Don’t Be So Quick to Judge

I was recently at a large fund-raiser and was noticing the poor design on the program booklet and slides.  White block letters with a black outline and drop shadow on a red background; sponsor logos in strange white blocks intruding on the logo exclusion zones; missed light and video cues; rough transitions and poor lighting in the videos.  But then I stopped myself.  I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. I have no idea what parameters they might have had related to budget, personnel or executive requests. Maybe some executive demanded that their kid who just got a Mac design everything.  Who knows!

If someone were to go back and review the creative I have produced, I am sure they might find things to critique.  I’ve always tried to start with a solid creative brief that everyone agrees to but you still can’t eliminate the client or exec coming in at the last minute requesting the random banana.  This is my term for that surprise request that comes late in a timeline when a client or exec finally voices an expectation or new requirement they have about the creative…something they never brought up during the creative brief process. And it’s not the perfectly ripe, yellow banana. It’s the mushy brown banana that should be used for banana bread.

Banana examples:

• Changing the color of the logo to something completely out of the brand standards 
• Removing a logo you thought to be critical
• Involving a committee of non-marketing people to make creative decisions
• Requiring a surprise chart to be included after the piece is designed and near final approval. (This happened on a brochure that took a year to develop and design. It was never printed because my client couldn’t make a decision.)
• Requiring the use of the President’s son’s girlfriend as the photographer. Seriously.

Some of these I push back. Some I call ‘surrender moments’ and you just have surrender to the moment and live to fight another day. Wishing you many ‘banana-free’ creative projects in your future.