A famous creative director said that once you find that unique "thing" about a product or service you need to tell a story about it by "flipping it on it's ear". What he meant was that we need to find an arc to our story which is unique, compelling, dramatic and memorable. After all, it's just another car, or brand of beer. How many different ways can we do the same thing? After 20 years of making the familiar and often intrinsically boring things, weird and exciting all for the sake of advertising drama maybe it's time to think again...
"....too often visual designers get preoccupied with creating the next shiny new thing. They chase clients who encourage them to surpass the latest trend, to find new ways to tell the same old story. These clients and designers produce work that may do well at award shows but often just draws more praise and accolades from their peers than from their target audience.
We all want to be recognized for our efforts and someone still needs to sell dog food. The packaging matters, as does the TV spot and the interactive website and a myriad of other visual devices that make up that so-called integrated ad campaign. This work pays a lot of salaries and it is serious business. But what if these same designers put their process to work on more challenging problems? What would happen if they were to harness their power of strangemaking at the point it intersects with their brand of sensemaking and instead of producing things that look really cool, they produce things that provoke us to think? Not just to think to be contemplative, but to actually think hard about creative new ways to solve some very old, complex problems."
"....too often visual designers get preoccupied with creating the next shiny new thing. They chase clients who encourage them to surpass the latest trend, to find new ways to tell the same old story. These clients and designers produce work that may do well at award shows but often just draws more praise and accolades from their peers than from their target audience.
We all want to be recognized for our efforts and someone still needs to sell dog food. The packaging matters, as does the TV spot and the interactive website and a myriad of other visual devices that make up that so-called integrated ad campaign. This work pays a lot of salaries and it is serious business. But what if these same designers put their process to work on more challenging problems? What would happen if they were to harness their power of strangemaking at the point it intersects with their brand of sensemaking and instead of producing things that look really cool, they produce things that provoke us to think? Not just to think to be contemplative, but to actually think hard about creative new ways to solve some very old, complex problems."
(from the Coda for my master's paper on visual sensemaking Sept. 2014)
