As I continue to look at the creative landscape — advertising agencies, design firms and technology companies — I continue to ask myself, how is it that a hardware company is teaching the creative industry how to be innovative? Ten years ago we were doing some pretty cool things with online tools. Creating sites with innovative tools like Flash. Building multifaceted pages that provided layers of content that served up text, multimedia tools, personal user interfaces, and video that was not only compelling, but also useful in its teaching.

As I look at the work in creative industries that are being recognized as leading or setting new market trends, I see the same solutions over and over again. Overly-complicated navigation structures. Very little care to content structures, and over-worked animation. Ideas that aren’t useful or executed in a way that shows insight into a creative opportunity that demands it. We are watching brands that are reaching out to creative institutions to help them step outside the box, but what we’re finding is a flailing creative industry that is also struggling to find its own identity.

Industries have seen these kinds of problems before. All of us are familiar with cell phones, and we all understand how difficult they are to use. Complicated. Over designed. They provide every viable content solution known to mankind, except the ones needed. We’ve watched an entire industry race toward domination, and it finally took one hardware manufacturer to show us that this daily exercise could provide everything we need to be productive. It could be easy to use, and on top of that, it’s interactive, elegant, and drop-dead gorgeous.