Back to basics

Presenting the humble layout pad and marker pen.

They were the basic tools of the advertising trade for decades. All you needed to add was a little bit of inspiration. And no small amount of perspiration.

You didn’t have to worry about software updates, crashes, viruses or power outages. There were no YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, emails or kitten videos to distract you.

You couldn’t fiddle around with fonts and Photoshop filters.

In other words, there was absolutely nothing between you and your ideas.

You’d brainstorm with your partner.

Look out the window.

Doodle.

Argue.

Tell each other unsavory jokes.

Moan about account service.

The brief.

The client.

The product or service you were trying to come up with ideas for.

Your Creative Director.

But then, sooner or later (and it was usually later), an idea would pop up and you’d scribble it down.

A matchstick drawing.

A headline thought.

Page after page after page in that layout pad.

Hours later, every square inch of desk space and wall space would be covered in pages torn from that layout pad and filled with scribbles and scrawls that were pretty much meaningless to anybody but you and your partner.

You’d go home and give all these ideas the Overnight Test.

Then you’d come in the next morning and hate everything.

On a bad day.

(On a good day, you’d only hate most of it.)

But, whether they were good or bad, at least those ideas were pure and honest.

There was no fancy Photoshop imaging, digital trickery or slick, computer-driven layouts to hide behind.

The ideas stood or toppled over on the basis of just how good or bad they were. There were absolutely no distractions. And no excuses.

Today things are a little different.

The art director has a Mac. As does the writer.

So, straight away they can start creating pretty accurate facsimiles of the creative work as it will ultimately appear.

Art directors can design and tweak their layouts to the nth degree. An image can be sourced, polished and refined in the space of a few hours. Or minutes.

The writer can craft every nuance and subtle detail of their copy. And if their art director partner is typographically aware (admittedly something of a rarity these days), they can adjust the text and word spacing so that justified text flows perfectly, with no unsightly word breaks or widows.

The result is a series of beautiful, highly finished concepts that any account service colleague would be proud to present to the client.

The result is also a series of beautiful, highly finished concepts that are nowhere near as good as they should be.

And the environment the team has to work in doesn’t help either.

Not all that long ago, each creative team would have a room of their own. They could shut the door. Take the phone off the hook. And get to work without distractions.

They had walls to paste their scribbles on. Space to pace around in. They could talk the kind of nonsense that’s involved in the creative gestation process without fear of anyone overhearing them.

Today, they’re lucky if they even have a cubicle. In fact, the current trend seems to be having creative teams sitting in long rows like a bloody factory assembly line or third-world call centre. The only way they can ‘close the door’ is by putting on headphones.

And let’s not talk about how compressed deadlines have become. Forget “the overnight test”. These days you’re lucky if you have time for an “after lunch test”.

So perhaps, if you spend most of your time staring at a blinking cursor on your screen instead of coming up with cool ideas, it’s time to get back to basics.

Switch off the Mac.

Find an empty room somewhere and close the door.

(Put your mobile on silent too.)

Pick up that layout pad.

Sniff that marker. (Spirit-based markers work best.)

And start drawing.

It’ll be awkward for a little while.

But I’ll bet you see a difference in the quality of your ideas.