 Our long-suffering dog. Thanksgiving is a tradition. Writing an article about what to give thanks for? Well, we’ve been doing it for so long each November, that it’s also a tradition here at Copel Communications.
Before we list what we’re thankful for, let’s turn the table on you. What are you thankful for this year? It can be big. It can be small. It can be professional. It can be personal. The thing is, there’s always stuff to be thankful for. You don’t need a national holiday to remind you. Just like you don’t need to book a spa day to take care of yourself. Or hug your kids to remind yourself that you love them. Chime in. Leave a comment. It might make you feel better; rest assured that it will make us feel great. The little things Sometimes, it can be a tiny bit of tech that makes your day nicer. We recently upgraded our AirPods, and are thankful that we can finally adjust the @#$% volume without having to reach for a phone or ask Siri. Here’s another technical marvel: A remote-controlled training collar. Our dog has a habit of running out in the middle of the night to bark at the deer; a little beep and vibration from the training collar broke him of that habit. He might still be looking at the deer at 3 a.m., but he’s not barking at them anymore. So we’re thankful for a better night’s sleep. Clearly, we’re starting small. And non-professionally. Let’s shift gears. The bigger/business things In 2024, we’re especially grateful for the power of networking. Whether it’s via in-person gatherings, Zoom meetings, LinkedIn, or forwarding a colleague’s Pitch59 card, it’s opened up new business possibilities. More importantly, it’s connected us to some really nice people. People first, business second. If you don’t like that person, you won’t like working with them. More importantly, the opposite is just as true. We’ll still reach out to, say, second-level connections on LinkedIn, and simply say “hi” to people whose profiles look interesting. It’s better than spamming them with a message-bot. Many people are understandably jaded these days, but there are still plenty of people out there who will respond with a “Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” Again: People first, business second. Saving the best for last We can’t build much suspense here, because you know what’s coming. Aside from the Big Two (having good health and being lucky enough to be in the USA), we’re grateful for our friends and family. That includes the dog. He’s been a good boy. Have a thankful-for to share? Contact us or simply comment below. We’d love to hear it.
0 Comments
 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. 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!  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. 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!  Another great photo by Karolina Grabowska 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. |
