Mikon van Gastel on Running an Ideas-First Design Agency

Formative Years and Creative Philosophy

• 💡 Mikon van Gastel's education at Cranbrook emphasized self-motivation and critique, unlearning traditional methods to embrace expressive typography and motion design.
• 🧠 He believes presentation skills are an underrated but crucial aspect of creative practice, essential for selling ideas to clients and institutions.
• 🚀 His early career was influenced by the merging of entertainment, music, and graphic design, leading him to explore motion and immersive experiences.

Sibling Rivalry: An Ideas-First Agency

• 🤝 Sibling Rivalry was founded on the principle of being an ideas company, where the concept is paramount, secondary to style or scale.
• 🎭 The agency balances a healthy creative rivalry with a family-like atmosphere, prioritizing people and relationships.
• 🎯 They focus on building deep relationships with a select few clients to avoid the time-consuming and destructive nature of constant pitching.

Designing for Impact and Emotion

• 🎨 The core principle is restraint; stripping away anything unnecessary to serve the central idea, especially in large-scale immersive projects like the Sphere.
• 🗣️ Designing for shared emotion involves orchestrating experiences that create moments of collective awe and intimacy, encouraging both engagement and presence.
• 💡 Client pitches focus on understanding their business and guiding them through ideas ranging from safe to experimental, often using visualization to build trust.

Agency Operations and Creative Process

• 🧩 Sibling Rivalry operates as a hybrid agency, combining a brand studio with a production company, requiring team members to be flexible and wear multiple hats.
• 🛠️ The creative process begins with the brief, but involves strategically deviating to explore more interesting territories, attacking and expanding ideas collaboratively.
• 📈 The agency emphasizes relationship-based discipline over project-based work, seeking opportunities to deepen engagement within existing client organizations.

Personal Philosophy and Balance

• 🧑‍🎨 Mikon actively stays hands-on as a creative director, refusing to transition away from the work itself, which he considers his hobby.
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Balancing agency leadership and extensive travel with family requires being fully present during the time available, making those moments meaningful.
• 🏎️ He finds inspiration in the evolution of Formula 1 as an example of how technology, entertainment, and branding can converge to reshape a sport into a global phenomenon.