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.
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