on 3 September 2004Mario Pricken’s previous book, Creative Advertising: Ideas and Techniques from the World’s Best Campaigns, has taken its place on all the best art directors’ bookshelves, or at least somewhere in the heap of design students’ portfolios, D&AD trophies and other unidentified crap that languishes under their desks. Visual Creativity is slightly thinner than its predecessor, and perhaps not quite so lovingly put together, but includes nearly twice as many illustrations and is if anything even more rewarding to dip into.
Pricken fancies himself as a sort of Edward de Bono for creative professionals, and here his specific aim is to change the way you think about and conceive images. A signature tactic is to offer questions for you to ask yourself: ‘What clichés could be adapted to absurd effect?’ ‘What if the product could give you an orgasm?’ This is fine as a quick jolt of mental caffeine, but if you try to read more than a few pages at once it’s liable to give you a headache.
When Pricken gets on a roll, he’s in danger of lapsing into self-parody: ‘What has no one ever seen before? What would be striking and original?’ You can imagine him enthusiastically coaching a delegation of quantum physicists. ‘What kind of particle has no one else discovered?’
Even the chapter headings consist mostly of gnomic utterances or jargon snippets, which can be quite confusing – mind you don’t mix up the Six Ways of Seeing with the Eight Departments in the Visual Lab! – and make the contents page largely impenetrable, which is unfortunate as there’s no index. The book is designed, as before, by fellow Austrian Christine Klell (who’s mercifully set the body text a bit bigger this time), and looks good but not great, the cover in particular coming as a disappointment. Creative Advertising had a monochrome photo of the back of a shaven head, which looked rather austere until you turned it over and found a laughing face on the other side – rather a neat reflection of both books’ intent.
Once again, Pricken’s own musings are accompanied by half a dozen brief interviews with leading practitioners which, perhaps counterproductively, remind you that creative people very rarely know how they do it. ‘The basis of my making games,’ announces Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, ‘is constantly asking myself the question, “How would ordinary things look if I observe them from a slightly different angle?”’ A paragraph later, though, ‘My way of making games is to start with thinking about unique ideas that cannot be realized by other forms of entertainment.’ So, hang on – completely unique or just a twist on the ordinary? The fact is, you don’t invent a dwarf-arsed cod-Italian plumber with a girder-climbing ape-magnet girlfriend by having a method. You just have to be born, like Miyamoto, with a quizzical grin and one raised eyebrow.
Graphic designer Jennifer Sterling refers amusingly to ‘the Christopher Columbus discovery of America approach to design’. Just as Western explorers took the credit for uncovering continents that had already been occupied for thousands of years, art directors habitually turn up completely original concepts ‘on page 183 of Communication Arts’. Ironically, Visual Creativity will itself prove very handy for plagiarists, as the examples displayed in its 800-odd pictures include plenty of concepts and executions crying out to be copied. Although ads still dominate, there’s also editorial and non-commercial work on show, including digital illustration from the likes of Faiyaz Jafri, whose immaculate 3D images for Guinness – recently featured in MacUser’s ‘Twenty/20’ – are amusingly credited as ‘photography’.
But Pricken is genuinely concerned with freeing you from the kind of mental block for which stealing comes as a blessed relief. Whether or not the particular tips and tricks offered here catch your imagination, there’s no arguing with the overarching theme that you can’t expect to have ideas just by sitting at your desk waiting for them. You need to think freely and constructively, and that means creating a conducive environment and using contrived techniques if necessary to stimulate your thought processes. ‘It may well be that the myth of creativity will lose some of its mystique in the process,’ says Pricken, ‘but magicians do not believe in magic; they know exactly which strings to pull in order to astonish their audience.’
Not that he believes great visuals can be created in a purely calculated way, but specific methods and working practices can put you into a creative state where inspiration is more likely to strike. Perhaps it’s just common sense, but with creative talent at constant risk of being undermined by the mundane demands of so-called commercial reality, there’s value in being told to do what you already know you ought to be doing by someone who sounds, at least sometimes, like he knows what he’s talking about.
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