You've received a brief. You understand the product, the market and the message. Now all you've got to do is to come up with an idea.
Easy? Not always.
Creatives are paid to think laterally and to produce words, images and ideas that sell things.
You have dictionaries and thesauruses to help you with words. There are directories of idioms and expressions which are helpful with copy. But, my personal favourite internet aid is image searching. It is the most amazing lateral thinking resource.
I'll give you an example (this happened to me only the other day): I had to come up with a smiling face image.
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Then something caught my eye. A photograph that someone had taken of three birds in flight that looked like two eyes and a smiling mouth. Bingo! I had my image. And, even better, I didn't have to pay for it. It was an idea that could be easily re-created in Illustrator and/or Photoshop.
This doesn't just work with images, it works with words and ideas too.
Put an abstract term (like, empty; separation; togetherness; contrast; love; big; help) into a stock photography site's search engine and see if it gives you any ideas. And don't forget normal search engine's images searches like Google or Yahoo.
Search engines don't have associations with words that we do. The stock photography library or search engine can often give you an unthought of angle to the idea.
It may be that the million dollar idea is just a click away!
Article kindly provided by Rob Cubbon
May 21, 2008
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