Beyond Typography

Marketing message

I attended a marketing department meeting the other day. All members of the department are required to attend. I was there because the Creative Services department, where I've been doing a job shadow for the past couple of weeks, come under the marketing jurisdiction. 

I didn't realise how many marketing people there were in the company. ScaRY!

Being marketing all the presenters were very good at public speaking and their presentations were equally as good. There was a howler that NOBODY ELSE NOTICED. An e-direct marketing person made a presentation and began by saying that everybody should have received an email entry for a prize draw, but unfortunately they used the wrong list so not everybody would have received it. WAHAHAHAHAHA! I couldn't believe it!

If you've ever been briefed by a marketing person, you'll appreciate the following vid. I first saw this last night sitting on a (delayed) train on my iPhone on the Debbie Millman blog. Hilarious.

Hello again

I'm back! Sorry for the lack of thrilling installments over the past month. Things have been rather hectic.

I've been working on rebranding the editorial products of a company that we recently acquired to bring it into line with the rest of the portfolio. Had a meeting with the relevant people and got on with it. Started off ok, followed the brief. To be honest, what they already for each report had was ok in isolation but as a suite of products needed some consistency, eg, standard colour palette, font usage, headers and footers, etc. Oh, and restyling the mastheads to incorporate the new logo. 

Got to the proofing stage and one person didn't like anything. The other people liked it. To be fair, he wasn't involved in the original briefing. When I sent him a copy of the brief he change his mind, because he realised I had answered the brief.

I have also been working on the redesign of some of our other monthly reports. Again, a detailed brief was all-important as a similar thing happened as above. I won't bore you with the details, but after some customer research, one of the person's objections (the body text was too small) was echoed by some of the customers. This has now been rectified.

A project that has been rumbling along for ages is now nearing completion: the redesign of the ICIS.com home page. This has been a long and arduous road. The brief was again all important, not least because it wasn't nailed until half-way through!

The point is, it really pays off if time is spent up front getting the brief sorted. I am really wary of people who say "I'll leave it to you". They generally end up saying "that's not what I was looking for".