Kismet Arts Tangent

Today in Tom’s class. A brief summary: banana cannon, graffiti is an old hat, “You are writing what you think are ads,” prismism. You can’t be successful if you’re always safe, but you have to make sense.You can’t be successful if you don’t give your work the effort it deserves. Okay is failure. 18-year-olds are sophisticated message consumers.

This was one (the best one, which says a lot) of the several thumbnails I submitted for critique. It was really heartbreaking having Tom read the headlines out loud as if they weren’t the funniest things ever. He went quickly through them, one after another slowly tearing down my expectations of being hailed the next Julian Koenig (copywriter for Think Small campaign). This is my first hurdle, the first of many times that I will think I am not sharp enough to be in advertising. He said, be straight-faced when I make the joke. Advertising audiences love piecing it together themselves, working for the reward of looking like a Magic Eye painting. I can’t give away the joke. He suggested that maybe from this brainstorm I take the idea of “magic isn’t the answer” with me and try some more at this thumbnailing business. That being said, I have a lot of thinking to do.

Creative Brief For TeeShirt Design

“Let’s see…

1)      We would like to do about 100 to 200 T-Shirts. 

2)      The shirt will be used for our first event (A Cigarette Butts Clean-Up, where students and employees volunteer to pick up the cigarette butts on campus and then we count each butt to see how much we as a college are littering and creating health and environmental hazards) but the shirt doesn’t need to say anything specific in terms of addressing  the “Cigarette Butts Clean-Up” event itself because if we have left over shirts, then I would like to use them for other Tobacco Free activities in the future. 

3)      But what it should say is something very general, like “Let’s Go Tobacco Free, SCCC!” Or just something really general about SCCC trying to be a Tobacco Free College.   I’m definitely open to your students making up their own tag lines and logos as long as it is general towards our efforts in being a Tobacco Free College.  In fact, I would like the students to make it T-shirt design that they think is “cool” to wear, one in which they would like to wear themselves, with a slogan/design/logo that is fun, or catchy, YET definitely tasteful (nothing perverse or vulgar, etc).  For example, University of Oregon just went Tobacco Free and their T-shirts said, “WTF!”  (with print below:  “We’re Tobacco Free!”) and that was attention-grabbing, yet still tasteful…

4)      I’m open to any colors as well.  We were thinking teal blue because of SCCC’s marketing colors as seen on our website, but I’m not committed to that.  For colors, we just wanted uniformity so that everyone who is out there volunteering on our Butts Clean-Up day would have the same colors on and that might strike conversation with other students who are watching and who might ask, “what is everyone in those T-shirts doing?” “

Execution

I wanted to create a design that didn’t speak negatively. “Don’t do this” doesn’t really resonate with people. My campaign slogan “Join the Future” is positive and subtle. The underlying approach is peer pressure. Join the future, join the people of tomorrow, the forward thinkers. I wanted this to be a versatile shirt. It can be used for a bunch of different events. I also did not target smokers whom with I greatly sympathize. As for my color palate choices, I think I may have been influenced by the ubiquitous political talk of the upcoming election.