Let the visuals do the talking

My favourite part of each new year is the “best of” summaries from the previous year. They are great inspirations for new ideas so bookmark them for your “trigger library” and refer to them when looking to unstick your thinking! Today I link to a purely visual blog, Most creative and interesting advertisements 2011. I give full credit to the contributors at pokkisam.com, a site that features beautiful photography, illustration and graphic design. It’s always a visual treat. Although you cannot use these images for your work, they may inspire you to rely less on words and allow visuals to do the talking.

I’ve already talked about specific ways to provoke with photography e.g., using it to stimulate conversation at an internal meeting or to warm up for brainstorming. For these uses, you can “borrow” pictures from the web without copyright worries. If you need royalty-free images, follow my tips in the same post. To lesson your dependency on words, you can also use clip-art (with restraint) and diagrams to convey your content.

Below are two of my favourite images from Most creative and interesting advertisements 2011. The first I love because it instantly conveys the value proposition of FedEx in such a charmingly global way. The second I love because it’s inventive, and a gift from Iberia to all those poor travelers who wait endlessly (and bored) at luggage carousels.