Imaginative Art

Posted by Laura

September 12, 2005

Last year, I wrote compelling copy with an attention-grabbing headline for a client’s direct mail postcard campaign. However, when the client’s designer got his hands on my copy for the first card, he put my headline over a photographic cliche.

You know the photo: two middle-aged white guys with their manicured paws firmly clasped in a power hand shake. Blue suit meets grey-pinstripe suit. White cuffs. Cufflinks, even.

Barf.

Listen, even if your target is middle-aged white guys, that picture won’t sell. It’s been done to death. At this point, it doesn’t connect emotionally, mentally, or spiritually with anyone.

That’s why we need to embrace new visual metaphors. The standard stuff is just that — standard. It’s not creative, inventive, or thought provoking. It’s not exciting enough to even register a yawn.

In this age of too much visual clutter — too much junk mail, floor show clutter, inbox clutter, etc. — you need visual images that can really excite your imagination and connect with your soul.

Give the hackneyed visuals a rest. Purge them from your PowerPoint. Banish them from your postcard campaigns. Get them off of your brochures.

Re-think your images. Do something different.

Go visit new and interesting places where you can feel a real emotional connection with what you see.

For example, I’m going to a gallery opening in my home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan this week. The gallery is called “Eyekons” and the show is called “Listening with Your Eyes” — which sounds compelling enough on its own. But go visit the gallery’s stock art section, and you’ll see that you can download stock images that are anything but average.

The site’s tagline is “art that explores religious ideas & probing spiritual questions”. You can see at a glance the difference between this site and a hundred other online stock image banks.

Eyekons is visually different. And it’s emotionally different.

I think we need more specialty, niche creative sites like this. There are too many me-too stock photos online that look exactly alike, that cater to the same tired metaphors.

No matter where you live in the world — go find a local art gallery. Give some of the large stock image sites a rest. After all, creative people live EVERYWHERE - and they don’t all work for the same large company, in the same big town.

Wherever you live, you can find art with a universal perspective….