the fruits of imagination

Handmade

There's been a big trend around for a while towards all things arts & crafty: knitting, scrapbooking, deconstructed textiles, and sites like etsy.com where you can buy and sell anything handmade.  But over the last little while it also seems to have crossed over into world of professional design, film, video, and advertising. 

After years of reliance on Photoshop and CGI animation, all of a sudden there seems to be a counter-trend going on recently towards the rough instead of the slick.

The nice folks over at Influx posted on a similar thought a few days ago.

For example the cover of Esquire magazine this month features this hand-written cover.

Michel Gondry started playing with cool handmade stop-motion techniques a while ago (including my favourite video ever), but it's gone more mainstream of late.  Like this video by the Pocket Dwellers from earlier this year with lots of interesting design using ink and paper.

And for the promotional campaign to his upcoming film Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld deconstructs the whole animation process with live actors in bad costumes (what's funny is apparently the movie itself actually will be full CGI animation, this film was only made as a trailer).

As they note at Influx (where they have some other great examples), the idea seems to stem from a desire "to demonstrate that human beings were involved in the creative process. It is interesting that this happening at the same time as creativity is becoming more democratic." 

So it seems like all the "unprofessional" creativity expressed by people on MySpace and flickr and YouTube - all the webcam films and picture-a-day videos - has seeped into the collective design consciousness, and is starting to change our expectation of what professional creativity can look like.  Which seems to me to be a good thing.

What do you have memorized?

               

                                

Memorization is an interesting thing.  I bet we all have some things memorized: a favourite poem, an exchange of dialogue from a movie or a TV show, song lyrics, a monologue from a play, a memorable speech or quotation.  And those things probably say a lot about us.  We've either taken the time to commit them to memory, or we've spent so much time with them that they've been internalized.  So they're meaningful in some way. They tell a story about us.

What do you have memorized?  I bet that would be an interesting question to ask in research.

Images via spell with flickr, but you already knew that.

Corporate blogging

A while ago I wondered aloud why more agencies weren't blogging, which prompted some interesting discussion.  If anyone is thinking about starting a blog, here is some excellent advice for how to approach it from an article by Mark Kingdon of ThreeMinds @ Organic in CMO magazine.   I heartily second everything he says.

Yours truly?

Matt - you're not alone.  There was an article in the NY Times yesterday on email sign-offs, and how people perceive huge differences between "Sincerely" and "Best" or "Warmly" and "Kind regards."  Apparently some people think there's a heirarchy of sign-offs, and have some they love or hate.  Some people even fret over whether a reply from a colleague was meant as a brush-off or was inappropriately affectionate.

Is this really something people think about?  Clearly, I hadn't thought about this before.  So here's my open apology: I'm truly sorry if I've ever sent you an email that made you think I was mean or was harrasing you or something.  I'm really quite nice.  I like babies.  And cats.

Unfortunate e-mail subject line

From Apple's e-mail list this morning.  Think it was supposed to say "smothered with love" or something like that?  Because as it reads right now, it sure doesn't make me want to give a Mac.

Windows, secrets, and glimpses

I keep meaning and forgetting to post about this lovely site that I heard about via Ben called The view from your window.  It's based on a simple idea: send in a photograph of the view out your window.  Your photo gets posted on the site.  And now there are pictures from windows all over the world.  It makes for very compelling viewing. 

I think it works for the same reasons as PostSecret.  We can enjoy them passively as viewers because they give us brief glimpses into others' lives, which can be surprising in their beauty, comforting in their banality, and intriguing in their details.  The glimpses are necessarily incomplete, so they require us to imagine what lies outside the little that is shown, who the people are, what the rest of the story is.  This makes them interesting.

But these sites also encourage active participation (not that I've sent in a picture yet).  They give us all an easy and relatively risk-free way to express ourselves creatively, give our creations a public forum, let us compare our effort to what others did with the same task, and make us feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves.

This is probably a good starting place for soliciting user-generated content (or whatever we're calling it these days): make sure you understand how you'll reward both passive and active participation.

Image is of Greet Roger's window on The View From Your Window.

Fortune cookie wisdom

   

Mousebrains

Just came across an interesting tool for idea generation called Mouse Brains, specifically designed for marketing & advertising problems.  It's basically a lateral-thinking engine. You enter the brand/category, a few benefits, some information about the target, and a few challenges/obstacles.  Then it randomly combines those in lots of different ways.  They won't all be useful or even make any sense, but it can be a good start.

From the mouths of babes

I spent this afternoon doing a workshop on advertising literacy with an elementary school.  The kids were aged 5-11.  I'd never done this before, and it was really fun (though quite tiring).

First, I asked them to tell me what they thought advertising was.

Their answers:

"sometimes it's misleading or spam"
"it's when you make a video"
"anything that tries to get you to buy it"
"when you turn on the TV and it goes to a commercial"
"when they use something popular to sell their product"
"telling you about something"
"subliminal messages"
"they're almost everywhere"
"something that corrupts you to buy more things"

Taken together, that's about the best description of this industry I've ever heard.  Brilliant.

Then we talked about different things that can be advertised (products, services, movies, politicians, charities, etc).  And different things that advertising tries to do (get you to think something, to feel something, to do something, etc). 

Then we deconstructed some print and some TV ads.  We worked through some questions as we looked at each one, like "who made this?" and "what sorts of people is it meant for?" and "what do they want me to think/feel/do?" and "what techniques are they using to get their message across?"  They were surprisingly good at it.  These kids were really media-savvy and smart.  They weren't afraid to reject the premise of an ad or question the credibility of a brand promise.  They could decode multiple levels in an ad extremely well.  It was kind of scary.  But it made me quite hopeful for the future.

For a final exercise, I had them split into groups and design an ad themselves.  The product I had them advertise was their school: how would they convince someone else to go there?  That was really fun.  I didn't give them any further instructions, and I didn't know what to expect, but in the end it wasn't much different from being in an advertising agency creative review session. 

There was the rational, long-copy, list-the-product-features concept:

There was the emotional appeal:

There was the hard-sell, call-to-action approach (with excellent use of white space):

There was the "attack the weaknesses of the competition" concept (the picture is of a kid being bullied):

And finally the pure corporate image concept:

 

If you don't already do so, spend some time with kids.  It's wonderful.

VP of Common Sense Revisited

Watching TV last night and an ad for the new Mazda CX-7 came on. (Go to Videos.)  The tagline: "The SUV you never saw coming."  And, being an SUV, it didn't have the handling to swerve and avoid you?

I only wish they'd  incorporated the recently very overused construction, "You're walking along.  And then suddenly, it hits you..."