Logos may be just the beginning, but they’re a good beginning. A logo has to work really hard for you. As your sponsor and ambassador, it goes where you can’t and reaches people you’ll never see.
How will it look on the side of a building? On a favicon above your website?
Many ways exist to stay top of mind without being irritating. Like this opera singer who wanted his portrait done digitally, so he could email a postcard over the New Year to his clients all over the world.
Originally a few paper jets made from the calender of the previous year featured, but these were discarded in order to leave the basic portrait free for embellishing with different seasonal themes throughout the year.
Everywhere has their favourite way of spreading the news about their business. There’ve been lo-tech ideas, e.g. your logo on top of your car since so many people are idly gazing down onto city streets. Then there’s word of mouth…
From that it’s a short hop to the murmuring holograms in Bladerunner accosting every likely commuter. Ideas flow constantly because we want people to know about us and what we do and why we should do it for them. Naturally, I have a few things to show in that area as well.
There was this grim feeling about education long ago, when children were best not seen having fun.
At one point, I was adamantly against this education-soaked material kids were being offered in South Africa. Nothing just for entertainment. Everything had to carry a moral or information that was for the child’s betterment. ‘An improving book’… straight out of Victorian times.
Then I did a writing course for children’s books, and it seems that children yearn to learn, to be like their parents or older siblings. This is amazing, and I’m relieved to learn that. There’s still a call for making it fun though.
Prisoners deciding on distance learning; staff members attending workshops; government officials bettering their skills – all can spread huge ripples through the well-being of an entire society.
So retrenchments ca be avoided by large and small companies and disaster averted. But with the best intentions on both sides of the clipboard, most people still retain only 10% of what was learned, long term. Here graphics and humour capture the synapses other methods cannot reach. If not humour, then elegant, simple and clear will prevent fuzzy-mode.
Simplify complicated things and make them accessible, digestible and even beautiful. The samples shown in this section (click below) involve different things like maps; an explanation by an engineer of how his spaceplane flies; how a poem can distill something profound into a few words and some fun flipchart diagrams.
Almost* every made thing began with a line. And words are wonderful, but nothing is as immediately accessible to more eyes than an image.
An outsider may not understand the religious and cultural significance of an intricate Kama Sutra sculpture on a temple in India, but they’ll get the gist of it.
People quarrel about what art is, but most would agree that nothing says it like a few explanatory lines. Not of text, no. Sit down at the back there.
So – allow me please to help. If you don’t draw unto yourself pictures, then draw unto yourself this artist.
*‘Almost’, to shut up the whataboutery.
Video remains the most compelling medium to grab people’s attention. Our animal instinct to watch a moving object remains strong.
A year or so ago, Swala Aerospace needed to put together a movie on YouTube and we collaborated on that. There’s more under Case Studies/Swala Aerospace on the Home page.
Also online and turning up the volume are a couple of my own YouTube and Vimeo movies.
Social media keeps me busy; there are a few Facebook pages I run or have helped with, and you will find them Beyond the Button.