Show and Tell Made Me Think

This Show and Tell assignment is very interesting to me. Bring in something that inspires you. Hmm, well, that got me thinking about myself as a designer. What things in my life influence my work as an artist and designer? Immediately I think of the work I have recently done at my job and how I overcome complete BS while solving irritating design issues. My place of business is a great company to work for but, as is commonplace in my experience as a graphic designer, there are great flaws with my position. First of all I am the second member of the graphic design team, which falls under the marketing department. To make a long story short I am the new guy, the other designer has been here for 9 years and has been designing for like 400. The marketing director is an IT professional by trade, knows how to manage people but knows nothing about marketing or creative services, even though he wishes he did. The summary: I get the work that the other designer doesn’t want, nothing new except the monthly specials which consist of the same copy sans the specific ad and custom graphics for a direct mail postcard, a brochure and a PDF for email blast and a grayscale version for faxing.

So this month I am designing the October Equine Special, the company I work for manufactures, packages and distributes nutritional supplement products for humans and animals, this was the horse special. So the copy is boring, I don’t write it and we are only showcasing 1 product but 3 versions. What is the incentive to buy our stuff next month? Wow, it is a fantastic gift card to Lands’ End for 50 bucks, oh joy, spend two to four hundred dollars on product and you get to buy a pair of wool socks and a mock turtleneck for free. So, how do I get the distributors or vets to buy into this sweet special, not to mention even read the piece? I have to make it interesting; eye catching and it must stand out from all the rest of the junk mail the businesses receive. Well, I already did the consumer October special, with that one I did my usual Illustrator drawings of a background that reflects the time of the year, colors, themes, consistency; fall is fall. I wanted to do a Halloween theme but they are to conservative and weird Christian for that. My challenge to make a design creative enough to make people read and conservative enough to please the “know nothings” up stairs.

Let me describe the situation a little more deeply. The equine October special was not going to take place, now it is. The deadline on the job request sheet gave me 2 weeks until drop-dead date. That gives me some time, especially since the copy has already been through legal. Not so fast guy. The pressures from above have shifted; it needs to be in proof form ASAP, what else is new? Inspiration, imagination, magic, something needs to happen. I go online and do a search for some horse themed dingbats and clipart, a good way to start, I might hatch an idea while browsing through this stuff, mostly junk but guess what: things that give me ideas! I found a decent free horse themed dingbat aptly named “Yee-haw” and I downloaded it, it may come in handy. OK, I have exhausted this means of brainstorming, and what do I do next. Simple. I hit the “images” tab on Google with “leaves” in the search bar, my other theme. There it is, my perfect inspiration for a fantastic piece. It is a logo for a condominium development somewhere in the United States. Good typography, interesting color scheme, classy font selection, cool, I have ideas brewing. Someplace to start, sometimes the hardest part of my job, can I actually hatch every cool idea directly through my own brainpower without the influence of the rest of the world? Never. In this circumstance a great idea is born out of randomly searching the Internet and viewing any number of things that that were related to my original idea for the piece’s theme, fall and horses. So I changed the color scheme, I created the heading to resemble the logo, changing and subsequently making it better and my own. Once I laid out the heading I proceeded to fill in the remainder of the content with the horse theme, although it is inspired by some Old West style graphic design that I try to incorporate whenever possible. This time around it was a logo from a condo development, I have gained inspiration for pieces by looking at architecture, album covers, beer labels, store fronts, almost everything has an idea for you to incorporate into your work but it is up to us to find it and develop that idea into solutions. So that is it, I am inspired to create any number of thing by just keeping my eyes open, you never know what will strike that cord and set you off in a creative whirlwind.