Summer Reading: What's the Big Idea?
Originally published July 24, 2020
Much of my role as a creative leader revolves around helping the designers on my team develop, refine, and pitch ideas. How to best generate ideas to creatively solve business and communication problems, then nurture those ideas into workable solutions, consistently, is a challenge my team and I face every day. My own ideation process has been a work in progress my entire career—I have an idiosyncratic process that works for myself, but might not be right for everyone. Mentoring and coaching designers of all levels through their own process is an additional level of complexity, but one of the most rewarding parts of the job.
While concepts and ideas are the stock-in-trade of the creative fields, they are often like phantoms, appearing hazily in the fog, ethereal and fleeting, and can slip through our mental fingers like quicksilver. The best ideas often come from the unconscious, around which the ambiguity and uncertainty can be unsettling, to say the least.
I am increasingly interested in creative strategy, and how it is developed, rather than just being focused on tactical executions. The table at which I want a seat is the one where discussion around high level strategies take place, not the desk where the brief asking for specific tactical deliverables lands.
To learn more about the nature of ideas, and how to create them, I turned to a few books in my library that deal with this subject. Primarily written by advertising professionals, these books have shed light on the metaphysics of the capital-I Idea, and how they are created, developed, and unveiled to the world. While some of these books are recent, many are classics written several decades ago, showing that the fundamentals are eternal. Starting with books focusing on ideas, I branched out into a wider range of books exploring how designers and creators of advertising think.
A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Young Webb (McGraw-Hill, 1965/2003 ed.)
In this lecture-in-the-form-of-a-short-book, Webb, a copywriter, details a five-step method for generating ideas. Ideas, he proposes, are “new combinations of things”. He argues that new ideas come from combining specific knowledge of a product or business with general knowledge of life and the wider world in unexpected and surprising ways. Webb’s technique is doing initial research, then letting the problem and knowledge bounce around in your subconscious as you do completely unrelated activities, but being ready to snatch the idea in its embryonic form when it appears to you. Which, is some of the best advise on the topic I have found.
Idea-ology by Stanley Hainsworth (Rockport, 2010)
A book of case studies on how designers in a wide range of fields and applications generate, develop, and execute ideas. Because this is such an ambiguous and varied topic, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but rather a wide range of approaches. Well illustrated with examples of both processes and outcomes.
Several of the subjects talk about juxtaposition—how combining the known and unknown in unexpected ways is where the tension and friction happens. The designer must create the circumstances in which these juxtapositions can occur, and have the mental clarity to see and grasp them when they appear. Many also talk about recording things they see in the world through photography, sketching, or note-taking, then organizing and editing this source material before filing away for future use.
My favorite entry in this book is John Hoke II’s origin story of the use of polymer netting for Nike running shoes. Hoke’s young son put a foam net from a gift basket of pears on his foot, which piqued Hoke’s imagination of how a similar material could be used in performance footwear. We must be prepared to seize an idea when it appears unexpectedly.
The Art of the Idea, and How it Can Change Your Life by Paul Hunt (Powerhouse Books, 2009)
Written as a series of observations, this is a treatise on the nature of ideas in the metaphysical sense. Hunt writes from a long career in advertising (he is the Worldwide Creative Director at TWBA), covering a wide range of aspects of ideas: how they are born, how to nurture them, and importantly, how they die—especially in committees who fear change and leaving the old, more than they do dying a slow, inevitable death by inertia.
Design is Storytelling by Ellen Lupton (Cooper-Hewitt, 2016)
Lupton draws parallels between design and storytelling by introducing concepts such as the three-part narrative structure, the hero’s journey, and the role of emotion, and how they relate to design. She also discusses strategy and techniques such as design fiction, scenario planning, and multisensory design to show how design can go beyond the arrangement of elements and play a foundational role in establishing core narratives to applied to brands, digital products, and IRL experiences. A good read for any designer who wants to expand their thinking beyond the tactical.
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy (Vintage, 1985)
Somehow, this book doesn’t discuss social media or digital advertising at all. This guy keeps going on and on about magazines and TV, who even reads or watches anymore? I mean, what about INSTAGRAM, Ogilvy? Of course, this book was written in 1985, by one of the most successful figures in advertising…
Ogilvy has a laser-like focus on how to make advertising that sells, especially in terms of smart copy. His mantra is “Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell”. He was also a very adamant proponent of research and testing advertising to determine the most effective approach. And direct marketing. And long copy. And putting the headline below the picture. And…
A bit dated as a manual (and with some opinions and social ideas that would not fly at all in 2020), but a classic of the genre by a giant of the ad canon. I’ve had this on my shelf for nearly 15 years—I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman (School of Visual Arts/Allworth Press, 2009)
Debbie Millman’s “Design Matters” podcast was my working soundtrack for years, when my job was to make things, rather than attend meetings and lead designers. Debbie is a masterful interviewer, and the conversations are engaging and enlightening. She is particularly probing around how designers and other creative people began their journey, and how they got where they are today.
This book, which is comprised of 20 interviews with some of the top graphic designers working in the ’90s and ’00s, is quite similar in both tone and content. It was a joy to get inside the heads of so many of the designers I looked up to early in my career. A bit old guard now, but at the time this was published, it was certainly some of the most relevant designers in the field.
Debbie queries each of her subjects about how they develop their ideas; the answers are insightful and varied, showing that while there are some constant themes to ideation, the specific process is personal and idiosyncratic. My favorite is from Paula Scher: “It’s so hard to describe how things happen intuitively. I can describe it as a computer and a slot machine…”
Strategic Thinking for Advertising Creatives by Alice Kavounas Taylor (Laurence King, 2013)
A primer on developing creative strategies for copywriters and art directors who work in advertising agencies. Even though I am not one of those, I found this book quite valuable. It is structured around an 11-point creative brief that might be used for a campaign: Product, Objective, Target Market, Strategy, Proposition, Support, Competition, Mandatory Elements, Tone of Voice, Desired Response, and Media. Taylor demonstrates how to work through each step, toward a completed brief that can guide the creative direction of any campaign or project.
The book is illustrated with many examples of successful campaigns. A sample brief for an imaginary campaign ends each chapter, which is added to step-by-step until it is completed.
Taylor makes a compelling argument that a sound strategy can carry a brand for many years (illustrated by Evian Water’s “Live Young” strategy), and adapt to changing times fashion, and technologies while remaining a constant guiding light.
Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand (Chronicle Books, 2014, originally published 1947)
Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly come to appreciate Rand’s impact on American graphic design (my West Coast nonconformist instinct was typically to rebel against the Eastern establishment). This slim volume is a quick, but invaluable read, which outlines Rand’s principles and approach. Rand’s arguments are illustrated with classic examples of his early work. The photograms are particularly compelling, and a form I would love to see revived.
Although much of this book deals with Rand’s thoughts on the formal aspects of form, typography, and use of space, the opening thesis, written in pseudo-poem form—that design must serve an idea—rings as true today as it did in 1947.
