Creative Communications Workshop

Why does your organization exist? What is the essence of its value proposition? How is what it does significant?

I'll lead you on a journey to the very core of your organization’s purpose in order to discover its truest identity. We'll then let that insight guide everything that we design and communicate online.

It's all about spreading into your organization, department or team a vision for person-centered information design that sparks the imagination, accelerates insight and releases potential. When we've completed your creative communications workshop, your result will be a new understanding, a new direction and a new attitude:

 

  • Attract - Intriguing, relevant, welcoming—your brand is beautiful.
  • Inform - Your content pushes and pulls people along the paths of understanding.
  • Invoke - Your audiences are infused with possibility and bursting with action. 

  • Aspire - Many have wished for greatness, but you have made greatness wish for you.
  • Affect - On our expedition to your very core, you uncover your truest self.
  • Evoke - You move from “let’s do this online” to “let’s be this online.”

  • Expand - Horizons, awareness, ROI—you grow from normal, past possible, to incredible.
  • Strengthen - You do what’s right for your audiences—and they gladly reciprocate.
  • Guide - Visitors are planets and you're GPS satellites; isn't the view from orbit amazing?

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Excerpts from TRAIN OF THOUGHTS: Designing the Effective Web Experience

Artfulness in Creative Execution—Doing Due Diligence

Why are so many attempts to apply creativity to online resources ineffective? Why are so few concepts—even those with really serious creative potential—rarely artfully realized?

The reason is that the creative process is often misunderstood, rushed, or altogether ignored. Additionally, experience designers often emphasize the wrong sorts of things. When they attempt to make the wrong aspects of their presentations interesting, this is generally an indication that they lack insight regarding the real role of creativity in Web experience design (see Chapters Five and Six). As a result, even potentially good concepts remain unrefined, undisciplined, and pedestrian.1 The opposites of pedestrian efforts are the inspired and skilled efforts of talented people. Because the practice of good process governs skilled effort, the solution to most creative confusion is the combination of accomplished people and a really great creative process.

To be ultimately successful in creative concepting and artful execution, designers must practice due diligence by iteratively executing their creative concepts. Solid design principles, as well as the qualifi- cation that comes through stakeholder validation, must govern each cycle of planning, execution, and evaluation. But what are the steps that go into planning? What’s involved in creative execution? What are the proper methods of validating creativity?

These are the issues that we’ll explore in this chapter.

10.00.01 To arrive at artfully executed expressions of genuine creativity, the entire creative process must continually be zeroing in on solutions that are both productive and original.

For a concept to have the quality of being productive, it must be appropriate for the audience and the need. For a concept to be original, it must be the result of diligent research, understanding, and interesting departures from the familiar. We’ll deal with the appropriateness issue in the remainder of this notion. We’ll deal with the originality issue in the next.

Appropriateness is in essence a social construct, and, as mentioned throughout Part One of this book, is governed by four principles of polite and helpful communication which are: quality, quantity, relevance, and clarity (Q-Q-R-C). Isn’t it interesting that beyond the emotional role that aesthetics and creativity are often understood to play, there’s a strong social role as well? What are the implications?

Well, for one thing, it means that to be successful in mainstream online communications,2 creativity can’t be viewed as an outlet for an artist’s self-expression but rather as an essential conduit for a patron’s self-resonance. Remember that one of the keys to success with experience design is to properly reinforce the social, emotional, and intellectual identities of the people interacting with a Web enter- prise. When experiences are oriented more toward the designer than to the audience—and informed designers know this—the result is that online messages are difficult for audiences to easily interpret.

Far from being polite and helpful, this is rude and inconsiderate behavior because it forces people to reflect on unproductive aspects of the design in order to decipher meaning.3 Ironically, this is the same problem that occurs with the boring text-based solutions that leading usability gurus are pushing. Both practices, although in dif- ferent ways, present perceptual as well as interpretive problems that the people within an online audience must grapple with.

Instead, appropriate communication must be like a helping hand of friendship that’s extended to indirectly communicate the message:

“I’m here for you. I’m understandable, embraceable, worthwhile, and enjoyable for you to interact with. I’ll make you a deal. If you spend the next few moments with me, I’ll enrich you in ways that far exceed the investment of time and effort that you’re making in me.”

Yep, to be successful, our expressions of creativity in mainstream communications must indirectly convey all of that information. The good news is that when creativity is on target, it communicates this message almost instantly.

10.00.02 The other component of creativity, which is originality, can only be arrived at by three means—through accident, through epiphany, or through horizontal thinking.

Since by definition neither accidents nor epiphany can be planned, it’s best to rely on horizontal thinking—which can lead to wonderful accidents and epiphanies! As mentioned in 07.00.02, this horizontal thinking takes us to starting points that are not mundane. Vertical thinking, which is logical, deductive/inductive reasoning (07.00.01), can then be used to help us comprehensively uncover the unique possibilities that horizontal thinking has helped us to newly discover.

The key to the success of these original starting points is this. These possibilities must be unique enough to be interesting, but they must not be such a great conceptual departure from what is known and understood by the audience that they require great difficulty in bridging the conceptual gap (see 03.00.09). The unique creative concept must still branch out of something already present in people’s conceptual framework. Remember that while on the one hand people get bored when they’re forced to absorb things that are mundane because they’ve become too familiar, on the other they get frustrated if they’re compelled to absorb things that are too great a stretch from that which is already familiar. The trick is to find the appropriate balance.

10.00.03 Although arriving at a genuinely creative solution to an experience design problem isn’t difficult work, it is nonetheless reached by working toward a valid solution.

Far from being hard work, the creative process can be both extremely enjoyable and rewarding. The point, however, is that it is still work— work that takes time, energy, talent, and dedication. What’s more, arriving at solutions that are truly creative is not the result of aimless, haphazard work. Ask anyone who’s acknowledged as a successful designer or artist, such as Hillman Curtis. It doesn’t matter what the genre, those who are successful base their success on specific processes that they know and follow, and that provide them with consistent results. Therefore I contend that, although genuine creativity often arrives via epiphany or accident, it can most reliably be arrived at by faithfully following an effective process.

While more than one process can be effective, the process that I recommend for the creative aspects of Web experience design is both a symbiotic parallel and a component microcosm of the larger SPEED process we’ve explored in Chapters Seven through nine. In essence, before moving on to a subsequent cycle of the iterative, creative- execution process, the creative team should first work to ensure that the work is conforming to the following appropriateness and originality principles:

  • Creative development is being governed by the experiential needs of the people who will be interacting with the online resource.
  • Creative direction isn’t going in an arbitrary direction for expediency or ego’s sake but instead, is developing based on meaningful rationale.
  • Creative direction isn’t slipping into an autopilot mode simply because the project must conform to an organization’s other branding or advertising initiatives.
  • Media are being crafted in such a way as to attract and hold the attention of the people in a particular audience set or subset.

Before we dive into the specifics of this process, let me reiterate two points. First, try really hard not to sell the process short by giving in to either your own or your management’s impatience. Second, don’t become enamored with early ideas. Instead, let the creative process outlined in the remainder of this chapter do its work. The results will be far better than would have been the case had you moved forward based on your initial concepts.