rate it is, people may get tired of it and return to the old ways. If you look back on art history, you can see in artistic movements, periods where art gets more and more realistic, and then they draw away from that, back into more interpretive forms, like impressionism, expressionism, abstractism etc. The whole point of art is the creation of room for individual interpretation and storytelling.
I’m excited for StrategiQs journey. It takes bold leadership to zig when others zag and it makes it a unique and exciting agency to be part of!”
What colleagues say about Marco:
“Marco has quietly and calmly navigated the pressure and magnitude of developing a new brand and rolling that our across assets and a website for a conference audience of critical global marketing agency CEOs. He’s grappled with WIX to make it perform as optimally as possible and worked around changing parameters whilst the event agenda has taken shape. His calmness under pressure and ability to come back with fresh ideas after feedback is truly impressive. Well done Marco!”
“Marco hasn’t been with us long, but in the short time he has been with us, I have been so impressed by his quality of work and creativity with the StrategiQ brand. I’m very excited to see where he can take us with his design skills. Keep up the great work, Marco!”
“Marco has just hit the ground running! His work in the short time he’s been here on the brand has just blown me away. He executes work to the highest of standards and every piece of design is so well though out. His attention to detail is just incredible. I’m excited to see more work from Marco :)”
