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!
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Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you! Turkey and stuffing are traditions, so why not a blog about what we’re thankful for? This is kind of an unintentional tradition here at Copel Communications, but the stuff we’re thankful for evolves each year. We post this not just to share the love, but also to inspire. What are you thankful for? Is there stuff that we list below which you’d overlooked? More important, what have we invariably overlooked? Please chime in, in the comments. Creature comforts We’ll do anything and everything we can to get those creative juices flowing each day. That’s actually one of the perks of this job. We get to indulge ourselves in a cocoon-like office space, with everything desirable all within arm’s reach. Ready?
Saving the best for last You should be able to figure out where this is going. Everything we’d bulleted above, while great, is stuff. What are we most thankful for? Of course. It’s people. We’re talking about the great creative folk we have the good fortune to work with among our constellation of vendors. We’re talking about the fantastic clients we’re lucky to serve every day: they keep us challenged and stimulated, and always fail to appreciate just how much free education they shower upon us with their subject-matter expertise. And then what is Thanksgiving without giving thanks to family? It’s why we do anything, everything, that we do. What are you thankful for? Let us know directly, or simply add your thoughts to the Comments below. Boy did this year ever fly past! We hope you’ve stayed productive and healthy. In what’s become a big tradition here at Copel Communications, we’d like to offer you 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, here’s an opportunity to re-hone your skills. Enjoy!
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you. Each year, around Thanksgiving, we here at Copel Communications like to devote an article to things we’re thankful for. We’ve written about the creative use of “stuffing,” about the camera obscura and other unsung heroes of creative inspiration, and creative “turkeys,” to name a few. This year, we’d like to talk about things that help keep the creative juices flowing. You know what we’re talking about if you, like us, toil in the ideation trenches: You’re constantly under pressure to invent wholly new things, and thus any little tricks or tips or devices you can find that lubricate the process are more than welcome. Well, here’s our little cornucopia. How many of these are you using now? How many are you under-utilizing? How many are, ideally, new to you?
Have any creative-lubrication tricks or gadgets you’re thankful for? Let us know about them! Meantime, here’s wishing you a happy and healthy Thanksgiving. 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. 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. 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. Bad practices to carve away Some creative practices persist over the years, even though they’re anything but creative. In this article, we’re going to single out some turkeys (given this posting’s proximity to Thanksgiving) that really jar our preserves. The good news: Once you see these examples, presented as such, you’ll surely find them galling enough, too, to regard them as cautionary tales. In other words, you’ll consciously avoid them in the future, too. The definition of annoying “Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘Quality’ as…” Oh goodness. Stop right there. This is a pointless time-waster. Don’t tell your audience what a word means. They know already. And the tacit message that they don’t—since you need to define the word for them—is insulting: “Hey, reader! You’re so stupid, you don’t know what ‘quality’ means. And I can’t define it well myself (I’m not smart, either), so I’ll copy-and-paste a definition from an online dictionary (I’m lazy and a plagiarist).” The pronunciation of annoying But wait, there’s more! These typically get even worse. The cutesiest ones attempt to mimic the look of an actual dictionary entry, with the heavily-hyphenated phonemic transcription that, we guess, attempts to make it look “official.” Uggh. And not only that, they’ll often get it wrong! For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to insult the reader by telling them they don’t know how to pronounce a word they already know, at least condescend correctly! So, continuing our example from above, it might go something like this: Quality. n. kwah-LIT-ee —with lots of little accents and umlauts and you-name-it’s atop the letters. Note that we’ve been given the “part of speech,” too, with that little “n.”, for “noun.” Gee, thanks! How could we have gotten through the day without this helpful information? Note, too, that if you read that “pronunciation” aloud, you’ll actually mispronounce “quality”! The takeaway: Whatever you had to say after that cute “definition” will never get read. You lost the reader from the get-go. That’s a big, fat fail. “Slide-show creative” We’ve seen ad agencies actually make TV spots for clients that are little more than an announcer track with either still or video images laid directly atop it, in flawless, anal sync with what the announcer is saying. This makes a PowerPoint preso exciting by contrast. We call this egregious practice “slide-show creative,” because it reminds us of being trapped in someone’s smoke-filled 1960s living room as they click their Kodak Carousel slide projector through each blurry picture of their latest vacation. Give your audience more credit than that. They can—and daily do—make the leap between one thing that’s being said, and another that’s being shown. That’s called synergy. Use it to your advantage. And this is for more than just TV spots, although that’s still a valid example. Whenever you’re marrying more than one medium, play them off each other. Interweave different aspects of the same content. The resulting tapestry will be far richer—and more memorable and impactful—than any “slide show.” The one-note song As humans, we’re wired to thrive on contrast and variety. You want a three-course meal, with something different for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You don’t want a bowl of the same exact thing, every single time (think: “dog food”). The same thing applies to creative—in all media. A radio spot that screams at you for 60 seconds straight will only motivate the listener in one way: They’ll change the station. Just as a joke builds to its punch-line, your radio spot should be orchestrated dramatically. You can have loud stuff in there, sure, but there is no “loud” without soft, just as there is no “shadow” without “light.” So this advice applies to visuals, audio, composition, copywriting… pretty much everything. It’s hard enough to hone your business message in the first place; don’t stumble when it’s time to deliver it. Speaking of screaming, you know to avoid ALL CAPS IN THE WRONG CONTEXT, RIGHT? Ouch. A final disclaimer Our disclaimer is this: Avoid disclaimers! “Oh,” you might say, “that’s a legal consideration, not a copywriting consideration.” We beg to differ. As soon as your reader sees that asterisk, their guard goes up. They’re on the defensive. Transform the disclaimer copy into body copy. Especially for stuff that’s easy to transform thus. Here’s an example from the past several years: Over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical products used to make claims about their efficacy—and then disclaim it with an asterisk. So—quick!—you look at the bottom of the ad, and there’s the disclaimer: “Use as directed,” with FDA fingerprints all over it. In a word, huh? Why think of that as a negative—something to hide? The pharma companies, and their ad agencies, eventually figured this out; the new copy would read (whether in print or as, say, a TV voiceover), “When used as directed, this product cures all ailments…” What’s so scary about that? Need help avoiding that next creative turkey? Contact us today. You’ll give thanks that you did. |
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