Old Comps Never Die
December 20, 2005
Infinite Beer
Gumbo
Beer Rocket
While rummaging around my hard drive I came upon these unpublished billboard mock-ups for the Empire Brewing Company. I think they are five or six years old now and Empire has long since closed down. Maybe if they used these billboards they’d still be in business? I do miss their gumbo.
These are rough and sloppy images because I only spent a few minutes apiece to mocking them up. Being able to sketch on paper and in Photoshop is an important skill for a designer or art director. You need to generate multiple ideas to figure out which ones are the strongest.
One of the things that separates me from most designers and art directors is that I rarely use stock photos. Not that stock photos are bad unto themselves — many are quite excellent — but I think they shortchange the client in the end. With today’s technology it is easy to create a very tight mock-up, using an easily downloaded stock image, that looks as good or better than the actual ad (or brochure, website, etc.) In spite of how nice the mock-up might look, it is still just another quickly done rough — to be put before the client en masse, with most of them meant to be rejected. The client will likely fall in love with one of those beautifully rendered mock-ups. And they’ll expect the final ad to match their first impression — literally. However that mock-up they’ve fallen in love with was done in fifteen minutes by a 22-year old intern and it just isn’t as refined or as thought out as it could — or should — be. The result is an expensive ad campaign hinging on only a few minutes of actual thinking….
To avoid this situation I try to sit with my clients to brainstorm with a pencil and paper. Hand drawing, as sloppy as I am, is still the best way to generate a lot of ideas rapidly. And it leaves the execution open ended enough that there is room to improve the work as you go through the process, instead of locking yourselves into the first appealing 30-second idea. By allowing the idea to be refined and improved throughout the writing, design, and photography process, you get a better ad and better end results.
I don’t buy the BS about spontaneous and magical creativity coming from out of the blue. Being creative is hard work. It’s fun too, but work is the key descriptor — and taking the easy way out by using stock photos and slick mock-ups is still a shortcut.