In a congested marketplace it’s vital that your business
stands out from a very jam-packed marketplace. We’ve heard this all before
right? And while it’s an undeniable fact and advice one should follow, what
would the concept of ‘standing out’ actually look like? Well that was the brief
our creative team received when preparing our latest advertising campaign.
We spoke to Mr. Talha Qadri Khan, one of MON’s Lead Graphic
Designers and asked him to share a little insight about working on the campaign
and the process of creating designs that aren’t afraid of being different.
What do you do at MON?
I work in the creative team and look after a small team of
designers, art-workers and photographers. We work on a whole host of projects
for the company, including branding, website, photography, marketing collateral
and online advertising campaigns.
What came first, the
words or the design?
The key note that the marketing team wanted to express was
one of MON’s core beliefs: that we can help any business, big or small, to
really stand out from the crowd. Our early aim was to explore concepts that
worked around this idea. We started out with a variety of headlines that
depicted the message and whittled them down to the ones that aligned best with
MON’s strong and playful tone of voice. From these we picked our final three.
We wanted each line to connect and engage our audience; prompting the
self-belief that they were the ‘glittery flamingo’ we were talking to. The
lines had such a strong visual identity that it was perfect for us to play on
this. The challenge was to figure out how to get a dolphin, flamingo and polka
dot to sit nicely together in the layouts – which is a line I never thought I’d
be saying!
Who was involved in creating the final designs?
All design work is an extremely collaborative process, and
this campaign was no exception. We worked with an external agency to craft and
hone the concept before passing the brief over to a paper artist who
painstaking built the ads, cutting out individual feathers and shrimp! Because
we were dealing in a media that is pretty unforgiving, we had to make sure
every element was perfect before the paper artist could get involved. This
meant we went through a variety of layouts and colours in vector form prior to
fabrication.
What advice would you give to designers who want their work
to to stand out?
The way I see it, every individual has the uniqueness and
potential to be that glittery flamingo, it’s just a case of believing in
yourself and owning your vision. Design is such a wide discipline, so you need
to identify your strengths and talents, find the field that makes you happy,
find what’s fun and run with it! After all, we all want to be the sexy ideas
dolphin…
