 Halloween is still a little ways off, but it’s never too early to scare up some good creative tips, especially when it comes it comes to common pitfalls you should strive to avoid.
The imitation game This one is easier said than done. We recently were tasked with re-imagining the front cover of a soon-to-be-released book, after the publisher showed the author some pretty uninspiring preliminary designs, which we had shared with our designer. We asked our designer and his team to develop a new logotype for the book’s title, and search out some relevant stock imagery to employ as background key art. Simple enough, right? A few days later, our designer said he’d hit a wall. He sent over some designs which he and his team had started on, but couldn’t get behind. They were, quite simply, not his best work. What was the problem? He’s a talented guy. There were a couple factors at play here, but the important one was that he had unconsciously tried to improve upon what the publisher had created. And that was a creative dead-end. The publisher’s versions took the wrong approach entirely, and the designer fell into the easy trap of taking that same approach. That was the mistake. Solving this book-cover challenge required a wholly different creative approach. Once we pointed this out to the designer (easy for us, since we were creative-directing this project from a vantage point affording greater perspective), he was able to easily shift gears and churn out some brilliant designs. The moral of this story is that it’s never as obvious as you might think. This designer never sat down and said, “I’m going to copy these mediocre designs.” And their approach certainly seemed straightforward if, in hindsight, it was truly suboptimal. So it didn’t seem like a mistake to follow suit, when in fact it was. Perhaps the corollary to this moral is Question everything. Don’t get lost in space We’ve written before about the tremendous value of negative space. (It’s a good article; check it out.) Well, the opposite can hold true. That is, the lack of negative space can really wreak havoc with otherwise elegant designs. Sure, we can be talking about graphical layouts and white space here. But this also applies to audio, video, composition, copywriting… pretty much any creative endeavor. Once you commercialize your creative efforts, you’re beholden to the needs and desires of your paying client. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold the line for the greater good. Yes, yes, yes, every client will want to jam ten minutes of copy into a 60-second radio spot. In that case, you’re actually lucky: Radio stations will reject an over-length spot, so you can claim that as your defense. But it’s more than that. With modern technology, it’s relatively easy to cram, say 63 seconds of copy into a 60-second spot, or 15 copy points into an ad which has breathing room for five. There’s a cliché version of this moral, as old as Madison Avenue itself: Less is more. Trend alert Remember that book-cover assignment we’d mentioned above? Well, part of its tasking involved searching out just the right stock image. And herein lies another subtle challenge… an evil spirit to avoid. Online stock libraries are a blessing. They let you search and cull with amazing speed and surprisingly good precision. But one thing they don’t really do is self-curate. That same designer we’d mentioned above complained about the “long diagonal shadows effect” that he was simply sick of seeing in stock illustrations. It was a trend he knew too well, and was rightly sick of it, because it had already crested. It’s on its way out. You can look at stock photos or illustrations from, say, the 1970s, and it’s glaringly obvious that they’re from the 1970s. You’ll see trends—from feathered hair and wide lapels on the models, to disco-era fonts—all over the things that make them look dated. Fortunately, these don’t bubble to the top of your hit-list when you search a stock library. But less obvious ones will. Depending upon your creative assignment, you probably want to avoid something too trendy, especially if that trend is starting to ebb. This is why it pays to keep culturally current. See what’s out there now, to spot new trends. Or far better yet, start your own. Have you got a creative challenge that’s been haunting you for too long? Contact us. We live for assignments like these.
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