 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higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated.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.
0 Comments
 Great photo by Juliano Couto. We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress.
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. Grab the lowest-hanging fruit Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. But what if that were already done for you? Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. Update what you bring Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? Don’t reinvent the wheel Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?” It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. For the love of QR codes How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in.  Great photo by Yan Krukau. We can’t count how many corporate videos we write here at Copel Communications. That’s because video is simply a killer medium, however you look at it:
But video can be a killer in other ways, too. Like production budget. Turnaround time. And keeping the project on track as it goes. In this article, we’re going to explain a way to keep your next corporate video on-track, using a technique we’ve developed, honed, and proven over the years. Note that we say “corporate video.” The technique we’re about to describe doesn’t work for narrative films, home movies, or Hollywood blockbusters. But it’s great for videos you need to make quickly and cost-effectively—and which, more than anything, sell. The old-school approach A video script is formatted in two columns: one for audio, and one for video. Very straightforward. (And wholly different from, for example, the WGA format for screenplays, which is structured to support dialogue being delivered by actors within a given scene.) But if you ever looked at a video script, you’ll know, without even reading it, that it’s hard to read. It’s like looking at the blueprint of a jetliner and trying to figure out what makes it fly. There’s stuff all over the place: Indications for on-screen titles, transitions, sound effects, music cues, suggestions for stock footage, directions for layering of motion graphics, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a very useful tool for a video editor. Or a voice-over artist. But for you (or for your client), it’s pretty indigestible. The old-school approach is straightforward: Start with that script. And that’s the rule we’re about to break. Going rogue There actually is somewhat of an analogy for the work-around we’re about to describe. And it’s based not in corporate video, but in feature films. In Hollywood, it’s known as the “treatment.” For our corporate purposes, we’ll call it “the spine.” It goes something like this: A Hollywood screenplay is typically just over 100 pages long (with the rule of thumb being one page for each minute of on-screen time). The treatment is a short narrative description of what happens in the finished movie. Like a synopsis. It could be a page; it could be five pages. Regardless, it’s quicker and easier to read than a 100-page screenplay. And it can be useful in getting people with limited time to wrap their heads around the movie-to-be. The treatment, as we’d noted, is a narrative, third-person account of the story and its characters. But a good creative treatment should be fun to read, and typically will include some choice snippets of dialogue, to help convey the mood and “sell” the piece. The ”spine,” for your corporate video, is similar. But it’s even simpler. The original name we’d given it was the “audio spine,” and that should tell you a ton. Think about it. Your corporate video doesn’t feature, say, two characters toughing it out in an argument or bar-room brawl. It shows stuff that you do, and a voice-over narrator is your guide. Ta-dah. That’s where the “audio spine” comes from. If you can write that announcer track, you’ve cleared a huge hurdle. Plus, you have something that, unlike a two-column video script, is incredibly easy to digest, regardless of the reader/audience. Hence, the “spine.” On your way So the trick is to write that “spine” first. Iterate and improve it via review and revision. Then get sign-off on it. From there, you can paste the approved “spine” into the “Audio” column of your to-be video script. At that point, it becomes straightforward—although of course, not simple—to populate the rest of the script with visuals, sound effects, and all the other elements we’d mentioned above. The nice thing about starting with a “spine” is that it’s fast and easy. It locks the most important element of your video script early. Which keeps all the subsequent steps on-track, and thus faster and better cost-contained. We use this approach a lot. So should you. Need help with video scripting? We’d love to come to your rescue. Contact us today to get started.  Great photo by Alan Retratos. 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!  Great photo by Alex Knight. From bots to AI, everyone’s in a tizzy about this new technology which threatens to take over the world, eliminating vast swaths of good-paying jobs as it goes. And yes, we did use the word “tizzy.”
Here’s the thing. This is a two-way street. There’s an inherent creative challenge here that no one is talking about. And that’s making the positive case for this technology, which—spoiler alert—often saves jobs, rather than displacing them. We know. We toil in these trenches quite often. So what’s this all about? Let’s take a second to discuss these supposedly-evil technologies before we weigh in on how to portray them, positively, from a creative standpoint. Broadly, the two we’ll discuss here are robotic process automation, or RPA; and artificial intelligence, or AI. Quickly and purposely over-simplified:
Honestly: Does any of that make you shake in your shoes? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’re not any more threatened by these than we are by a word processor. They’re just tools. Powerful tools. And that’s why they’re making such a big splash nowadays. They’re new. So there’s a fear-of-the-unknown factor at work. The good news We have a client that custom-builds lots of AI-powered bots. And we help to promote them in various media. So the age-old creative challenge goes something like this: How do you “portray” a bot that you’d like to sell, knowing that it’s actually an evil job-killer? This would have you asking yourself things like: “Should we even portray it at all?” and “Do we even mention this evil technology?” Well, we’d spoiled this above, and so we’ll dive in here. This technology, this tool, is hardly evil. And in the majority of the use-cases that we’re tasked with promoting, they’re a downright godsend to the people who “work side-by-side” with them. How is that? Imagine you’re a worker. Sitting at your computer all day. Doing tons and tons of drudge work, like creating reports using data from one system, and manipulating it in another and doing all this stuff, over and over, because none of the systems talk to each other and, importantly, all this drudge work is eating up the time you’d rather be devoting to the more important and fulfilling parts of your job, such as serving clients or customers or developing new solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if you could simply flip a switch, and all of the work, in your day, that you hate-hate-hate, magically goes away? That’s what happens. You’ll never see this in the news, because it isn’t scary, and the media’s job is to try and scare you in order to keep you clicking. But workers who get bots not only love them; they actually show them off to their co-workers, who each want their own. Talk about viral. The creative challenge that solves itself All of the above discussion was not a digression. To the contrary: It was the setup for solving the initial creative challenge. The answer, as you can now see, is to address this one head-on: In other words, feel free to depict this technology as friendly, as an assistant, a life-changing development like the microwave oven or the cell phone. Thus, we routinely work on marketing materials which, yes, personify and anthropomorphize RPA bots. And they’re all portrayed as eager, friendly helpers. Incidentally, this entire tale is a great example of taking a customer-back approach to a creative challenge. Once you know what the end customer (in this case, the worker who could benefit from the addition of an AI-powered bot) needs, the way of expressing the solution, creatively, becomes not easy… but straightforward. Need help with challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you.  Here at Copel Communications, we do a lot of writing. But a picture is still worth a thousand words. We craft a lot of creative concepts, too, involving visuals, which are typically handed off to talented artists and designers.
This is where visual metaphors often come into play, and we love them. So much so that we’re devoting this article to them. Show me a story A metaphor is really a verbal construct. It’s when one word is used as a symbol for something else. (“Love is a rose.”) Again, words. If you look up “metaphor” in your thesaurus, you’ll get some decidedly “verbal” synonyms, such as “figure of speech,” “word painting,” and “word picture.” Whatever. More interesting is how you, as a creative professional, can use a metaphor visually. Where one thing stands in for something else. Or how you can be “literal” with your visuals, combining or juxtaposing elements that, in the real world, would never be combined or juxtaposed. Yet when you force that combination upon the viewer, bang, there’s synergy. (If you do it right, of course.) And that’s stuff that we love (again, when it’s done right). Put it in its place We developed creative campaigns for a company that served a large community. They were a private concern, yet funded by taxpayer dollars, providing an essential service. (That’s as much as we can divulge safely here.) We were tasked with creating a pride/public awareness campaign for them. So the thinking went like this:
Thus the campaign. You certainly think of those trucks as they drive through your neighborhood. But did you know that this company also does outreach to local schools? That it serves wealthy and poorer neighborhoods alike? So what if you saw those familiar trucks... in unfamiliar settings? Mind you, the truck is branded with the company’s logo; it’s unmistakable. So what if you saw it, parked... inside a kindergarten classroom? Atop a wealthy lawn in an affluent neighborhood? At the park? The images would be (purposely) jarring... at first. But then, within seconds, they’d make sense. “Oh, of course,” you’d think. “(Company) is part of the landscape. Part of the community.” It’s hard to connect them so inseparably with words. With images, it’s instant. It’s visceral. We did another creative campaign for this same client, along similar lines. What, we asked, are the essential elements that everyone needs? The answers are easy: Air, water, food, life, safety, security, and so on. So what if you depicted a visual/iconographic matrix of those elements... and simply added (Company) into the mix? You’re forcing the viewer to make the connection. Personification Personification represents an entire subset of visual metaphors. We worked on a creative campaign for a regional cancer center, in which the visual metaphor was arrestingly simple: We opted to personify cancer. The reasoning went like this: People are afraid of cancer. But what if cancer were afraid of (Regional Cancer Center)? That’s an interesting spin. Of course, you can’t see cancer. Not in real life. But in Ad Land, you can. Because you can personify it. The same way that Allstate famously personified “Mayhem” with its character who loves to trash your home and your car (underscoring your need for the services of Allstate). Cancer is a serious subject. You don’t want some cutesy actor portraying it. So you could just have a menacing pair of eyes... a shadow... just enough to walk the line between seen and unseen. A deep well We love visual metaphors because opportunities to employ them always crop up sooner or later. And there are always new ways to use them, to get creative, to make something that’s at once visually arresting and on-message. Need help with this kind of creative concepting? Contact us. We’d love to tackle that assignment for you.  Boy is this ever a fun—if uncommon—topic. So many times, in these articles, we’ve addressed ways to deliver the most bang for the buck... and often, for the nickel.
That’s not always the case. Every once in a while, we’ll work on an assignment for a client with incredibly deep pockets. Then the calculus changes. Not the creative. But the approach to the creative. Think of it this way. If you see some low-budget movie with no-name actors in it, everything is cheap. The sets. The music. Even the hair and makeup look bad. Now make that same movie, except with an A-lister. Would the music sound tinny? No way. Would the sets look cheap? Nope. Would one hair on that actor’s head be out of place, in even one shot? Never. But these two hypothetical movies are shot from the exact same script. Or are they? Playing Monopoly More times than we can count, we’ve used the word “stock” in deliverables we create: References to stock photos. Stock music. Stock illustrations. Canned material. Granted, that does pose some very real creative problems. How do you, for example, make your stuff stand out when you’re using the same ingredients as countless others? (We wrote a cool article on that very topic; check it out here.) But for a recent assignment, the sky was the limit. Of course we’re under NDA so we’ll need to cloak the details in anonymity, but the client was a major U.S. enterprise. You know their name, even if you haven’t used their service. And you likely have used their service. So. We were tasked (by this enterprise’s ad agency, to be clear) with developing concepts for a creative campaign that would span all media. Think network television spots. Bus sides in major cities. Blanketed social media. Everything. In the broad scheme of things—and this is pretty typical in situations like this—the client’s big budget item wasn’t the creative, but the media buy. (Yes, our rates are quite reasonable here at Copel Communications!) Think of, for example, a Super Bowl spot. There’s no way the production budget comes anywhere near the price-tag for the air time. But we still had what felt like Monopoly money to play with. Imagine an unlimited production budget. What do you do? How do you spend it? It’s all in the scale We’ll single out one of the campaign concepts we’d submitted here, because it illustrates our point nicely. We wanted to show (imagine that this is a “pride” campaign, showing the world how great this company is) that this company makes people’s lives better. So we’d start with, say, a guy on the street. A woman in a grocery store. A cop on the beat. (Remember, we’re fudging reality here a tad, to maintain confidentiality.) And we could then show how each of these people’s lives were improved by Big Company. That’s fine. In fact, it’s nice. It’s intimate. You, the viewer, can easily connect and identify with all these people. But what if it’s bigger than that? What if Big Company is helping entire neighborhoods? How do you show that? Know how? You show it. You go big. You go aerial. You broaden the perspective—try that with stock footage—and have all these people coming together harmoniously. But it gets even bigger. (Yes, Big Company has global ambitions.) Big Company, it turns out, is helping the entire planet. It’s all part of the “E” in what’s commonly known as ESG, for Environmental, Social, and Governance, i.e., corporate social responsibility. So we scripted time-lapse special effects which depict the world’s wounds, healing. Changes in the oceans. The weather. All orchestrated (what the heck, call in the orchestra) to this very human-level narrative which began, mere seconds ago, at the street-and-grocery-store level. That’s how you use a big budget. Stress-test it Note the progression here. We started small on purpose. The reason for this was twofold: 1) It established the intimate, human connection. 2) It effectively “showed off” the big budget: The spot grows bigger and bigger and more audacious as it goes. That’s intentional. Imagine if we didn’t work that way. What if the spot started with the planets and stars and special effects? Then it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s no exciting revelation, no expansion. In a strange way, it would be small. Here’s another stress test: Does the whole thing resonate with the client’s intent and vision? Put bluntly: You can’t bring in space ships and aliens if there’s no need for space ships and aliens. Everything must be justified. Overall, we’d say that lower-budget projects force you to be more, not less, creative. You have to do more with less; you can’t simply buy your way out of a problem. But big budgets, as you’ve seen, have their own special challenges. We couldn’t turn in a script for just-the-grocery-store-level perspective for this assignment; we’d be laughed out of the room. You need to make it appropriate for the assignment. And yes, even the budget. Not everything we work on is a multimillion-dollar project. Not that yours isn’t—but even if it isn’t, we’d be delighted to help. A creative challenge is a creative challenge, and we love rising to the occasion. Contact us today to get started.  Can you imagine life today without...
No, we’re not going to say “the internet,” “mobile phones,” or “next-day free shipping.” Can you imagine life today without... rectangles? Stay with us on this. There’s a method to this seeming madness. Rectangles. Boy do we ever take them for granted. Sure, they’re the shape of buildings and Amazon boxes, but for the purposes of this discussion, they’re also, almost exclusively, the shape of the boundary in which you present creative materials to your audience. Think about it. Everything you must design for—everything your audience consumes—is bounded by a rectangle:
Need we go on? Fact is, from the days of the first framed canvas, creators have been creating within rectangles. Today, we take that for granted. But we shouldn’t. That’s because there’s an art to composing for rectangles, regardless of the medium. Since we’re so surrounded by rectangles, you’d think that 1) everyone was aware of this fact, and 2) everyone intuitively knows how to compose for them. Both of those assumptions, clearly, are wrong. Thus this article... thus the need for this article. Know the rules before you break them “Composition,” in this context, means “where you put things inside that rectangle.” And three classic rules of composition come to mind, which have evolved over the years: 1. The Rule of Thirds. You’ll see this one in every photography textbook ever printed. It basically divides a rectangle into a tic-tac-toe board, and tells you that you should place your subject at any of those intersections. Why? Well, this rule will tell you that most people’s instinctive response to framing a subject in the viewfinder would be to center them. Put their face right in the middle, equidistant between left and right, and top and bottom. Therefore, putting them where they’re about a third of the way across (and/or down) will look more pleasing to the eye, less “mug shot-ish”/less “deer in the headlights.” 2. Leading space. You’ve got a composition of a person looking off into the distance. How do you frame that? This rule tells you to give them “breathing space.” That is, if they’re looking off to the right, you should park them toward the left of the frame (a third of the way from the left border, if you’re also following the Rule of Thirds). This way, there’s room for your eye to go where their eyes lead you. It’s a nice place to park, say, a headline. Look at any stock-photo website; you’ll see tons of photos framed like this, for that exact reason. Leading space creates comfort. It respects the subject. It provides balance. (If you’ve read any of these articles from Copel Communications before, you so know that all of this is a set-up!) 3. Bounded/unbounded composition. This is one of the basic tenets of photojournalism. It asks you to make a choice. Do you want to show the entire subject within the frame? Or would you prefer to show just a portion of it, letting the rest bleed out of the picture? The former “bounds” the subject, and tells the viewer: “Here’s the entire story.” The latter “unbounds” the subject, and tells the viewer: “This is just a part of the story. It’s bigger than the portion you’re seeing here.” So following this rule will make “bounded” subjects stand alone, whereas, say, an “unbounded” crowd scene (or, say, cemetery) may appear to stretch for miles—when, in fact, it may only extend a few inches beyond where the photographer chose to frame it. Breaking the rules As always, you have to know the rules before you break them. Which is why we took the time to define each of the three rules above. These rules didn’t just appear out of the blue. They evolved. They withstand the test of time. They serve a very good purpose. Most of the time, you’re best off following them. But sometimes you’re not. 1. Breaking the Rule of Thirds. Sometimes, you’ll want your subject to be pegged like a deer-in-headlights. You’ll want them to look uncomfortable. Or you’ll want absolutely perfect, anal rigor to your composition. Those are perfect times to break the Rule of Thirds. 2. Breaking the leading-space rule. This one’s even more fun to break. Picture this: Your subject is peering off, intently, to the right. What happens if you park them at the very far right side of the frame, leaving a ton of empty space to their left? Bingo: You’ve created tension, and suspense. Tension, because the audience can’t see what your subject is looking at, when they're inured to just seeing it. And suspense, because what’s about to come up behind them? This type of composition is routinely used in horror movies. Want to see one of the best-ever usages of “invading what seems to be safe negative space”? Just watch the first appearance of the shark in the movie Jaws. You’ll see. 3. Breaking the bounded/unbounded composition rule. This one is a no-brainer. You can make a crowd look smaller simply by showing its edges. You can make a sole subject seem bigger than life by having it break the bounds of the frame. It’s entirely up to you. The key thing is to always know that this tool is in your kit, and to employ it judiciously. Get help We know about these rules—and how to break them—because we employ them—and break them—all the time on our clients’ behalf. If you need help with that next creative assignment, contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  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.  Our annual cornucopia of creative goodies
Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. What could be better? You look around you, and you express your gratitude for everything you have, and everything you have to look forward to. And you cap it with a tasty supper. If you’re in the creative-services field, or if you simply rely on others (like us) who toil there, we invite you to sit back and sate yourself with this selection of some of our favorite things to be thankful for. What they all have in common: They’re things we often take for granted. Yet they do so much for us, creatively, every day. So it’s only fitting that we pay tribute in time for Thanksgiving. The dark room Caught ya off-guard there, didn’t we? Translate “dark room” to Latin, and you get camera obscura. Ergo, photography. Boy, do we ever take photography for granted these days. Not long after its introduction, the iPhone was used to take more pictures than had been taken in the entire history of photography. That’s mind-blowing. And, of course, that’s just the iPhone, not its competitors. And the iPhone has been around since 2007. Time was, you’d go to a bookstore (remember those?) and drool over big, coffee-table-sized books... comprised solely of photographs. Sure, those books (and perhaps those stores) still exist, but you get the point. Photography is so ubiquitous these days, that its original magic gets lost. Don’t let it. The ability to transform 3-D reality into a flawless 2-D rendition—not to mention instantly—is a miracle. A captured slice of time, what Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” that you can study forever. Think of those Civil War photos you’ve seen. Don’t you instantly gravitate toward the faces of the soldiers and widows? It’s because the humanity, and the immediacy of the moment, were captured, and locked forever, into the medium. Here at Copel Communications, we use photography daily. Even cheesy stock photos can provide surprisingly inspirational material; we wrote an entire article (“Help With Creative Assignments: New Approaches to Stale Stock Images”) about that. So be thankful for photography. When you’re away from home, and flip through pictures of your kids on your phone. When you’re trying to express a certain emotion in a layout and stumble across that perfect “Aha!” image. When you hire a photographer to put that art to work for you. The world that exists outside your screen If you’re seeking creative inspiration, nature beats man-made stuff, hands down, every time. We’re talking colors (tropical fish or birds, anyone?). Sounds (wind in the trees, the wail of a loon). Composition (the propagation of a crystal). Direction (the kinetic motion of a hawk diving, or a deer leaping). Rhythm (waves lapping at the shore, the metered chant of the mockingbird). If you’re ever stuck on that creative assignment, simply un-stick yourself from your seat and place yourself in a natural setting, and get set to take notes. You’ll come away not only refreshed and invigorated, but truly inspired. We wrote another article on this subject (“How to Draw from Nature [and profit from it]”) and we think you’ll enjoy it. Check it out! The unsung heroes While we work in creative services, and do a lot of ideating on our own, we also rely on a lot of others who are amazing at what they do. True scenario: A hot prospect reaches out to one of our clients, and a deal gets closed. Why did that prospect reach out in the first place? Well, it wasn’t luck. You can trace it to a particular direct-mail piece that had been sent their way. “Direct-mail piece” is a euphemism. Most people refer to it as “junk mail.” So think about that. For a piece of unsolicited “junk mail” to 1) not get trashed, 2) actually get opened, 3) make an impact, and 4) induce the reader to a) take action, and then b) sign a deal is, well, pretty amazing. There are a lot of moving parts at work here, such as the quality of the mailing list, the timing, and so on. But don’t forget: the thing simply looked good. This humble piece of paper was able to stand out from the stack, and generate enough interest for the recipient to pause before trashing, open it up, start to read, and then let the copy do its job. Who made it look good? In this instance, it was a particular graphic designer we regularly rely on. He had spent hours, in a dark corner, squinting at his Mac, agonizing over details such as the kerning of individual letters in the words of the headline. Finding the exact right color for each element. Making sure they all supported the key message that was intended to be conveyed. All that work paid off. Handsomely. And yet today, that same graphic artist still toils in that same dark corner. We know he’s appreciated where he works, and by us, too. But on days like this, we’re downright thankful. Last thanks This is where we traditionally insert what’s known as the call-to-action, in which we ask you, humbly, to contact us should you need our creative services. But regardless of how we slide it in, we’d prefer to end this article with a simple wish to you: Happy Thanksgiving. |