Versatility is vital to success. The more a person can do, or know, the greater the potential for success in any discipline. It is no different in the advertising world with graphic design.
A common stumbling block in many advertising endeavors is the desire to focus too heavily on the design of one particular project without consideration for other projects that will directly correlate to the campaign or promotion. While it is common for one project to work as a springboard for others in a campaign this can create havoc down the road. A clear understanding at the outset of the vehicles or mediums the campaign will use to accomplish desired marketing goals is critical.
For instance, it would be one dimensional to focus time and energy on the creation of a visual concept for direct mail only to find out after it has been printed that a TV spot, full-page magazine ad and outdoor board need to follow that visual style. This type of scenario makes it difficult to preserve the design integrity of the campaign.
From a layout point of view there is now a kind of handcuffing that occurs, restricting all of the new projects to a design format that may not translate well to a different medium. Let’s say that the visual selected for use on the direct mail piece is an extremely horizontal photograph that uses the far left and far right areas of the image as necessary focal points for the visual concept. While this image may transform splendidly to the horizontal physical attributes of the outdoor board and a simple pan will accommodate the photo in the production of the TV spot, the vertical magazine ad suffers tremendously. The image has to be scaled down so small to fit the narrow page width. Consequently, it no longer has the visual power to intrigue the viewer. A decision must be made to either take the ad to a two-page spread or reduce the ad to a half-page or smaller ad. Either way results in costs to the client—from production design or lost impact and, therefore, lost revenue.
To avoid potentially aggravating and costly issues like the previous example it is important to always look toward the future, considering how a visual idea will translate to any medium. An effective way to accomplish this is to build a key image.
A key image consists of all of the driving visual elements (photographs, illustrations, typefaces, color palette, etc.) necessary to fulfill the visual concept in any given medium and also sets the overall design style for the campaign. No particular size or format is given to the key image to restrict it. This forces the designer and client to envision how the visual concept could be applied to other vehicles. It stages the most important question: Does this visual concept have legs? If the answer is yes, then there should be no problem in the translation of the visual concept to any medium. You end up with a versatile, “elastic” design platform capable of achieving success.
