We talk about mental wellness, but no-one talks about ‘creative wellness’. DOPA (The Department of Pro-Activeness) is a brand and podcast that aims to fuel conversations around creative wellness and put positivity back into the hearts, minds and ears of people working within the creative industry. A brand created to enable candid conversations around specific topics ie: fear, self-doubt, failure etc and to ultimately facilitate change.

The brand was created to resemble an official governing body, whilst feeling uplifting, positive and empowering. The ‘D’ monogram contains simple shapes/letters that represent the letters within the DOPA acronym. These shapes can then be enlarged to form a flexible visual language system for content creation in print, digital and motion.

The project launched on World Health Day 2021 and was quickly picked up by the press in The Netherlands. It gained further traction online and ultimately drove the listing figures up through Spotify, Google and Apple podcast platforms. More importantly, it opened up conversation topics like: ‘How to navigate from self-doubt to self-belief’ or ‘From failure to re-invention’.

We are not alone. Through conversations, all of the interviewees have similar daily thoughts. From a young professional to a seasoned veteran. We all have these thoughts and feelings – we need to talk more about them.

There were several challenges in bringing this project to the world. The project was floating around in my head for quite some time. What was required was a self-imposed deadline. Once April 7th (World Health Day) became the launch date this became a labour of love working around the clock for several weeks to get everything ready for launch.

The biggest challenge was putting myself out there after being in the social media wilderness for a year. To be open and honest is hard within the creative industry. But that is part of its’ success – the willingness to be so candid.

Writing, producing, recording, editing, and releasing a podcast episode series into the world was a huge learning curve. It was great to learn new skills, new software, production techniques. It has been a valuable journey and one I wouldn’t change for the world. Here’s to Season 02.