The path to advanced for senior designers Shift from visual creativity to content creativity

Mondo Workplace Updated on 2024-02-12

If a junior designer wants to become a senior designer, he must first practice the basic skills (such as the use of design software, graphic design ability, layout design ability, font design ability, etc.), and secondly, he must see more excellent cases, master some design skills and methods, and finally, most importantly, that is, work hard in actual combat for about five years, basically he can become a senior designer from primary deep thinking.

But when you become a senior designer, how do you take it a step further? This may be a problem that many designers are more troubled by, to improve the aesthetics a little more? A little more refinement? Or maybe it's a little more skill? These are all necessary, but Master Onion shares his own experience again, and he must cultivate his creative ability.

I have been in the design industry for more than ten years, as far as I know, most designers to do creative is to go to the ** or books to find other people's works, through a large number of reading and screening to get a more suitable reference object, and then combine it with their own design needs, make some changes, and finally copy is not too similar is creative.

I can't deny that this practice does require creativity and ability, nor can I deny that it is an efficient design technique, but it is really only a kind of creativity limited to visual expression, such as graphic creativity, typography creativity, composition creativity, style creativity, color matching creativity, font design creativity, etc., these are all abilities that every designer must have. But if you're a veteran designer, or a veteran advertising designer, and you want to take it one step further, then you need to take another step, which is to move from visual creative to content creative.

What is content creativity? To put it simply,Be creative about what message to convey and how to convey both。When you think about ideas in terms of content ideas, there are two things that change.

01.The way you think about ideas changes

Pay more attention to what the design wants to express and what concept to convey, rather than just thinking that the form is good-looking, fun and special.

For example, we have a financial customer who co-branded an anti-fraud IP and wanted to design a cup sleeve with the theme of anti-fraud. Through some changes in the design form, colleagues have provided customers with several directions, such as using the shield as the main element, the mobile phone as the main element, the co-branded IP image as the main element, the lock as the buckle of the cup sleeve, etc., plus one or two anti-fraud slogans, the typography and color matching have also been changed and changed, but the customers don't like it, the colleague is very puzzled, the content is related to anti-fraud, the creativity is also there, and the vision is not ugly? What do customers really want? In fact, the customer himself doesn't know it, he just thinks it's not good enough.

So Scallion Ye put forward two design ideas to the customer from the perspective of content creativity.

Because anti-fraud and cup sleeves are actually unrelated, I wondered if there was any way to make the two related, so that it would be natural to do anti-fraud on cup sleeves, and then I thought of a sentence:There is a "set" of anti-fraud。In terms of design, highlight it as a theme, and then add anti-fraud IP and a few anti-fraud slogans, and you're good to go.

I'm thinking why do anti-fraud on the cup sleeve, we don't do it for the sake of doing it, but try to make it more meaningful, the water cup is a daily product that we use frequently every day, so the anti-fraud on the cup is to remind users to have anti-fraud awareness at all times, so I thought, then simply make the cup sleeve a relatively comprehensive anti-fraud knowledge popularization, rather than just putting one or two slogans. When the user holds the water cup and drinks water, you can read the text at any time, if you receive a scam **, receive a scam message, the cup sleeve can also play a role in reminding, so I proposed:"Anti-fraud knowledge is mastered in one handSince there is a lot of text, I recommend using Memphis style in terms of visual style.

As a result, the client liked both directions, and finally chose the second direction to execute.

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