 Great photo by Designecologist. We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging.
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! Website in the spotlight We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. Starting wide As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages! Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons:
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. Answer: No. Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours.
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 Great photo by Moose Photos 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!  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.  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.  Ah, stuffing. What a perfect topic to address in November. Breadcrumbs and giblets, all jammed into a turkey, which is then jammed into the oven, and eventually jammed into your gullet, thus living up to its name. Stuffing. After Thanksgiving dinner, you’re stuffed.
What on earth does this have to do with creative services? Bear with us. We’re getting there. So. You had that big dinner, you’re feeling uncomfortably bloated. People always say it's the tryptophan in the turkey that makes you tired; we've read—and believe—that it's simply the act of over-stuffing yourself that wears you out. And now we circle back to things like layouts and website design and illustration. Stuffed. Overstuffed. Bloated. Uncomfortable. They all go together, right? Not always. More is more You’ve had the phrase “Less is more!” drilled into your head from the first time you ever clutched a pencil. (Or stylus.) It’s true... to an extent. Remember, here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of creative rule-breaking. Indeed, that’s where the creativity often happens: right at the ragged boundary between “What you’re supposed to do” and “What you dare to do.” Of course, you can’t break a rule—and get away with it, let alone achieve a creative breakthrough—unless you know what the rule is in the first place, and how it works, and why it’s there. So let’s start with “Less is more,” assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that it’s a “rule.” “Less is more” tells you to minimize your content. To maximize your negative space. To embrace silence, white space, and sentence fragments. Like this. It tells you to let the audience connect the dots in their mind, to let them enjoy the creative leap which requires them to fill in the gaps, Rorschach-like, between what you’re telling/showing them and how they fit into that story/presentation. That’s really valuable advice. Most of the time, it’s spot-on. Except when it isn’t. Put it this way: Do you always want your audience to make assumptions on their own? Do you always want them to fill in blanks from their own tool box? Do you always want them to have just the least possible information? Do you always want them to have clean, airy space? No, no, no, and no. There are countless exceptions to this rule. And many of them create the most engaging and enjoyable audience experiences you can imagine. We read an interview with the cinematographer who was shooting a James Bond movie. And he mentioned the “James Bond ‘see-it-all’ look.” Isn’t that beautiful? It tells you everything. When James Bond first sneaks into the villain’s secret laboratory/lair, do you just see a whiff of fog and a desk or two in a sterile room? Heck, no. You see it all, in perfect deep focus: the massive cavern carved out of the inside of a volcano, with missile-launch controls festooned with chrome dials and switches and blinking lights, and scores of evil-uniformed workers busily scurrying about, and the monorail with the “Evil Industries” logo on each car zipping by, and the shark tank with the bubbles, and the huge orchestral “reveal” score and it’s just a jaw-dropping overload which defines the big-screen experience. Less is more? Hardly. Another: Think of great illustrations. Sure, some can be sparse. But the most memorable are packed—stuffed—with detail. Don’t believe us? Norman Rockwell. So there. You can spend hours--happy hours—staring at one of his illustrations, diving down the rabbit holes of detail. He put a ton of work into every composition, and you, the viewer, get the reward. If you’re old enough to remember “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” those gorgeous hand-drawn cartoons were similarly packed—every square inch of them—with cool details. Ditto for the classic Rube Goldberg inventions. More modern examples exist, too. Think of, say, a movie or TV satire in the recently-departed MAD magazine. Just because that mag is gone, doesn’t mean that the over-stuffed illustration approach is gone, too. It’s been a staple of comic-book art since its inception, and lives on today in things like the graphic novel. Get stuffed The important thing, for you as a creative resource, is to know when to employ this approach. There are times when, pardon our punning, your audience will be hungry for detail. They’ll want a “big meal” of information that they can over-indulge in. Your job, at that time: Reward them. Got a creative challenge—stuffed or otherwise—you need help with? Contact us. We solve these kinds of problems every day.  Learn how to improve beauty & readability at the same time
We read so much that it’s scary. You’re reading this sentence. How much else have you read today? How much more will you read? It can be tiring. Specifically, it can be more fatiguing than it needs to be. It can also be a heck of a lot uglier than it needs to be. We’re talking about letterspacing. Here’s a great quote: “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” It bears repeating. “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” Chew on that one for a second. We’ll circle back to it shortly. Pick a font, any font? Let’s start with some real basics here. Serif vs. sans-serif fonts. The serif, as you know, is that little flourish on the end of a stroke, like the little fingers that hang down from the top ends of a letter “T.” Tradition says that serif fonts are the best choice for body copy; the serifs themselves help to set the baseline and subtly align the text, helping the reader along. “Helping the reader along.” Another good quote. Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, are traditionally employed for headlines, for bold applications. The all-time iconic sans-serif font is Helvetica. It’s ubiquitous to the point that it gets bashed and abused, but it’s iconic for a reason. Its elegance lies in its understated beauty. So. Serif for body copy. Sans-serif for headlines. Simple as that, right? Of course not. You know that here at Copel Communications, we’re avid fans of justified rule-breaking. There are times when you want to play against expectations, when you want to surprise your audience. Swapping out a serif font for a san-serif one, or vice versa, is the simplest example there is. Which gets us back to letterspacing. What’s missing from fonts Back in the day, each letter in the font had its own letterspacing built in. We’re not talking TrueType or OpenType. We’re talking metal. The word “font” shares the same root, in French, as “foundry,” which is where metal was melted down to cast actual fonts. (We know more about this than most people. Be sure to check out our killer blog, “We Bought Fonts at a Foundry.”) So each letter would have a certain amount of metal around it, to “automatically” provide the proper spacing vis-a-vis the ones beside it. Overall it worked well. But not perfectly. Look at any old book that was printed via letterpress. (If you’re not sure, simply feel the pages. The hard type makes a physical impression in the paper, in contrast to lithography, wherein the printing plates are smooth.) Now, look closely at the type itself. It will look, well, old. Something about it will appear amiss. And it’s the flawed letterspacing. The carved-in-metal dictates of the individual letters can’t possibly anticipate, let alone compensate for, the juxtaposition of letter pairs that require special spacing. We’re talking “V-A”, for example. The word “AVAIL,” in caps like that, generally looks horrible when it’s set in metal type. There’s all that dead space in the diagonal channels between the “V” and its pair of flanking “A’s.” It hurts your eyes, and your brain, to read it. Of course, we’re not setting type like that anymore. It’s all done via computer. And modern computer fonts do have algorithms baked into them to compensate for these special situations. Overall, they work quite well. They can scoot a “V” closer to an “A” without any need for, oh, shaving down a piece of metal! But computers and algorithms can only do so much. The rest is up to you. Get kerning That quote we’d cited above—“The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves”—is from a great art teacher we’d had back in junior high school. Some wisdom just sticks. He was absolutely right. It’s not just “V-A.” It’s all the letters. A good font is an incredible creation: the way it appears aligned and uniform, when it’s actually an orchestration of careful cheats and eye-trickers, from the capital “O” that may descend beyond the baseline to the “fi” ligature which elides what would’ve been a distracting double-dollop between the serif on the “f” and the dot atop the “i.” The thing is, the beauty is in there. It’s up to you to liberate it, not constrain it, not shackle it. Our junior high teacher’s quote is as close as we can get to a “rule” here. This is art, not science. You need to play, to look at it, to experiment. Save your different versions and compare them. Sometimes you’ll want to break the rules: You’ll want to crash those letters together. Or you’ll want to stretch them out, airily, in order to underscore the message. Ditto for leading (pronounced “ledding”): the vertical spacing between individual lines. Use our art teacher’s guidance. Or creatively avoid it. Here’s the irony in all this. Done right, the best possible creation is practically invisible to the audience. It just... reads. It looks beautiful. It transmits its message. And that’s what type is supposed to do. Having trouble with that creative challenge? Contact us. We help clients of all stripes with these kinds of issues, and more, every day.  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.  Whether you’re a creative professional yourself, or someone who needs to employ the services of one, sooner or later, you’ll have to direct a creative person.
“Provide creative direction to a creative person.” Sounds redundant, superfluous, even oxymoronic. Hence this article. This really does happen—depending on who you are, it could happen a lot, or a little—and, importantly, you need to know how to do it right. These articles all have one common theme: Maximizing business impact. Providing creative direction is no exception. Understand the assignment There are two parts to challenge: 1) Understand the assignment, and 2) Understand your creative person. Let’s take them in order. It may sound painfully obvious, but you need to know that creative assignment, inside-out, before you go doling out any of its constituent elements to a creative pro, whether they’re a graphic artist, illustrator, copywriter, voiceover announcer, video editor, etc. This comes back—as it always does—to understanding the target audience and their needs. This assignment—whether it’s a website, landing page, direct mailer, eblast, etc.—should address them. Your challenge: Address them creatively. You want your audience to sit up and take notice. You want your piece to cut through the miasma of competing ads, websites, TV spots, whatever, so that your message—your offer—shines through. Assuming (big assumption!) that your offer properly promises to solve one of your target audience’s most pressing problems, you then need to determine just how, and how much, you’ll delegate among different members of your creative team. Again, this is context-sensitive. If you’re an agency creative director, it’s simply a matter of calling, texting, emailing, or meeting (real or virtual) with your already-established creative team. If you’re in a smaller shop, you may have a trusted stable of freelancers. If you work as “the marketing person” within a company that’s not a marketing firm, you may have a few key people you count on. Generally, the who-does-what is straightforward. You won’t ask your voiceover person to design a Facebook ad. But you do want that voiceover person to deliver the best darned voiceover they’ve ever done, for you and for this assignment. How do you ensure that? Get under their skin If you take away just one thing from this article, let it be this: Creative pros are like athletes, actors, and other star performers. They’re able to channel their innate talents into a profession. They’ve honed them to be the best they can be; face it, just because you’re six-foot-ten, doesn’t mean you’re in the NBA. So they’re really good at what they do. They continually strive to be better. They welcome a challenge. They enjoy performing well. They bore easily. And they have no time for amateurs. None of the above may be obvious. If they’re truly good creative pros, they’re also able to, simultaneously, sublimate all of those intense feelings, desires, and ego, and come across—to you—as buttoned-down professionals. This in itself is one heck of a performance; appreciate it. But now that you know what makes them tick—what’s under their skin—you can use it to your—and frankly, their—advantage. This boils down to some do’s and don’ts:
Similarly, here are some don’ts:
Get help Sometimes, you simply have too many things on your plate to attend to this. Other times, the creative interpretation/direction may fall outside your wheelhouse or your comfort zone. There’s nothing wrong with getting help. From us, for example. We wrangle and direct creative pros all the time. Contact us today and let us help you nail that next assignment.  We didn't create this infographic. But it's a nice one to illustrate this article. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then an infographic, done right, is worth 2,000.
It’s often convenient, if not downright imperative, to convey your company’s offerings via a succinctly annotated image. Done right, it packs the punch of a headline. It quickly conveys the big picture. It even gets across a few crucial details—in the proper sequence, that is, after the main message has made its point. Note that we said “done right,” twice, above. It’s really key. Look at the flip-side: An infographic, done wrong, will have the opposite of its intended effect. It will confuse. It will disorient. It will convey the wrong message. It will show the whole world that you can’t even describe your own offering. With that caveat as a motivator, let’s dive in. How to create an infographic Step 1: Step back You thought we’d be talking about color palettes and fonts, right? Wrong. That’s part of the execution, the tactics, of the infographic. You need to start with the strategy. And you can easily devise this by considering two basic things:
Basic, yes. Simple, no. For the intended audience, let’s say it’s prospective customers—a fair assumption. But are they qualified or un-qualified? What you tell them would vary accordingly. If you want to move them along the sales funnel, you need to know about their needs and behaviors. Put it this way: You don’t want to get deep into the weeds with them if they’re truly viable, and yet such deep detail would only confuse them or turn them away too early in the game. (If that’s the case, you may well need to create Infographic 1 and Infographic 2, for the un-qualified, and qualified, leads respectively.) Also, from the “audience” standpoint, what’s their situation and sense of urgency? How much, how desperately, do they need to learn what you want to present to them? This will really help your efforts downstream, as it will translate to the types of colors, fonts, verbiage, and imagery you employ. You want to do the best job of pushing their buttons. After all, the tacit job of that infographic is to sell. Another consideration: The form factor. Where will your audience be seeing this infographic? In a huge, printed brochure? Or minutely displayed on their iPhone screen? The answer to that question will dictate just how much, or little, info you can clearly convey. Once you’ve answered the “target audience” question, the “What do we want to show them?” question becomes easier to answer. A rule of thumb: The narrower your focus, the easier this becomes. If you know, for example, your audience consists primarily of logistics executives who are seeking to reduce costs for overland transport, that rapidly narrows down what you should convey in the infographic, in a very good way. As always, you want to respect the viewer’s time. Assume that they’re jammed. Never assume that they’re going to cuddle up with your infographic and read every word. So keep those logistics people focused on logistics, or whatever the case may be. Here’s another basic guideline: Less is more. You simply can’t say everything about your business in a single infographic. It pains us to even say this, but too many companies actually try. Narrow your focus. Consider the job at hand. Think of what you must do, who you must convince, and what action you want them to take. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, this requires a lot of discipline, and we haven’t even gotten to the execution yet. In other words, infographics are hard. We’ve worked with ad agencies that have spent months developing a single infographic. Think of it like a Super Bowl TV commercial: Well done, it zips by in 30 seconds. But you know they spent months making it. How to create an infographic Step 2: Prioritize By this point, you’re very well armed. You understand your target audience and their needs, and you know what you want to tell them, in the infographic. The hardest part is behind you. Take the next step in Word. Write down all the bits of information you want to convey. Don’t worry about sexy wording; just make a list. Bullet points are fine. Now look at that list, and rearrange it. Find all the most urgent stuff, set it in big/boldface, and move it to the top of the list. Then find all the least urgent items, and set them in a smaller size or italics, and move them to the bottom of the list. Ta-dah. You’ve carved the thing into three big chunks: Urgent, average, and less-urgent/detail. Now, some of the “Average” items will be qualifiers of some of the specific “Urgent” things; similarly, some of the “Details” will be qualifiers of discrete “Average” items. That’s good. So now, move them around, so the list looks like this: Urgent Item 1
Urgent Item 2
Urgent Item 3
Of course, it won’t look exactly like that. Some of your urgent items will be stand-alone's. That’s fine. Now, take that list, and do a “Save as...” in Word. Call your new doc something like “Infographic Text 1.docx.” Now you can play around with the actual verbiage. So something like “Fast Response” becomes something like “99% Same-Day Turnaround.” Yes, use numbers. A lot. They’re the “info” in “infographic.” And your Urgent/Average/Detail might shake out like this: 56 Locations Nationwide
See how all of your work from Steps 1 and 2 is paying off? How to create an infographic Step 3: Execute This is the last step—the step that far too many companies believe is the first step, to their peril. Unlike them, you now know exactly where you’re going. This step is fast, cost-efficient, straightforward, and fun. You have all the cool verbiage in your “Text” document. You know, from your target-audience exercise, what kinds of colors, images, and moods will resonate with them. You know which items in your “Text” doc are the most urgent of the urgent ones. You even came up with a cool title for your infographic (such as ABC Logistics Support at a Glance, to play out our above example). Now you can search stock libraries such as Shutterstock for cool images, icons, and backgrounds. Cast a wide net: Grab more than you need. Keep your eyes open for surprising images you hadn’t expected. (We have a cool article on that very topic: New Approaches to Stale Stock Images.) Then, you either hand off all these images and text to your graphic designer, or take the next step and use either a dedicated app such as Illustrator, or an easy-to-use online tool, such as Canva, to design the thing yourself. (If you go the latter route, be sure to look at the different infographic templates they offer; you can tweak any of them to your liking.) Need help? We know about infographics, because we help our clients with them all the time. We can help you, too. Simply contact us today for a friendly, no-obligation consultation.  Each year, we wrap up our blogging at Copel Communications with a roundup of our top articles. In case you were unaware, we alternate our posts between our two core audiences (which certainly overlap): 1) consultants, and 2) creatives. And by “creatives,” we mean ad agencies and direct companies that turn to us for creative solutions, in marketing, advertising, and writing.
This post is a compendium of articles for the latter audience. (You can check out the one for our consultants here.) We think you’ll like these. If you’d missed any during the year, here they all are, replete with summary teasers and links. And hey, if you liked any of them the first time around, you may well enjoy a refresher!
Do you have a creative topic you’d like for us to address in the coming year? Or do you have a creative challenge you need solved? Either way, contact us. We’d love to hear—and to help. |
