How Not to Reimagine a Newsletter

(Undertaken as Creative Director at Sane Difference)

When you’ve been around newsletters a while, built one of the first homegrown ones in India that hit 20,000 readers without an ad rupee, another for a brand that grew even bigger, helped creators launch their own, you start to think you know this form. That’s usually where the mistake begins.

At one of my first client meetings as Creative Director at Sane Difference, we were asked to reimagine the newsletter for The Convergence Found (TCF).

The brief was simple:

“Our newsletter boringly depicts very exciting things.”

Simple enough, I thought.

So I did what experience tells you to do — take what’s boring and make it tidier. Better boxes. Better flow. The design looked sharp. The sections read well. We logged into the presentation with the quiet arrogance of people who’d clearly nailed it.

Our designer shared the new layout. We explained the logic, the sections, the structure. There was silence.

Was it awe? (My heart hoped so.) But then came:

“This is just a better arrangement of what was. It doesn’t excite me. It doesn’t make me want to go where you’re leading me.”

Ufff. That sound you hear? That’s my confidence leaving the room.

As someone who is married to anxiety, I started wondering if I should turn in my resignation before the studio fires me. As someone with imposter syndrome, I was sure my career had been a lucky streak. But as someone who was trying to hold it together, I nodded, pretended to take notes, and left the meeting with my tail between my legs.

We went back to the drawing board, and did the only thing worth doing: we tore it all apart.

Every section, every shape, every word got interrogated. We argued. We questioned. We stripped it down to what it needed to say, not what we knew how to say. And somewhere in the chaos, something with a pulse began to emerge.

When the next issue went out, it didn’t just inform, it sparked conversations. A couple of months later, another client forwarded that newsletter and said,

“It has you written all over it.”

The irony? To make something feel alive, I first had to forget everything I already knew.

Being a Creative Director in a small, inventive studio isn’t about being the most creative voice in the room. It’s about knowing when to talk and when to shut up and listen. It’s about trading certainty for curiosity, ego for instinct. You build, you break, you rebuild, and the work gets better, and so do you.

(Also, in case you were wondering, it takes more than one mishap to get fired. I have been told the number is 2.)