Our last blog post was about seeing “The Big Picture.” I realize that this is what the “big guys” get paid the “big bucks” for… but even if you are a freelancer, it should be something you strive to develop. If you are at an agency of 500, sure.. the Creative Director get’s to sit around all day and dream up ideas, and make his peons do them… Don Draper is cool, and that’s fine. But if you are a freelancer, it ‘s your job to concept, create, follow through, and deliver.
The concept does not have to be difficult, and it doesn’t even have to cost a lot of money. It just needs to accomplish the goal at hand (if you don’t have a goal for the project, maybe you should start there).
We recently did a project that I think is a good example of this. It was a simple CD packaging project, but I think it came out nice. We went in to the project knowing what the finished piece was going to look like. For the photography, we knew what the lighting needed to look like, AND we knew that we were going to be cutting all of the images out, so it didn’t matter what the backgrounds looked like (thus the wonderful orange ladder).
Here is an example of the shots out of the camera:
Here is an example of the almost finished artwork:
Big difference huh? It is all about the concept. We have to see the big picture from the very beginning.
6:48 pm on November 4th, 2010
Good thinking. This is what Stephen Covey stated as one of his main precepts….”Always begin with the end in mind.” It seems like such a simple concept. The best things in life usually are simple. However, it is amazing to me how many businesses and businessmen take what has begun to be known as the “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to every day work. They set artificial deadlines and the deadlines themselves become so important that they just end up throwing things together with very little thought of whether it will work or whether it will accomplish the goal or whether this step in the process will work with the next step in the process. I’m glad to see that in this world there are still young minds that know how to think and know the importance of starting a project with the end in mind. It truly does make everything work so much better.