I’ve always wondered why the web, which is a medium perfectly tailored to be perfectly targeted, so often carries advertising that is not. True, people don’t like to be spied on, and rarely leave the true information about what they earn in a year on some form they have to fill out – if they even bother filling it...
I just read a great interview with illustrator/animator Kao Lee Thao. Kao mentions that the one theme that resonates in her work is the swirl, ‘…the swirl is a symbol of proportional perfection but what I’m drawn to more is the visual appearance of having no beginning or end is could easily travel on forever. A swirl has an...
Outfoxing the Small Business Owner: Crafty Techniques for Creating a Profitable Relationship, by Gene Marks (2005, ISBN 1-59337-157-8) is worth reading if you’re thinking of freelancing. Small businesses make up the vast majority of potential clients, and the approaches you’ll take to work with them profitably are different from those you’ll take with large corporate clients. I’ve worked with...
I am among the last generation of copywriters who sat with art directors and designers as they sliced into type galleys to hand-kern letters, adjust word or line spacing, or piece together new words and sentences. “Can we cut seven characters out of this copy block?” they’d ask, and I’d take up the challenge, think of another way to...
When the ideas flow, concepting is fun. When they don’t, I grind away over award books, archives, and stock photo sites producing page after page of tedious, trite, irrelevant, stupid ideas. Yes, I may be laying the groundwork for later brilliance. Or not. That’s why, when the deadline looms, it pays to have a few different approaches to concept...
An ad concept does not exist to win awards, or to set trends, or to break rules. It exists to solve a problem. That’s the challenge of commercial creativity. The glory part is that if you solve the problem in an unexpected way, you sometimes achieve those other objectives too. But, you have to solve the problem. And, to...
A new restaurant, La Familia, just opened in our community. It’s not upscale, by any means, so although they’ve put some effort in making it look nice, they’ve not been able to go all-out with decor, design, promotion, and so on. I was especially struck by the menu, featuring a decorative font that was popular maybe 10 years ago....
As promised yesterday, here are a few more places I often visit for inspiration. Simon’s Skip: Advert and Brochure Archive. Simon Moses graduated from the University of Brighton (UK) with a degree in Design History. His personal website houses a small collection of British ads and brochures for household appliances, mostly from the 1960s but extending into the 1970s....
Artist Geneviève Godbout is 22 years old and orginally from Canada. She graduated in the traditional animation of Vieux-Montreal and then the Gobelins in Paris. These days she’s a freelance artist, based in London. We came across this great illustration of her’s by way of Veerle’s blog and just had to share it with you all. HAPPY HUMP DAY!
When I get tired of leafing through current award books, it’s often more productive to reach deeper into the past for ideas to steal inspiration. That said, here are some classic advertising and design archives. Key things to think about as you browse the archives are: • the graphic history of iconic brands • the evolution of the relationship...
