It’s time to turn off the Adobe autopilot
Let’s talk about social design.
For the first piece of content I ever made for a client, I agonised over the typographic layout of an educational post about condoms. Fresh out of Uni with a degree in ‘all things pretty’ I was sure everyone cared as much as I did.
“These horny Teenagers WILL be able to tell if I use Gotham or Futura.” I thought.
“The letter spacing is all over the place, now our values will NEVER align!’ I proclaimed (internally).
Two or three hours later the post went out, but don’t worry it looked goooood. Roll on the viral results.
Tumbleweed…
It’s probably time to rethink this then.
It’s not news that social is a whole different ball game. It’s not news that we’re building relationships not selling things to people. But it is still painful to put these into practice when your brain has an Adobe autopilot.
Let’s ease into this with a little help from the guys over at Bumble. Bumble are trying to create relationships, literally, and what do we know about good relationships? At their core lies trust.
Now let that little voice in your head recant some recent experiences regarding brands, design and trust.
‘Their website looks a little dodgy, not sure I trust it’
‘Hmmm, photos of their food on the menu, not sure I trust that’
‘I know they’ve got great interest rates, but is that logo from clip art??’
These are all valid hesitations. Brands should take care of how they look if they want to make a good first impression. You probably wouldn’t listen too closely to your personal trainer if they were out of shape. Nevertheless, let’s carry on.
Let’s hop back over to Bumble’s Instagram and have a look. One thing to remember when doing this: if Instagram was a person it would be that guy in the corner of the coffee shop, writing poetry… on a typewriter.
#ToTheGram https://www.instagram.com/bumble/
Their photos are pixelated. Their colour palette choices came from the cover of a faded 90’s workout VHS and their type layout looks like when little Billy (the little shit) threw his alphabetti spaghetti all over your White Company bedding.
All things that their near 200k Instagram followers couldn’t give a shit about. Why? Because the content is good.
THE CONTENT IS GOOD.
They know their audience. They know what they want, where they are and who they slept with last and that’s how they make their content. Relatable, funny, quick, simple and certainly not stylish. Creating content this way is no accident, they’re putting relatable subjects and emotional reactions at the forefront of their strategy, not aesthetics.
You don’t get your audience’s attention by default, by having a household name or a big billboard. You get it by actually making things they care about. Make your audience laugh, cry, shout or gasp and they’ll do the marketing for you. If you sell pizza, tweet 5 reasons why you think pizza is better than sex, you’ll probably start a conversation. Don’t just put your logo on a studio quality photo and expect people to care because it’s ‘pretty’.
Yes there are anomalies. Fashion brands may not be too happy when they’re literally in the business of looking good, and the corporate end of the spectrum may get defensive at the thought of you LOLing at their brand guidelines. I’m not saying that your content needs to look ‘bad’ to be good, but rather the idea has to be strong before you take it to your audience. If it’s strong, then you can add all the glitter you want.
My challenge to you, make all of your content in Word. If you can get someone to care about black Helvetica on white, then you’re onto something. Then when you want to scale it up, remember a sourced image that takes 2 minutes to find could do the job (especially if it’s already been shared a few (hundred) times). Photoshop should do the things that it has to, not that it wants to. Cropping, adjusting curves and adding a text layer aren’t against the rules.
Make sure the idea is golden, polish it a few more times and then when you have to sell it, package it up. But remember, no one cares about the box the ring came in. Stop trying to intimidate your audience into respecting you with design, put photoshop down, and make things that are brilliant before they look brilliant.
(If you do one thing today, go and watch the Black Farmer ad on YouTube. It’s 2 minutes of pure creative fun and not one mention of price or stockist! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53twFqvOJ5Q&nohtml5=False )
