Can’t help wondering how we can get our hands on some packaging projects like these. North Carolina has its share of vineyards and wineries (and microbreweries). Have any friends in the wine (or beer) biz? Tell ‘em to give us a call!

by Jim Ellis
Director of Business Development

Adobe recently released a study that shed light on a “Creativity Gap” that we face globally. According to the findings gathered from respondents in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan:

• 80% of people think creativity is critical to economic growth,
• but only 25% of people believe they are living up to their creative potential
• and only 39% of people consider themselves creative

For close to 10 years, Signal’s tag line has been Creative Power. It’s a pretty reasonable moniker for describing who we are as a company. After all, we’re made up of strategic thinkers, graphic artists and technologists, who create communications programs for our clients day after day.

However, I’ll be honest. There are days I wonder how Creative Power translates to my Account Services team and to me personally. We joke internally that our group are “the suits” that take people to lunch, shake hands, close deals (think the smarmy Pete Campbell from Mad Men). Well, we joke, but I’ll admit that sometimes I feel like I’m just the sales guy…the delivery boy for Signal’s good work.

So I get it when they talk about “The Creativity Gap.”

But you know what? Whether it’s working with my clients to figure out the best solution to a problem, working internally with my production teams to juggle multiple projects, or even connecting clients who wouldn’t have otherwise met for a common goal, I am being creative every single day too. We “suits” shouldn’t feel ashamed or unworthy of owning up to that.

It’s also important to value our personal creative outlets. Beyond my work at Signal, I unleash my creativity through my songwriting. My little black songbook is one of my most treasured possessions.

The truth is, every single person on the planet is creative, and I believe “The Gap” is just a reflection of our current lack of creative self-esteem.

Please understand this distinction. You can choose to take the Creativity Gap as an unchanging fact of life, or you can choose to look at it like I do…as our collective wake-up call to realize our own creativity and do something about it.

Whether you’re one of “the suits” in an agency, or a banker, or a pizza delivery guy (I’ve been all three), you have creative power. So, I challenge all of you to work on your own creativity, and let’s close “The Gap!”

Here are some quick things you can do right now:

• Do something differently today. Take the long way home. Change the order of how you put on your clothes. Brush your teeth with the opposite hand.
• Do the most important thing first thing in the morning…don’t check email first!
• Focus. It’s proven that your brain can’t multitask, and yet we all try.
• Try some of these exercises.

This next assignment from ADF Director Jodee Nimerichter will be even more challenging.  “Signal will be designing a capital campaign brochure and marketing strategy to help ADF expand their facilities and programming in the local community,” says Woody. “We can’t wait to get started!”

This classic poster by Colin Harmon captures the fundamental challenges of the design industry in a simple Venn diagram. It’s tongue in cheek, of course, but its point is deadly serious: A design agency can’t reasonably expect to deliver creative work that is Fast, Cheap and Great. At best, they can deliver on two of those promises – and always by giving short shrift to the third.

In a tight economy, many design agencies are lowering their prices to stay competitive. But this always means that either the quality of their work is going to suffer or it won’t be delivered as quickly (because the agency has to take on a crushing volume of work to make up for slim profit margins). Likewise, if super-fast turnarounds have become an agency’s stock in trade, they either have to hike their rates (to afford the extra staff they need to meet tight deadlines) or – and this is the ultimate compromise – they have to settle for pushing out mediocre, formulaic design work.

What does this mean for clients wanting to get the best bang for their buck? I always like to counsel clients to hire the best design agency they can afford, because superior design provides a superior return on investment. As Grandpa used to say, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” But great design isn’t usually cheap, and it generally isn’t fast either – unless you’re willing to pay rush charges. It’s a mystery to many clients why excellent design costs so much more than merely competent design. But any experienced designer can tell you why: it takes twice as long and/or twice as many designers to create! Have you found an agency that can handle every rush job you throw them – without steep rates or rush charges? You can bet they’re cutting corners on quality to meet your deadlines.

So if you’re the kind of client who appreciates the benefits of great design, be prepared to pay for quality and don’t routinely insist on rush turnarounds (unless you can stomach the corresponding rush charges). That’s the approach that will deliver the best return on your investment and push your company forward.

From the water cooler to the web, the world is abuzz with talk of Pinterest, the fastest growing web site of all time.  While users are pinning everything from pot roast recipes to ultimate vacation destinations, marketers are trying to figure out how to communicate with this rapidly growing audience.

As a user, I’ve been totally uninterested. Do I have time to get involved in another social network? No.  But as a marketer, it has become apparent that I need to get my head wrapped around this new phenomenon.

For the uninitiated, what exactly is Pinterest? The concept is simple, as the site’s homepage states: “Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.” It’s basically a visual bookmarking site where users tag online images that they like and arrange them in customizable categories. The experience is analogous to tearing interesting photos out of magazines and collecting them in scrapbooks.  This makes Pinterest distinct from Facebook and Twitter’s direct interaction among friends, being more focused on the individual user’s interests such as home decorating, apparel, recipes, vacation spots and various aspirational “things I like and want.”

Let’s take a look at some recent numbers from Comscore and Google Ad Planner.

• The site registered 17.8 million users in March 2012, a 58% jump from the month before. (Keep in mind this is a closed network. It requires an invitation to join.)

• Total unique visitors for March 2012 are estimated at 31 million and an average time on site is 14:20 minutes. (As a point of reference, Facebook boasts over 800 million users and more than 23 minutes of time on site.)

• The audience skews heavily female at 74%, with 53% being between the ages of 25 and 44 years old. (It is worth noting, this female demographic controls over 80% of U.S. consumer spending.)

Obviously, opportunity exists for marketers to connect through this new online platform. But the question remains… how?

Strategically, things haven’t changed. Knowing the audience and providing them with relevant content that they can choose to interact with on their own terms is mandatory. Consumer interaction with marketing has changed and what you’re trying to communicate is only one click away from being a distant memory.  Focus on the useful and aspirational (discovery and inspiration are the core of Pinterest’s positioning statement).

Tactically, there are several top-line considerations. Pinterest is a closed community so content must be curated from the larger web. Once the content makes it into the community, the predominantly female user-base is very inclined to share. In fact, 80% of pins on Pinterest are repins (compared to Twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweets).

Pinterest has a unique interface that is completely image driven. Because of this, photography is a primary driver to encourage users to investigate and propagate content. The top pinboard categories, Home (17.2%), Arts and Crafts (12.4%), Style/Fashion (11.7%), and Food (10.5%), are well represented as visual offerings, as are products. “Products I Love” is the third most popular pinboard name, indicating that the potential to convert pins to commerce is a distinct possibility.

Brands such as Whole Foods, Real Simple, Martha Stewart and others are beginning to embrace the platform but their objectives at this point seem to focus more on awareness than actual sales. My guess is that as Pinterest attempts to monetize its offering without diminishing the user experience, new options will emerge. Only creativity, user-acceptance and time will tell.

Have you ever wanted to see a word or thought typeset into a beautifully crafted piece of art? You’re in luck – someone else wanted to see that too.

In 2011, graphic designer Drew Melton started a web site called The Phraseology Project. It’s a simple idea: any visitor can submit a letter, a word or a short phrase, and Melton and his talented team of contributing designers (Ray Brown, Luke Ritchie, Simon Ålander and Joshua Bullock) will transform it into a piece of art.

“Most design sites or blogs are merely feeds of disconnected visual stimulation,” Melton explains. “I wanted to do something that you could actually influence and invest into.”

The site also has an online store selling prints of the unique typographical creations to help fund the project. Pick one up and spread the word!

My favorite: Life Is Like a Box of Type.

We’ll have plenty of food and drink—including our creative director’s world famous Pantone Vodka in five scrumptious flavors! We’ll also have a live DJ at the party–DJ Piddipat–who will be handing out iTunes gift cards every hour.

Our studio’s located in Brier Creek, the perfect first stop for you Durham & Chapel Hill residents on your way into Raleigh. Visit the Studio Open House Eventbrite page to register and see a full list of participating agencies and a Google Map of their locations, plus an attendee list of all the cool folks coming. Hope to see you then!

We all know that design can play an essential role in the success of a new product or company, and it’s no secret that many of the most celebrated companies at the moment—Apple and Target come to mind—lead all their efforts with design and branding. But a bestselling book makes a more radical and compelling claim that design is now a fundamental driver of the world economy, with design, rather than price or quality, being the fundamental differentiator between products and brands.

“Companies traditionally have competed on price or quality, or some combination of the two,” notes author Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. “But today decent quality and reasonable price have become merely table stakes in the business game—the entry ticket for being allowed into the marketplace. Once companies satisfy those requirements, they are left to compete less on function or financial qualities and more on ineffable qualities such as whimsy, beauty, and meaning.”

Pink finds validation in this statement made by Norio Ohga, former chairman of Sony: “At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. So how can we compete? It has to be with design.” Pink insists this is part of a seismic shift in the world economy, as we transition from a society built on the logical, linear, “left-brain” skills of the Information Age to one built on the inventive, creative, big-picture skills of the new economy—which Pink dubs the Conceptual Age. This leads Pink to his oft-quoted (and hyperbolic) claim that “the MFA is the new MBA.”

Of course, Pink is quick to acknowledge that the defining skills of the Information Age, the left-brain skills of so-called knowledge workers (accountants, lawyers, computer programmers, etc.) are still absolutely necessary—he just insists those attributes alone aren’t sufficient for the demands of this new Conceptual Age. They’re also more easily outsourced and automated than right-brain work, which is why, for example, computer programmers in this country no longer command the salaries they once did.

Pink tells us “the only way that businesses can differentiate their goods and services in today’s overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beautiful and emotionally compelling.” In this environment, the right-brain capabilities that were once considered frivolous—inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness and meaning—become the critical recipe for financial success, and the profession of design, too often dismissed as mere decoration, becomes widely recognized as an essential ally of economic development.

It’s no accident that in the United States, the number of graphic designers has increased tenfold in a decade—even as graphic design software becomes widely available to the general public. Needless to say, one doesn’t become a brilliant designer by buying a software program, any more than one becomes a master carpenter by buying a fancy set of power tools. But expanded access to professional-level technology has empowered greater numbers of potential designers to develop their skills and choose the creative disciplines as a career path.

The process of creative thinking may seem intangible, but good design—whether product design, graphic design, identity design, motion or interactive—has always delivered a substantial return on investment, and for all the reasons cited by Daniel Pink, that return is becoming more quantifiable and dramatic every year. In this so-called Conceptual Age, will the work of designers finally be acknowledged as an essential driver of social and economic progress? Will right-brainers, as Pink predicts, really rule the future? Will the MFA truly become the new MBA? Let’s hope so.

The ampersand is a favorite typographic character among graphic designers. Its calligraphic qualities add visual punch to otherwise humdrum page layouts, and its brevity consistently finds favor over the orthodox “and.” In recent years, entire blogs (such as Ampersand a Day & 300&65 Ampersands) have been devoted to this esoteric subject. Signal art director Melissa Herboth is such an aficionado that she included a 3-D ampersand in her staff photo.

Outside of ordinary text layouts, the ampersand is used primarily in business names – think Johnson & Johnson or Barnes & Noble – but that innocuous character was once considered the 27th character of the alphabet. Where did it come from? The origin of its name is almost as bizarre as the name itself.

The shape of the character “&” predates the word ampersand by more than 1,500 years. In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means “and,” they linked the e and t. Over time the combined letters came to signify the word “and” in English as well. Certain versions of the ampersand, like the italic version in the typeface Caslon, clearly reveal the origin of the shape.

The word ampersand came many years later when the “&” was taught as part of the English alphabet. In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the “&.” Since it would have been awkward to say “X, Y, Z, and,” students finished with “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself, and.” Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand.

Amazing & incredible!

Woody’s design work has been recognized by AIGA, PRINT, GRAPHIS, HOW, NOVUM, PAGE, Creativity Annual, the American Advertising Federation (28 ADDY Awards), Logo Lounge, American Design Awards, W3 Web Awards, Summit Awards & Davey Awards. Most recently, NOVUM, Germany’s leading design magazine, devoted eight pages to his work at Flywheel.

Click here to download a PDF of the NOVUM article.