So few people in the creative design industry understand mood and timbre. A brochure, a video, a website, even a billboard ought to have atmosphere. It ought to pull the audience into its world. It ought to feel real. Really real. It’s something all of us should work on harder.
“No caffeine for the last ten years. I only have two speeds, and the third speed, on caffeine, is not a pretty one.”
Turn to any prominent blog online today and you’re likely to get lots of encapsulated nuggets of knowledge. Top 10 lists of what you “ought” to be doing. Lazily cast off quotes about how the “right way” to do things.
Good writers persuade, they use turns of phrase. Better writers build cases for their arguments, and discredit the opposition. In the face of smart, savvy, educated writing, the people who are adrift and looking for answers are prone to grab onto the life raft thrown them by the grounded, benevolent writers. But lets consider:
“Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.” Steven Covey -author, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery -author, The Little Prince.
Hmm. Which one is right? Which one is more persuasive to you? They’re almost directly contradictory- but they both make sense in certain situations. In your life you’ll probably run into both.
It might seem simple, it might seem obvious- but the next time you run into a persuasive argument on a persuasive blog think about a few things:
Advice can be just as harmful as it is useful. Regardless of who is saying it.
“For all of the thrills that must come with growing a large business, I have to say that small ones are closest to my heart. Typically I find the people within them closer to the action, and that’s almost always more fun than being around middle managers who seem more interested in office hockey pools. I like it when the dream is alive, and the people in the room are engrossed in the work at hand. That’s where the magic is, and I feel like these are my people.” -Eric Karjaluoto From the ever growing ebook Speak Human.
via Swis Miss
The new Letterhead & Logo Design 11 from Rockport features several Entermotion projects. Scooper Joe’s and our side project Paste Interactive picked for logos. And Layla Grayce for the full print Identity system. Fun stuff. See the shots after the jump:
