Halloween is still a little ways off, but it’s never too early to scare up some good creative tips, especially when it comes it comes to common pitfalls you should strive to avoid. The imitation game This one is easier said than done. We recently were tasked with re-imagining the front cover of a soon-to-be-released book, after the publisher showed the author some pretty uninspiring preliminary designs, which we had shared with our designer. We asked our designer and his team to develop a new logotype for the book’s title, and search out some relevant stock imagery to employ as background key art. Simple enough, right? A few days later, our designer said he’d hit a wall. He sent over some designs which he and his team had started on, but couldn’t get behind. They were, quite simply, not his best work. What was the problem? He’s a talented guy. There were a couple factors at play here, but the important one was that he had unconsciously tried to improve upon what the publisher had created. And that was a creative dead-end. The publisher’s versions took the wrong approach entirely, and the designer fell into the easy trap of taking that same approach. That was the mistake. Solving this book-cover challenge required a wholly different creative approach. Once we pointed this out to the designer (easy for us, since we were creative-directing this project from a vantage point affording greater perspective), he was able to easily shift gears and churn out some brilliant designs. The moral of this story is that it’s never as obvious as you might think. This designer never sat down and said, “I’m going to copy these mediocre designs.” And their approach certainly seemed straightforward if, in hindsight, it was truly suboptimal. So it didn’t seem like a mistake to follow suit, when in fact it was. Perhaps the corollary to this moral is Question everything. Don’t get lost in space We’ve written before about the tremendous value of negative space. (It’s a good article; check it out.) Well, the opposite can hold true. That is, the lack of negative space can really wreak havoc with otherwise elegant designs. Sure, we can be talking about graphical layouts and white space here. But this also applies to audio, video, composition, copywriting… pretty much any creative endeavor. Once you commercialize your creative efforts, you’re beholden to the needs and desires of your paying client. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold the line for the greater good. Yes, yes, yes, every client will want to jam ten minutes of copy into a 60-second radio spot. In that case, you’re actually lucky: Radio stations will reject an over-length spot, so you can claim that as your defense. But it’s more than that. With modern technology, it’s relatively easy to cram, say 63 seconds of copy into a 60-second spot, or 15 copy points into an ad which has breathing room for five. There’s a cliché version of this moral, as old as Madison Avenue itself: Less is more. Trend alert Remember that book-cover assignment we’d mentioned above? Well, part of its tasking involved searching out just the right stock image. And herein lies another subtle challenge… an evil spirit to avoid. Online stock libraries are a blessing. They let you search and cull with amazing speed and surprisingly good precision. But one thing they don’t really do is self-curate. That same designer we’d mentioned above complained about the “long diagonal shadows effect” that he was simply sick of seeing in stock illustrations. It was a trend he knew too well, and was rightly sick of it, because it had already crested. It’s on its way out. You can look at stock photos or illustrations from, say, the 1970s, and it’s glaringly obvious that they’re from the 1970s. You’ll see trends—from feathered hair and wide lapels on the models, to disco-era fonts—all over the things that make them look dated. Fortunately, these don’t bubble to the top of your hit-list when you search a stock library. But less obvious ones will. Depending upon your creative assignment, you probably want to avoid something too trendy, especially if that trend is starting to ebb. This is why it pays to keep culturally current. See what’s out there now, to spot new trends. Or far better yet, start your own. Have you got a creative challenge that’s been haunting you for too long? Contact us. We live for assignments like these.
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Never miss an opportunity to leverage curiosity and drama in your work We exist in spacetime. Events move from the past to the present. We are all passengers aboard time’s arrow, hurtling inexorably toward the future. In other words, WTF?? Stay with us on this one. It will get real practical, and real concrete, real quick. But we really have to start this article with incredibly broad, almost Einsteinian strokes. Life is a temporal medium. That is, it moves through time. People will say that music is a temporal medium. That’s true. You can’t listen to an entire Beethoven symphony, or Beatles song, in one instant. You must start at the beginning, and experience it as it progresses through its middle to its to end. It’s been said that painting, by contrast, is not a temporal medium. You can see the entire Mona Lisa in one blink. But what if you put a headline above her head? Hmmm. Now things begin to change. Thus our segue into the core of this matter. If you’re in the communications business—whether creatively or not—you need to appreciate the way that people move through life. The way they experience your work. The sequencing of events they undergo. And—and here’s the basis of this entire article—their expectations and instinctive desire to enjoy a story. Wow. Took a while to get there, didn’t it? Is the medium the message? Let’s start simple. Let’s say you’re scripting a TV commercial. You can set up the viewer’s expectations with some kind of tease at the outset (“What is Brand X?”), and then effectively keep them in suspense while you hit other copy points in your script, knowing all along that you’ll pay off those expectations—and thus satisfy the viewer—at the end of the script, when you “button” it. (“Brand X is [Blank].”) As we said, that’s pretty simple. You already knew that a 30-second TV spot runs for 30 seconds. But what happens when you go to print? Where’s the timing? Where’s the temporal factor? What’s the sequence of events for you to capitalize upon? Now it’s subtler. Now you need to do a little more creative extrapolating. Let’s return to Mona Lisa. If she’s your “print spokesperson” for Brand X Ice Cream, you might have a headline that reads, “Mona Lisa Loves Brand X Ice Cream.” (Creative, huh?) But now look at that image, that painting, which we've posted atop this article for your convenience. As you can see, it's a vertical composition, with negative space above and below it. Sure, you could park that entire headline above Mona’s head. “Mona Lisa Loves Brand X Ice Cream.” Now think: How would that placement affect the viewer? If you’re the viewer, seeing this for the first time, you’d recognize a woman’s face, instantly, and then read the headline. Face, headline. Just like that. That’s the sequence. It may seem simple, but it’s very important. Because now you can deconstruct it. You can leverage it. You can make it better. What if you break the headline in half? “Mona Lisa Loves…” Loves what? What does she love, for goodness’ sake? See? There’s that instinctive curiosity and desire for completion that we, as humans, have hard-wired into our brains. In fact, if you just put that first-half-of-the-headline atop Mona Lisa and left it that way, you would drive viewers absolutely nuts. Is this a mistake? Not if you plan it. What if you’re launching the Mona Lisa movie, and want to run a teaser campaign in advance? Heck, that “unfinished” layout would work great. Back to ice cream. If you now typeset the second half of that original headline, and set it, small, beneath Mona’s face, you’ve—just like that--taken the viewer on a little journey, replete with a satisfying destination. The journey goes like this:
Bet you never thought of if that way before. (If you have, kudos!) This was a purposely simple, and made-up, example. But here comes a real one… The big reveal We were recently tasked with redesigning a slim introductory brochure that would sit within a pocket inside a larger presentation jacket, part of a “company overview package” for a big professional-services firm. This firm specializes in addressing a business problem that many of its prospects take for granted/assume can’t be fixed. Hmmm. The old brochure pitched the solution in terms of a metaphor (both verbal and visual) on the cover of the slim brochure that pokes out of the pocket. Once you opened it and read it, you could see how they played out the metaphor. Now think back to Mona Lisa. And consider the incredible creative opportunity that was handed to us by this assignment. Think:
What’s the sequencing then?
Now you can see how we approached this creatively:
We won’t—we can’t—get into client details here. But suffice to say that the “problem” the company addresses is a form of “chaos” or “disorder.” So that’s what we depicted in the top half. You already figured out the rest, didn’t you? You’re so clever. Yep, the bottom half represents perfect, lock-step, anal-retentive order. It’s perfect. And—and here’s the fun part—you actually get to see the transition take place as you pull the brochure from the pocket. Heck, it’s enough to make Mona Lisa smile. Wider. Moving ahead As you can hopefully appreciate, there is no limit to this set-up/payoff principle, or its applications in your work. Think about, for example, the discrete steps somone goes through when they open and read a basic trifold brochure. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a business memo can benefit from the set-up/tease/pay-off approach. It’s simply a matter of putting yourself into the shoes—and more importantly, the head—of the recipient first, and deducing the sequence that will take place, and the expectations that will follow. Need help applying this principle—or any other creative approach—to that next challenge of yours? Contact us. We would love to help. |
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