Noah Scott Braun

Your first internships were at Essex Industries — an aerospace and defense manufacturer. How does spending your summers around precision manufacturing change how you think about design?

My connection to manufacturing actually goes even farther back than my internships at Essex. My dad was the president of a manufacturing company when I was growing up, and he loved to bring the efficiency improvements from work into our family home. (Think a dialed-in process board for household chores, labels on everything … and when I got my first smartphone, the condition was that I had to improve something around the house every week and capture it with iMovie.) When I started designing, I brought the same knack for efficiency. I loved memorizing keyboard shortcuts and even got into scripting and terminal commands when AI came along. Speed without losing quality—that’s what precision manufacturing taught me about design.

You almost didn’t apply for the AIGA St. Louis Student Conference gig. A friend had to push you. What would you have missed if they hadn’t?

So much. First, it gave me an opportunity to think about how brand identity functions in a real world setting at an early point in my career. Second, the connections I made with the AIGA board and conference speakers are still positively impacting my professional life to this day. (In fact, I just got drinks with the AIGA president last week.) Third, it was fun. So, a big thank you and shout out to Noah Huettenmeyer (thatguynoah.com) for encouraging me to apply.

You won a Gold Addy and Judges Choice for SUKU packaging before you graduated. What did winning that early in your career do to your expectations — did it help or make things weirder?

When I won those awards, I realized that I might actually be able to do this awesome creative thing as a job and succeed at it. It was a huge confidence boost after feeling insecure and unsure in the past. However, it also showed me that the best creative work is never a solo act. Without my collaborator Camryn Adams and professor Tahsin Hyder, who knows if the project would have ended up winning anything. Since then, I’ve started trying to loop others into my creative process as much as possible.

You’ve been in St. Louis for a minute now — what surprised you most about the creative scene here compared to what you expected?

I feel like agencies here (overall) are more formal than where I went to college in Springfield, MO. Examples that come to mind are Atomicdust (ha), Toky, HLK, Brighton, New Honor Society, FleishmanHillard. It feels like we’re trying to be a mini New York without as much weird, crazy experimentation. We’re focused on clean, clear, strategic professionalism, WHICH IS GREAT, but I’d love to see St. Louis embrace our unique culture more and loosen up just a little.

If you could go back and tell yourself something the week before your first agency job, what would it be?

They hired you because you can do the job, so you don’t have to spend every ounce of energy proving yourself. Plus, people are worried about their own stuff, and they probably aren’t even paying that much attention to you. Just do your thing, and your worth will show itself.