The Transformation of Visual Design
George Shewchuk
moving Beyond design for design's sake
A very successful advertising creative director said to me that once you find that unique "thing" about a product or service, you need to tell a story about it by "flipping it on its ear". What he meant was, that we need to find an arc to our story that is unique, compelling, dramatic and memorable. After all, it's just another car, or brand of beer. That so-called unique thing is probably just a little widget that every other product has in some other form or another. 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. Creative provocation has been democratized, it's no longer just in hands of the "creative department". The net is one big messy gallery of amazing, as well as stunningly inane, creative work.
"....too often [professional] visual designers [and creative types of all stripes] 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 draw more praise and accolades from their peers rather than from their target audience. [Who, for the most part don't care and hit that little "x" or "skip-ad" button].
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 is serious business. But what if these same creative individuals put their process to work on more challenging problems? What would happen if they were to re-channel their creative energy away form producing things that look really cool to producing 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 that have plagued humanity well before Madison avenue existed." -- from the Coda (with edits) of my Master's major research project: OCADU 2014