Paul Merrill
Creativity is elusive sometimes. When you reach the bottom of your cup, it can be hard to find inspiration.
One new direction is to think the opposite of the way you would normally think. The designers of this brochure, circa 1995, used a red car and primary headline bar to illustrate Green – the complete opposite.
And it worked. If the designers had used a green car and a green headline bar, the result would be … boring.
My uncle snail-mailed me this letter to the editor he recently wrote. He was thrilled to see his name in print. I have wondered what makes some of us enjoy that recognition. Here are a few ideas why:
By the way, I appreciate his point in the letter. I am very frustrated when I see the numbers spinning past so fast. ($10,000 is added to the US national deficit every second.)
Our culture tends to have knee-jerk reactions. As eBooks have been on the rise, many people say the printed book will die. It is very true that paper mills are closing and that physical book sales are way down. But I predict that the printed page will continue for many years.
Moving from physical artifacts to digital artifacts is a major trend. It is so much cheaper to produce an eBook than to print a paper book. Physical books may become a luxury item. Ironically, companies that do very small print runs are on the rise. People still value something they can hold and smell.
Maybe posters will all turn digital, kind of like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. A problem: the shoot-from-the-hip aspect is much harder to do digitally. (Have you tried to hire a hacker lately? I’d guess that it would be expensive to get someone to hack into a Times Square billboard.) People with some glue and 50 printed sheets can plaster a city center pretty quickly.
So don’t rule out the printed page – just yet.
I found this card on the parking lot of a Target store.
Observation: The author was older than 50, from the handwriting style.
Questions:
1. Did the author go back to their home and create the card or did they have some in their car, just waiting for such situations?
2. Did the bad parking person pick up the card and bring it with them to Target?
3. Did it fall out of their purse or pocket?
4. Did the bad parking person change their evil ways?
Last fall we went to Aspen for a weekend getaway. (We did not take a private jet – just our minivan.)
One evening meal was at a fairly humble pizza place. I loved their drinks menu: “Beer: $3, Good beer: $4.”
All too rarely do we communicate that bluntly. It’s a good thing to do so, as long as we don’t hurt others in our blunt communication.
One friend observed, “You get mad at things, I get mad at people.” She said it in a complimentary way. (And I thanked her.)
If you’ve never been to a Big Lots store, you need to. It’s a lot like a dollar store, only they have a wide variety of stuff you won’t find elsewhere. Like Belgium Cookies.
My sister and her family live in Belgium. You can’t buy Belgium Cookies there. Which reminded me of when we lived in England. “English muffins” were not to be found. “Muffins?” Yes. (Same phenomenon.)
What is an “inside/outside” term that you’ve experienced?
I love IKEA. But they did not get their trash cans right. What are blue recyclables and what are green recyclables?
If I’m the only one with that question, no problem. My guess is that others might be confused too. Many cumulative staff hours must have been spent on explaining which kind of objects go into each bin. And many people probably were just confused and threw recyclables into the trash bin.
The very simple solution would be to have diagrams of types of objects that go into each bin.
Bicycles are all over Oxford, England. (Good thing, since there are few places to park a car!) Signs are on every surface that isn’t moving. (And some that are.)
Someone thought of combining the two – they put signs for theatre productions on old bikes that are painted totally gold.
What ways can you combine unlikely objects to get your message across?
I am amused by spam.
But I am not amused at spammers. Recently these two “young women” followed me – and they had very similar tweets, which immediately flagged the fact that they were not real people.
My question is this: do any women Twitter users who are reading this get spammy “female” followers like this? (I am just wondering if they only target males – though I did not want to click on their links to see just who they were targeting.)
For those of you who want to follow more of my thoughts along these lines, check out my archives about spam.
“Wonky” is a great word. Askew or amiss might have a close meaning, for those of you not from the UK.
Anyhow, sometimes it’s better for a thing to be slightly imperfect for it to be more interesting. In the case of this little sign, if the clear background portion were perfectly aligned with the front portion, it would be boring.
Takeaway: Can you be intentional about adding some interest to projects you are working on? Adding a tiny bit of chaos could be a good thing.
