Why Codea is putting humour at the heart of creativity
For the Barcelona-based studio, humour isn’t just about making people laugh – it’s a way of challenging conventions, as co-founder Ricard Sunyol explains
‘We take our own jokes seriously.’ This somewhat paradoxical statement was adopted by Codea earlier this year to describe its new positioning. Yet the Barcelona-based creative studio isn’t in the business of punchlines or memes. For them, humour is more of a creative philosophy – one rooted in irony, absurdity and a willingness to question convention.
Almost every story co-founder Ricard Sunyol tells during our conversation starts with somebody making a joke that at most other agencies would probably have stayed in the room. “Sometimes a good idea comes from a bad joke,” he says. “We laugh ourselves, and then we think, OK … but what if we really do it? For example, we were thinking every agency has a newsletter. Then someone said, ‘Why don’t we make an actual letter?’”
That throwaway idea eventually became one of Codea’s most distinctive calling cards: a beautifully designed physical newsletter that lands on subscribers’ doormats rather than in their inboxes. Every new sign-up means another letter to print, package and post – an increasingly impractical undertaking in an industry obsessed with automation and scale.
