WHY? Why? Why? Is IMAGE so important?

Didn't Mom always say, “Be Yourself”? ‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” “You can’t tell a book…” yadda, yadda, yadda, and so on. So why is it we place so much emphasis on image?

It’s like this. Until you can taste that beautifully, decadent looking chocolate cake on a dessert cart, you have no idea whether it will live up to its image. You haven’t a clue whether you’re about to enjoy the culinary experience of a lifetime, or a mouth full of floor-wax! It’s the creamy appearance of the filling between the soft spongy layers, (yum) and the rich looking icing, that attracts you. Before you can actually smell it and taste it, all you have to go on is how it looks. “The look” creates expectations. Our metaphorical “cake” could be truly wonderful without any special “effects” and experience would certainly provide the proof we need.

But who would know?

Without the visuals to get our attention, why would we bother to take the first bite? Maybe the most delicious dessert, or the most exquisite perfume, or well designed and built car, or the best sound system, or safest playground equipment really are good enough to sell themselves – but first, they must get your attention! That’s the point. A product should live up to the expectations it creates, but to get you to know it exists - it MUST GET YOUR A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N!

So, image isn’t everything, but you have to start somewhere.

Apparently I’m a member of Generation Jones. Who Knew?

I remember being fascinated by the Hippy, Afro, MOD, and psychedelic culture that was so pervasive in 70’s media (including the social changes). My high school and college-aged cousins were immersed in it - passionately engaging each other, and our “elders” no less - in their Dashikis and enormous ‘fros. It was all too COOL. From ages 8 through 11, I was thoroughly impressed. (I didn’t have any older siblings, so my knowledge of teens was minimal and second hand.) When I reached that transformational age for myself, I had an epiphany. Coolness could be as much for some an “acquired” persona - a method of self-marketing. For others, it is the authentic result of self-realization.

My Baby Boomer cousins and I are genealogically speaking, of the same generation. But I can’t identify with or claim the cultural trappings of the 60’s as my own, even though I was there. By the time we “late-Boomers” were teens ourselves, the revolutionary concepts that emerged and were embraced by our older cousins, were climaxing for us. The carriers of the Anti-Establishment message were beginning to get…well…established and many props from the theater of social change were quickly co-opted for commercial purposes, which diluted some of their impact, but also allowed some to become mainstreamed.

With all the talk recently about the influence of “Baby Boomers” on many aspects of today’s culture, it needs to be clear whom we’re referring to. What assumptions/expectations accompany that label?

This post at bozellthinking.com on the Generation Jones describes the phenomenon so clearly…

The Body as Billboard: Your Ad Here

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

Published: February 17, 2009

TERRY GARDNER, a legal secretary in California, returned home from work recently to find two police officers waiting. They said her brother had told them he thought she might be having a breakdown because she had shaved her head.

Rita Thomas and Rob Powers were among 30 people who agreed to advertise Air New Zealand on their bald heads last November. They were paid in cash or free tickets to New Zealand.

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Popular Brochure Design Trends

brochure trends
by Lynne Saarte January 30, 2009

Are you creating a design for brochure printing? Do you want your color brochure printing designs to be eye-catching and effective? For many months now, we have been looking at brochure designs and have been noting a couple of basic trends that are popular for most designers. These range from changing the overall shape of the brochure to simple effects such as using textures.

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Hispanic Marketing Trends

Written on January 27th 2009

Authorby Edward Barrera |

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ADOTAS — In a survey of Hispanic marketing, a large amount of marketers say that they do no create different versions of their promotions based on dialect and colloquialism.

Two out of three Hispanic marketers also do not create different versions of their promotions for different US locations, according to the Direct Marketing Association report, “Hispanic Direct Marketing: Techniques and Best Practices.” One out of two marketers report that the majority of their Hispanic-specific promotions are written or spoken in both Spanish and English. One in five say that most of their promotions are in English only or that they have separate English and Spanish language versions.

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What is graphic design?

“Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by many disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, science and politics and performance.

Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children's chubby board books.

Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of the Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, postage stamps and food packaging, fascist propaganda posters and brainless junk mail.

Graphic design is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demands the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive or somehow memorable.

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.”

- Jessica Helfand

© 2008 AIGA

View the source of this quote and its video >..