Give Me Just A Little More Time

‘Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.’

Dylan Thomas

It would have been Dylan Thomas’ birthday this week and looking through some of his great quotes this one caught my eye and caused me to smile inwardly and raise an eyebrow. Though not simultaneously – that would be too much like multi-tasking!

Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s an experience thing, but I remember when it was harder to put a presentation or proposal together, when we couldn’t just bash our thoughts onto a keyboard and then drag and pull them into some kind of order through the wonder of PowerPoint. And I think that was a good thing.

For all the fantastic things that technology has done, and I’m certainly not a Luddite, maybe it allows us to commit our thoughts a little readily. To paraphrase the poet, maybe PowerPoint lends ‘some sort of certainty’.

The ability to work more quickly hasn’t made us cleverer, the creative process is still just that – a process, and like all good things it takes time.

This isn’t misty eyed Madmen inspired nostalgia, but I remember the time when we used to present off boards too, when we used hand crafted rather than mac ‘visuals’.

These were great, because you could change the piece then and there, in front of the client’s very eyes, as they fed back on your concept. You may end up walking out of the meeting with a completely different piece from that with which you walked in, but that was great because it was a collaborative process and one which was shaped by the business issue we were facing.

Because it was a concept rather than a finished piece, the feedback we got was at that conceptual level. We were all able to look at the ‘big picture’ and get the proposition and key messaging right before we moved to the finite detail. It wasn’t black or white, right or wrong, it was interpretative and it was more likely to be ‘right’ before it moved on to its many and varied executions.

A knock on effect of work looking so ‘finished’ nowadays is that the feedback is often very ‘literal’ and detailed, and sometimes misses the point for that. Too often, we hear too early in the process ‘the logo is too big/not big enough/too bright/not bright enough etc.’ and bypass the ‘is the concept and messaging right’ stage.

As a brand consultancy we often deal in ‘big’ questions that require ‘big’ answers – your brand is the truth of your business after all – and we make sure that we spend time working with you ensuring that the big picture is right, before we focus on the detail.

Maybe it’s because we learned the hard way, because we still see what we do as a blend of art and science, or maybe it’s just because we care that we think this stuff is important?

First published on www.taylorobrien.com