![]() Landing new business is exciting. It means new assignments, and a new source of revenue. What’s not to get excited about? We worked with a client recently on some customer-discovery work, and found, counterintuitively, that almost the exact opposite was true. That was the case for them. It may well be the case for you, too. Let’s explain. Who wants what? As part of our near-religious passion for taking a customer-back approach to everything we do here at Copel Communications, we were helping this client of ours—a niche consultancy—to develop their new website by first determining who they wanted it to reach. So far, so straightforward. Now, we need to clothe the details here in anonymity, but we can still make this story clear enough for you to understand and profit from. Historically, this client of ours had worked with various types of customers, whom we were defining as avatars—or, more colloquially, “putting into buckets.” Among those buckets were the “Go-Getters”: the really aggressive customers who offer high reward… for commensurately high risk and high maintenance. There were the “Tire Kickers.” They weren’t an obvious group, at first; it took a lot of discussion to tease them out. But once we did, we realized that we didn’t want to attract any of these energy vampires to the business. (We have an entire article on this topic, which you’ll enjoy.) The third bucket (are you sensing the Goldilocks vibe here?) was what we ended up calling the "Lovably Boring” cohort. They were exactly that: Steady, meticulous, detailed, risk-averse… yet honest, straightforward, trustworthy, and reliable. Bingo. They automatically became our client’s prime target. Weighing the cost and effort to attract, sign, and service them, vs. the revenue and profit potential vs. the other buckets, it became crystal clear… in hindsight, of course. It took a bunch of modeling and number-crunching to reach this conclusion. But once we got there, it was great. You (may) know the old adage: “Speak to the target. Let the others listen.”That was the case here. (Granted, the “Tire Kickers” were kicked right out of the room.) Catering to the un-exciting You might conclude, somewhat logically, that reaching this “boring” audience would itself be a boring assignment. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve said, taking a customer-back approach makes things not easy, but straightforward. And in the case of our “lovingly boring” target audience, it actually made it fun. Imagine: Climb into the head of that super-cautious prospect. What gets them excited? Things like safety and peace of mind. What freaks them out? Things like risky approaches and high-pressure sales. Aha. From here, it became downright enjoyable to create this safe, Eden-like online oasis for this group. Knowing their personalities, and needs, made it straightforward for us to determine what kind of language to use… what kinds of fonts, colors, background video music, amount of white space… all of it. The lesson here is to really follow that customer-back approach. That customer’s values might not align with your values. But you’re not selling to yourself. You’re selling to them. And what, after all, could be more exciting than converting a boring prospect into a paying customer? Need help with customer-discovery challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!
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![]() It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy!
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know! ![]() Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing. How can you say organized without reading? Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? Why it’s hard There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps. Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. What don’t you read? There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding. Naaah. That ain’t it. There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. Which leaves one more choice. The universal language The Big Element here is color. It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. Brilliant. Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.) Read without reading Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. Mac-specific tricks Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.)
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them! ![]() You’ll like this story. It’s useful. Recently we were working with a client to help them strategize the new branding for their business. Granted, we need to purposely “fuzz-ify” the details here, so for the purposes of this story, let’s make two broad points: 1) The new branding was for a B2B service-based business. (Feel familiar to you?) 2) The name was something like “Rocket-Speed Consulting.” That’s totally made up, and not the name, but again, it will help us tell this story to you. This client had already created some “1.0” branding which they shared with us. As you can likely imagine from what we’d just described, the logo featured a picture of a rocket ship. And every single offering from this company was named something like “Flight Speed Service,” or “Supersonic Payload Power,” or “Blast-Off Engagement.” What’s wrong with that, you might ask? To mix metaphors (one of our dubious skills here at Copel Communications), this got our Spidey Sense tingling to the point where we had a Vietnam flashback. A higher power Ages ago, there was a car company called Saturn. You might not remember it. It was actually owned and launched by General Motors, with much fanfare. It was a really innovative brand, and car, and gained a loyal following for quite some time. For example, they introduced the concept of no-haggle pricing. Their car doors weren’t stamped sheet metal, but rather plastic: One of their TV commercials showed a supermarket shopping cart smacking into the side of a parked Saturn, only to bounce off, with the dented door of the car magically popping back into shape without so much as a scratch. They had a pretty logo, too. It was a square, with a minimalist illustration of the planet Saturn, with its signature rings, cropped within the square. Red and white. With the name “Saturn” underneath. Very nicely executed. So what’s this have to do with Spiderman? And Vietnam? Our Spidey Sense tingled, because there was something about all this “Rocket-Speed” 1.0 branding that didn’t feel quite right. And we experienced a Vietnam flashback, because this reminded of us one day, back in the day, when we toiled at an ad agency in New York. Inner vs. outer space That ad agency did a lot of “automotive retail advertising,” which is code for “screaming car dealership ads.” One day, we were working on a print ad for a Saturn dealership (see? it’s coming full-circle), and consulted the manufacturer’s ad planner to help us. Uh-oh. Jargon alert. What’s an “ad planner”? Back in the day, these would be printed books. Full of artwork and logos you could use in dealership ads, along with copious guidelines detailing what you could and couldn’t do in those ads. Today, these don’t exist as printed books, any more than Saturn exists as a car company. But branding guidelines live on. They’re important. They’re huge. Anyway, there was one page in this Saturn ad planner which showed what you could and couldn’t do in any ads. And it said, quite plainly: “No stars or planets.” Huh? Now, a typical guideline for ads like these will dictate that you use their logo, as a measuring stick, and be required to allow a certain number of logo-widths around it, as white space, to elevate it, to prevent clutter. To protect the brand. That’s common. And it was the case for Saturn, too. But no stars? No planets? Just as Saturn didn’t want to muddy up their branding with visual elements impinging upon the logo’s “breathing space” on a page (or screen), they also didn’t want to muddy up the powerful feelings that are implicit in the name “Saturn” by calling attention to it as a planet in the solar system. Think about that. That’s brilliant. “Saturn” means something to you. It’s cool. It’s beautiful. It’s hinted at in the logo. But not one of their ads mentions planets or stars. It’s forbidden. It would cheapen the brand. Can you think of another brand that does this today? Hint: Their logo also looks like a familiar object. Yet they make no reference to that type of object in any of their advertising. You guessed it. Apple. Their logo looks like an apple. Replete with a bite taken out of it. (Legend has it that the “bite” was added because without it, the original looked too much like a cherry.) But you’ll never see any mention of “fruit” or “juice” or “trees” in any of their advertising. Same reason. (The closest they came to that was naming the Macintosh, back in 1984, which is an intentional misspelling of the McIntosh variety of apple. But as you know, it’s only ever called a “Mac” these days.) Helping our client Fresh from our Vietnam flashback (which should give you a hint of what those New York days were like), we were able to tell this story, and make this suggestion, to our client: Keep the “Rocket Ship” name. But nix every other “rocket” reference in the sub-branding. Protect the brand. Elevate it. Don’t cheapen it. This client of ours is very smart. They got it immediately. And they implemented it, too. Today, their branding is very clean, smart, and dare we say, Apple-like. Need help with a branding challenge for your business? This story, and lesson, are just one small sliver of the type of support we offer. Contact us today to learn more. We’d love to hear from you. ![]() This is one of those provocative subjects that, theoretically, we could argue in a single sentence. But it requires some setup and context, and deserves a fleshed-out explanation. But first: What on earth are we talking about? What’s the intent of the headline of this article? Why would you, as a creative professional (or someone who hires one) ever consciously go against your own creative instincts? Why would you ever make a creative choice that you don’t like? Talk about counterintuitive. The germ of this article came from a recent situation with a client of ours. We had worked with them for months to do painstaking customer discovery. It’s one of our specialties—it’s pretty much our religion—here at Copel Communications. Through lots of structured conversations, we had worked with this client to narrow down their targeted audience to just two big buckets. Then we worked with them to understand each of those audience’s day-in-the-life concerns and needs and comfort zones. Always, always “work backward” from the customer. If you know what the customer is going through, and what they need, then it becomes straightforward (albeit not easy) to start with that, and then “back into” the best possible messaging. Indeed, you can also “back into” the best possible products and services, too, but that goes a little beyond our wheelhouse. So. For this client, we’d helped them uncover some really interesting things about their target customers, for both buckets. While they were certainly distinct in terms of what they each needed and wanted most, which strongly suggested serving them via a bifurcated website (we have a very helpful article on this exact topic), they did have a fair amount in common, too. For the purposes of this article, let’s say that these target audiences each wanted a Lexus-like look and feel, yet with the suggestion of more Toyota-like pricing to purposely undercut the upscale look and feel. Pretty neat, huh? Unpleasant surprise So you can imagine our surprise when, one day, this client sent us a brochure they’d created on their own. It featured lots of big, cartoony graphics and bold/daring layout: for example, on each page, the single biggest element on that page was the page number itself. Oh boy. Why did they follow this route? The piece was certainly bold, but 1) it looked like a student project, and 2) it wholly ignored everything that had been learned during the intensive customer-discovery sessions we’d conducted, and documented, with this client. Here’s the short answer: The graphic designer they found and hired simply liked this stuff. He liked cartoons and huge page numbers. Do our client’s prospects feel the same way? Absolutely not. So this brochure would turn them off, simply by looking at it, without so much as reading a single word. Thus the headline of this article: When should you avoid creative choices that you, personally, like? Answer: Whenever they conflict with what the customer would most like to experience. As we’d said above, straightforward. But not simple. Another example Years ago, we did work for an ad agency, and the owner told us a great, and related, story, which we’ll paraphrase here: The ad agency conducted market research for one of their clients: A nationally-known maker of a certain line of consumer packaged goods. The ad agency’s job: See which colors would resonate most with targeted buyers. (You know where this is going already, don’t you?) So the ad agency commissioned original, confidential market research, in which lots of mock-up products, in lots of different colors, were presented to the target audience via methods such as surveys and focus groups. The findings were clear and unequivocal. There were certain colors that were really liked, and others that were really disliked. When the ad agency presented these findings to their client’s CEO, she disagreed. She was certain that certain colors—the ones that she liked—would do better in the marketplace. She imposed her will, and so those colors—and not the market-tested ones—went into production, and then on sale. Guess what happened? All of the colors picked by the CEO absolutely tanked in sales. The one or two, from the market research, which she had allowed to go into production, soared. We don’t know the rest of that story. We hope it became a teachable moment for that CEO. But it certainly backs up what we’ve said for years: If you’re looking to grow your business, always subsume your own desires to those of your customer. Have a customer-discovery challenge that needs cracking? Contact us. We’ll help you move forward. ![]() Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s all about love. Today, fittingly, that’s what we’re going to talk about. But we’re not talking about another person. We’re talking about the heavy lifting of doing creative work. You—or the creative person you task with this—got into this business because they love it. That’s one thing that all creatives have in common. They have an intense relationship with their work. But like any relationship, this one can grow cold. Do your assignments simply feel like, well, assignments? If so, what do you do, on this day of chocolate and flowers, to re-kindle that old flame? Take hope. There are ways to do this. We’re here to help. Find new inspiration in old sources As a creative professional, you’re required to keep up with the latest trends in design, advertising, music, pop culture, all of it. People depend on you to be dialed in. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that that’s the case. So take a break from what’s new, and indulge your senses in what’s eternal. We’re talking about nature. We’re talking about looking out the window. Or better yet, simply walking out the door. Take a breather. Take a nature break. Soak in the beauty, the tranquility, and the relaxation. This is more than mere therapy. It’s also hugely inspiring. Study the veins in a leaf, or the shapes of the clouds. We wrote an entire article on grabbing inspiration from nature; check it out. We can dive down even deeper into this same category, with one sub-category of nature which we find extra inspirational: Birds. Yep, we wrote another good one on this topic, too; here it is for your enjoyment. (And here’s one more: On other overlooked sources of creative inspiration.) Update your retreat You can picture an MBA’s office in your head. Not hard. Now picture, in your mind, the office of the ultimate creative director. Pretty neat, huh? Now ask yourself: How does that vision compare with your reality? It doesn’t matter if you have a corner office, a tiny cubicle, or work from home. Your space is your space. And it needs to be your safe, comfy, inspiring spot. So “spa it up.” You can indulge massively, on the cheap. Treat yourself to a new chair cushion. Get yourself a whole collection of fancy coffees or (as in our case) tea. A little aromatherapy goes a long way; there’s everything from candles to simple hand lotion that smells nice. Don’t forget music. Even as we’re writing this, we’ve got some beautiful, relaxing, spa-style music playing, and it’s sure helping. The point is, anything that puts you in a more relaxed state will help unclog those creative juices. It can also be tech: Something as simple as a new keyboard or pen tablet. Here’s one: We found an inexpensive seat heater on Amazon, and installed it on our desk chair. It’s heavenly in winter. Makes us write better. Dive into the details Our last bit of advice is perhaps the simplest. Lots of times, creative work loses its luster simply because there’s so much of it. It’s overwhelming. It feels more like work, and less like fun. The way around this is via a subtle attitude adjustment. For every assignment on your desk, it has scores of details that you must knock out. Remember the days, earlier in your career, when you would enjoy every one of those details? Now’s the time to re-discover that passion. It’s not “I need to knock out this headline layout”; it’s “Let me enjoy the process of kerning these two letters so that they breathe perfectly together.” It’s not: “Let me slog through this video”; it’s “How can I have the most fun with this particular lapped edit?” It's not a change in the work. It’s a change in the way you approach it. If it helps, think of this, too: For every person—like you—who’s toiling, and earning a living, in creative services, there’s likely a hundred others who dream of doing it. Or talk about doing it. Or plan on doing it. But they don’t. You do. That’s quite an accomplishment in itself. So pat yourself on the back. Show yourself—and your work—a little love. Why not? It’s Valentine’s Day. Have a story or tip to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. ![]() We love using extreme examples. They’re so helpful. They can really get you to the crux of a creative dilemma—or others—very quickly. Allow us to explain. So many times, in the creative field, you’ll be tasked with coming up with a novel approach to a given challenge; that’s the whole “creation” thing. And more often than not, the person handing you the assignment—your superior in the organization, or the client—will not want something extreme from you. They hardly ever ask for something that’s over-the-top in its creative interpretation and/or execution. So why do we love extreme examples so much? Calibrate your creative compass Like you, we find our assignments are more often vanilla than jalapeño. But using vanilla to solve for vanilla is unproductive. How can you take a bland concept and amp it up to the level you desire? You can’t. There’s nothing there to dial up. See where this is going? But if you start with an extreme concept, it’s easy to dial it down. To pull it back. And here’s the important part: It’s easy to pull it back to any level of intensity you desire. Now isn’t that useful? So start with the most extreme, over-the-top interpretation of a creative solution that you can possibly think of. We do this all the time. What if that ad for, say, a new software solution depicted, um, well, murder? Whaaat? Yeah. Go there. This is a creative exercise, wherein the end will justify the means. It’s also a lot of fun. So you’re now ideating an ad for an app in which someone is killing someone else. What on earth will this prove? How on earth will it help? First of all, it will loosen you up. You’re violently throwing away any of the assignment’s original creative constraints. That’s liberating unto itself, and an important prerequisite. It’s also quite likely that this extreme, over-the-top (again, murder???) concept is making you laugh, making you giddy. It’s like the suppressed laughter you had in school when you drew a funny picture of the teacher, not ten feet away. But here’s the thing: Like it or not, there will be a method to your madness. You just needed to uncork it. “Murder” in this case, can be figurative. It might be that this new software can slay the competition. Maybe it’s a novel depiction of a “killer app.” See how ridiculously easy it is to dial back the original, wholly inappropriate concept to something very useful? And it only took a minute. We mention the “method to your madness” above because, try as you may, you’ll still be on-topic, even when you try to be your craziest. You can’t un-think the original assignment as you brainstorm insane iterations for it. So you’re really just tricking your own sense of propriety into letting go. Now imagine, as part of the tried-and-true brainstorming process, you follow the first rule (by the way, we have a nice article on “The V-8 trick” and other brainstorming techniques) of “going for volume.” Imagine that you have lots of these insane, ridiculous, over-the-top ideas. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Because you can dial any of them back. An exception to the rule As we’d noted above, most assignments ask you for vanilla in the first place. But some don’t. For those—the jalapeños—it’s not just appropriate, but expected that you go over-the-top in your interpretation and execution (glaring fonts and neon colors, anyone?). So then you’re set from the get-go. These kinds of extreme assignments often ask for parody, or shock value, or brash humor. All of that works here. But again—go big. Go huge. Go over the top. Challenge yourself to out-extreme the extreme assignment. Again, you can always dial it back, easily. The opposite (cranking up something bland) is impossible. This trick is more useful than you think We’ve couched this entire article within the context of solving a creative assignment. But it’s so much more useful than that. We use extreme examples all the time. When a client asks us whether Option A for a certain business challenge might work better—or worse—than Option B, we dive straight for the “Extreme Knob,” and crank it. What would Option A look like, pushed to its ridiculous, over-the-top extreme? What would Option B look like, pushed just as much? We imagine, and describe these, for the client. Clearly, one of these will be closer to what the client wants than the other. We point that out to them; it’s instantly crystal clear; and within the context of that very conversation, we’re able to easily dial back the extreme scenarios, and help the client to pick the better of the two options. All this falls under the challenge of creative problem-solving. Which is what we do every day. Contact us now and let us help you, too. ![]() Here’s a dilemma: Your business serves two different audiences. They each have different needs. They each are aware of the other audience—and may well be wary of them. Yet you need to serve them both. What do you do? Do you create two different websites? That is, one for each? You could. But we think there’s a simpler, more elegant way. A twofold dilemma The situation we described above is common:
So this is a common situation. Think about your client base, and the prospects you’d like to serve. Are they really all in one homogenous “bucket”? The self-selecting gate The simplest way to shepherd these crowds through your site is to give them a simple selection, right up front. Imagine a home page that is truly minimal. We’ll use the recruiting firm as an example:
Below it, you’ll see two buttons:
There. Done. Simple as that. When you arrive at this site, you can’t get confused. You’re either an employer or a candidate, and there’s nothing for you to do but click one of those two big buttons. Thus you self-select your “side” of the site and enter it. As you might guess, each “side” of the site is similar looking, but different enough to avoid confusion. Imagine, for example, the exact same layout, but with different color palettes. Once the visitor is on their “side” of the site, it’s basically a self-contained experience. They land at “their” home page, where they get more-focused messaging and navigation. And they get the full panoply of options they’d expect: “Services.” “About.” “Recent Posts.” "Contact us." And so on. Some devilish details As we’d mentioned above, the two different sides of the website are similar yet different. So just in case the visitor of one side accidentally stumbles onto the other side, they’ll know immediately that they’re on the wrong side of the fence, because it will look different. They’ll thus need to click their browser’s “Back” button to return to familiar territory. This leads to an opportunity, and a caveat: The opportunity: The “About” page content that you offer to one audience is likely 95 percent the same as the “About” page content you’ll be offering to your other audience. And aside from the color change, the layout is the same, too. This translates to a big bang-for-the-buck cost saving, in terms of content creation and site-development time. You can effectively copy-and-paste Version 1 to create the bulk of Version 2. So do this as much as possible. Start with the bigger/more difficult “side” of the site, and build it out. Then leverage its parts for Side 2. The caveat: You need to assume that members of Audience 1 will occasionally stumble onto pages designed for Audience 2, and vice versa. And since you want both of them as your clients, you’ll need to offend neither. This is a messaging/copywriting challenge. You don’t want those HNWIs to think that you’re helping the professional-service providers to profit off of them. Similarly, you don’t want those professional-service providers to see anything that suggests you might interfere with their relationships—or revenue streams—with those HNWIs. So you need to craft the messaging carefully. And then you need to read each “side” through the eyes of each audience, and see if anything looks amiss. Making it happen We recently worked with a web-design firm that was a vendor to one of our “two-audience” clients. The lead person at that firm was totally confused by our proposal of a “two-button home page.” They hadn’t seen a site like that before. They were scared it wouldn’t work. Now that that site is up and running, that person is totally sold on the idea. And so are our client’s prospects: The site traffic statistics confirm it. Here at Copel Communications, we also serve two broad swaths of clients: 1) consultancies, and 2) ad agencies and internal departments we call “Creatives,” since they hire us for creative services. And guess what? Our home page has two big buttons, too. Need help with that bifurcated website challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help. ![]() Hard to believe that 2020 is almost over. (Good riddance, right?) What we mean is, it’s time for our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, 1) thanks! and 2) here’s an opportunity to revisit and refresh.
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you. ![]() Don’t act surprised. Here at Copel Communications, we can’t even touch on a nice artsy topic like “color” without tying it directly to the bottom line. We’ve already discussed the art/business dichotomy in deeper detail in a previous post; be sure to read “What’s the difference between ‘creative services’ and ‘art’?” Back to color. It’s one of those fundamental elements that’s so important, so ubiquitous, and so easy to employ that it gets taken for granted, if not overlooked altogether. Not long ago, there was a renewed love affair with color—when its use was democratized and mere mortals were freed from the shackles of black-and-white—similar to what happened with fonts, with the advent of desktop publishing. (We pay homage, and respect, to fonts in this other article which we’re happy to recommend: “How to make fonts work—harder—for you.”) In fact, a good way to appreciate color—a prerequisite to bending it to your business will, nyah-ha-ha—is to go back to the days, not long ago, when it was a luxury. And we can conjure up that world to you with just one word: Newsprint. For the longest time, “news” meant “newspapers.” And newspapers (before USA Today came along) were primarily black-and-white. Sure, there would be what was called “spot color” that would be added, usually red or yellow. And it would invariably be horribly out of register; picture an “On Sale Now!” starburst with the yellow color a third of the way out of the burst itself. So that’s not even “color.” That’s “colorized.” Of course, a world without color is not a world without creativity. We firmly believe that restrictions—guide rails—actually encourage creativity, not limit it. Think of film-noir movies. In color, they would, pardon our French, suck. So there’s gorgeous artistry to be found, and exploited, in the world of monochrome. But then comes the time to go beyond it. A chromatic leap By the way, the term “black and white” isn’t exactly, well, black and white. Early black-and-white film was what was called orthochromatic. Sure, it rendered a black-and-white image, but it looked wrong. That’s because that film, that chemistry, didn’t treat all colors that it was photographing, equally. Reds, for example, would turn almost black. It was stilted. Think of old silent movies, and how it looks like the actors, especially the men, are wearing strange makeup. That’s not strange makeup. That’s orthochromatic film. So it was a big technological leap to get us to panchromatic film. That’s the black-and-white film that you take for granted today. It looks like the real world, only with the saturation dialed down to zero. Now move that “Saturation” slider to the right. And you’re like Dorothy when she lands in Oz. There’s so much there that it’s overwhelming. And now, finally, we get to design. To things you need to create on a daily basis. Like logos. Websites. Flyers. Social ads. Videos. The “color saturation slider” analogy is useful here. Because it helps us find the truth between the unwanted extremes. At one end, you have black-and-white. But we’ve graduated beyond that. More importantly, at the other end, you have full-blown, retina-melting color. That’s why The Wizard of Oz looks like The Wizard of Oz. They were purposely going for color overload, 1) because they wanted to convey the surrealistic quality of this fantasy land, and 2) Technicolor was still relatively new, and they couldn’t resist playing. (Indeed, Dorothy's slippers, in the book, are silver; they were changed to "ruby" for the movie, simply because that's more colorful.) Watch any color movie from that era, and you’ll see the same thing. The film wasn’t more vibrant back then. They simply put more vibrant things in front of the camera. Brightly-colored sets, props, and costumes. From Gone With the Wind to The Adventures of Robin Hood, it’s practically a trope. Dialing it down Here’s the point: There is virtually zero application for Wizard of Oz-style color in any assignment that’s going to cross your desk anytime soon. Could you imagine the reactions you’d get if you handed in something that, um, garish? People got over the novelty of color back in 1939; now it’s time to put it to good use. With that said, here are some guidelines and thought-starters to help you with that next assignment:
Get help Here at Copel Communications, we’re lucky to work with some really skilled graphic and video talent, who often toil within the walls of our clients’ own offices. They take direction brilliantly (see our post on “How to direct (other) creative people”), including when it comes to color. Sometimes you won’t want, or be able, to do this yourself. You’ll need help with that creative assignment, color and all. If that’s the case, contact us. We’d be delighted to help. |
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