Overview
The eventual merging of television and the internet means that the advertising world as we know it is ending and new possibilities beginning. The fact that powerful equipment and technology is more affordable than ever before is even better news. How can we as creatives take full advantage of these opportunities in order to create better work, make more money and love what we do for a living?
The following are a few simple questions and answers that have helped me focus on how to create engaging interactive experiences…The answers would obviously go into greater depth with the help of visual examples and my personal take on what is usually a dry study conducted by old, stinky teachers with little hands-on experience.
1. What do users want?
-To be entertained…More specifically to laugh, to be fascinated, surprised and sometime even to disgusted! As has often been said, people love a good story… from the absorbing, epic tale all the way down to the hilarious 2 second on-click animation. Tell it right and people will sit up and take notice. Something that makes an experience even more delicious is if it has the distinct personality of the creator…The sometimes sweet , sometimes acrid taste of originality.
(Examples and discussion)
2. Originality…how?
A billion books have been written on the creative process and I am not about to embark on another one. I will run through three simple steps that have helped me a great deal over the years:
a) Brief
Take a 2 day vacation from your computer and get to grips with the brief. If you are in direct contact with the client camp outside his house and eat his brain. If you are further down the food chain in a vast advertising juggernaut then eat the brain of your creative director and account handler. The key is to boil the project down to one key sentence or idea that sums up what the client wants to say about their product.
(Examples and weird tales from personal experience)
b) Inspiration
Here I will provide a list of ideas and tactics that have always helped me, and few of them have anything to do with the internet. Breeding the results with the ideas of others and then breeding those with new ones will, well, make your mind a funny, but original place to be. (Examples and discussion)
c) Selling it
Some projects will not leave a lot of room for originality and inspiration, so the great idea you come up with may face the firing squad from the get-go.
This will be addressed in a short monologue entitled:
“How to sell the bastards what they think they can do without.”
3.Where to begin?
The age old question…I will provide a list of strategies and stories that helped me go from a lowly lackey doing HTML templates in photoshop to the guy art directing sites in which people get beheaded by chainsaws and eaten by vultures.
Above all this presentation would be about keeping things simple and focused, enabling the average creator to excel in their chosen field.
