Blowing Out Advertising's Walls

Collins sees himself as ringmaster, enabler, and chief advocate of a band of gifted mavericks; his job is to match them with intriguing projects and then goad them into doing their best work. "There comes a point as a creative person where you become more excited by seeing what the people who work with you do, rather than doing it yourself," he says.

The work the team has delivered is astonishing in its variety and breadth. For Canadian Dove/Unilever, the team was asked to plan a local photography show around the idea of what constitutes real beauty. Instead, they delivered a sophisticated show featuring 60 images of women shot by some of the world's best female photographers, among them Annie Leibovitz and Mary Ellen Mark, challenging conventional notions of beauty.

For Sprite, the team took a comment by a young consumer -- "Sprite feels like a chill explosion of lemon-lime icicles going down my throat" -- and used it to create an array of designs that can morph from cans to basketball backboards to murals three stories high. "The work balances not only what is familiar about the brand but what is surprising," says Esther Lee, chief creative officer of Coca-Cola, Sprite's parent.

Most often, an assignment begins with an industry audit that may include ethnographic research or an inventory of products. Then designers start to make things, sharing files, getting things up on the boards for discussion and collaboration in a kind of visual rapid prototyping. Collins eventually steps in, winnowing designs, challenging his people to look for the grander, overarching idea.

While the results may look like the inside of a skate punk's head, the strategy that informs the final design would satisfy any MBA. "Brian would push us incredibly hard to solve problems in ways that were not only sound from a business perspective but were also creatively fresh, which was nearly impossible, given some of the huge clients we were working on," says BIG alumnus Alan Dye, now creative director of Kate Spade. "But I've never worked with someone so willing to put his neck on the line for the creative work."

Changing People

Growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the oldest of five children in a large Irish Catholic family, Collins was always something of a gifted maverick himself. A flamboyant child with a precocious sense of style, he quickly found a way to protect himself from bullies. "I was funny, and I could draw," he says. Upon graduation, Collins headed to New York, where he enrolled at Parsons School of Design, then went home to Boston and the Massachusetts College of Art.

After six years operating his own shop in suburban Boston, Collins went to work for Joe Duffy, creative head of Duffy Design in Minneapolis. The sojourn expanded Collins's thinking beyond the hip aesthetic that had a stranglehold on the coast. "At the time, most designers were fascinated by grim postmodernist exercises," says Collins. "Yet here was Joe, off in the West, doing decorative, funny, ironic, delightful work, and it was beautiful." Like Collins's Irish grandfather, Duffy believed in the power of storytelling. The experience crystallized Collins's own design philosophy: "I have no aesthetic beyond telling a really incredible story that people are moved by," he says.

Collins eventually found his way to Foote Cone & Belding in San Francisco, and, in 1998, returned to New York, drawn by the opportunity to run an innovative group at the agency founded by his longtime hero, David Ogilvy. Over the past seven years, Collins and his team have won innumerable industry awards. Yet asked what has meant the most to him in that brilliant run, Collins picks an example that would resonate with the kid who loved clothes, who struggled to fit in, who understood the power of imagery.

When he came to Ogilvy, he says, its security guards were dressed like zoo attendants: maroon jackets with piping, ill-fitting polyester pants. Collins commissioned outfits that looked like something a concierge might wear at a W Hotel: black jackets, gray crew-neck sweaters, tailored pants. Soon after, one of the guards stopped him in the lobby. "I can take my daughter out for a cup of coffee at Starbucks now and not look like a security guard," he said. "It looks like I work at Ogilvy & Mather." The next day, Collins says, you could even see the difference in the way they stood. Something had happened. "That's how design can change people."

Linda Tischler is a Fast Company senior writer.