Paul Murphy

I've been making things for as long as I can remember.

As a kid it was always drawing, building spaceships out of cardboard boxes, filming little movies with my brother and sister, writing stories before I really knew what a story was supposed to look like.

Making things was just what I did.

Getting older, that became frustrating. I loved design, but I also loved writing, and directing, and being on stage, and I spent a long stretch trying to figure out which one I was meant to commit to. Everyone talks about finding your niche, and for years I felt like I was failing at that. Like I should have picked a lane by now and hadn't.

So I kept working across all of it instead, mostly because I didn't know how else to do it. Writing something and then staging it. Designing the posters for shows I was also acting in. Building a brand and then writing the words that had to live inside it. I wasn't trying to prove a point. I was just doing the work that was in front of me, wherever it came from.

Somewhere in that, I realised I'd never actually needed to choose.

Doing all of it together made me better at each individual piece, not worse. I stopped seeing design, writing, and directing as separate skills competing for my attention and started seeing them as one way of thinking about a project as a whole.

That's the perspective I bring now as a creative director.

I've been the one backstage, the one writing at midnight, the one figuring out a brand from nothing with no process handed to me.

What I want now is to keep turning ideas into things people can actually stand in front of: shows, stories, brands, products, whatever form an idea needs to take to make it more than just an idea. I want it to give people some of what it's given me.

A reason to feel like more is possible.