Expectations are the spine of life. They act as steadying points around which everything revolves in an upward or downward spiral. Expectations met re-affirm our view of the world, act as a kind of psychological shorthand and reassure us that things are progressing just right. Expectations not met, interestingly enough tend to have the same effect, except they impart a certain degree of negativity upon us.
Take the girl on the top banner of the amerlandent.com site for example. Faced with a choice of who to put there we could have gone for an employee but that raised some interesting questions about preferential treatment, stereotyping, typecasting and so on and on and on and well, in the office we are pretty equal, taking our work really seriously but never ourselves so that kinda spoiled that fun for us.
So it had to be a model. We all agreed on that on a hot Friday afternoon meeting and that's when the fun began.
Raised on a generation of Baywatch and Buffy The Vampire Slayer our first instinct was to go for blonde. Blondes are inviting, visually appealing, sexy and serious at the same time. They are perceived as more fertile by males, more likeable by females and have the added advantage that everyone knows they are more fun!
As a rule we never take anything at face value and that includes our own perceptions and preconceptions so it wasn't more than ten minutes into the meeting that someone asked "Why blonde?" which opened the floodgates on why Caucasian, why white, why business-suited and why a woman anyway?
The office manager offered to stop the debate and pose himself in a revealing one-piece but given the fact he's approaching retirement and has not been a paragon of athleticism lately we sort of declined his kind offer. But it did get us thinking because whatever image we used there was inevitably going to colour visitors' perception of who we are and what we do.
Our first instinct was to forego using a person at all and put instead an empty chair as an indication of the futility of existentialist longings within a commercial environment but given how that might affect public perception of our work ethic we scotched it at the start.
One designer's suggestion to use a picture of Theo, her Senegalese parrot, went the way of the Dodo as then that would mark the site as having something to do with wildlife or exotic bird sanctuaries, which led us back to a deep discussion on the visual semaphore used my sites to send a strong message to their visitors and that includes text, layout and the use of colour as well as imagery.
Finally, when the coffee ran out we looked at our notes and mostly agreed that the brunette would stay. We deconstructed her for a while. We liked her smile and her no-nosense yet feminine hairstyle. We liked the fact that she was nicely dressed not too sexy but neither dressing down. Her open-arms body language was welcoming, engaging and inviting without being too over the top.
She best projected, we decided some of the values our print and web content business stood for:
* Practicality
* Dependability
* Competence
* Trust
Her clear gaze and youthful looks stood for energy and dynamism. Her smile for someone who was at ease in the new media. Her dark looks hinted at mixed ethnicity, important in a global market place not dominated by Aryans.
It's ironic perhaps that what gives our firm those characteristics is its very eclectic mix of age, talent and skill. Our youngest designer is barely 20 while we have a long-time editor who perhaps should have retired long ago (come to think about it we don't see him in the office that much any more).
So, with the Friday rush hour almost over and everyone thinking either of the projects that would be worked over the weekend or the weekend itself the brunette became a no-brainer, the choice itself informed not just by convenience but also the knowledge of how the brain decodes visual stimuli and we respond to superficial input in ways that we are barely aware of.
This is knowledge, of course, we bring to bear in the execution of our work. It is knowledge we apply in print and web projects and the development of material that has to work fast and work well - whether that is email shots, newsletters or Power Point presentations.
We didn't overlook the fact that popularly brunettes are perceived as being more intelligent. We definitely liked that!
The point to all this is simple of course: we can all use visual shorthand and stereotypical images in our promotional literature and websites to create a certain look and feel, to engender empathy with a particular demographic and to identify ourselves as possessing certain characteristics. Ultimately, however, we also have to be intelligent in our use of it. Back it up with hard evidence of what we promise, otherwise what we are creating is a downward spiral of dashed expectations, a re-affirmation that all advertising is pure hokum, that all ads are sleight-of-hand lies and that print and the web are nothing more than an extension of ads and ad copy and cannot be trusted.
This may re-affirm the world-view of some individuals but it's not a good world to live in and, really, we all live in it, so we owe it to ourselves to create as much positive energy as possible.
Take the girl on the top banner of the amerlandent.com site for example. Faced with a choice of who to put there we could have gone for an employee but that raised some interesting questions about preferential treatment, stereotyping, typecasting and so on and on and on and well, in the office we are pretty equal, taking our work really seriously but never ourselves so that kinda spoiled that fun for us.
So it had to be a model. We all agreed on that on a hot Friday afternoon meeting and that's when the fun began.
Raised on a generation of Baywatch and Buffy The Vampire Slayer our first instinct was to go for blonde. Blondes are inviting, visually appealing, sexy and serious at the same time. They are perceived as more fertile by males, more likeable by females and have the added advantage that everyone knows they are more fun!
As a rule we never take anything at face value and that includes our own perceptions and preconceptions so it wasn't more than ten minutes into the meeting that someone asked "Why blonde?" which opened the floodgates on why Caucasian, why white, why business-suited and why a woman anyway?
The office manager offered to stop the debate and pose himself in a revealing one-piece but given the fact he's approaching retirement and has not been a paragon of athleticism lately we sort of declined his kind offer. But it did get us thinking because whatever image we used there was inevitably going to colour visitors' perception of who we are and what we do.
Our first instinct was to forego using a person at all and put instead an empty chair as an indication of the futility of existentialist longings within a commercial environment but given how that might affect public perception of our work ethic we scotched it at the start.
One designer's suggestion to use a picture of Theo, her Senegalese parrot, went the way of the Dodo as then that would mark the site as having something to do with wildlife or exotic bird sanctuaries, which led us back to a deep discussion on the visual semaphore used my sites to send a strong message to their visitors and that includes text, layout and the use of colour as well as imagery.
Finally, when the coffee ran out we looked at our notes and mostly agreed that the brunette would stay. We deconstructed her for a while. We liked her smile and her no-nosense yet feminine hairstyle. We liked the fact that she was nicely dressed not too sexy but neither dressing down. Her open-arms body language was welcoming, engaging and inviting without being too over the top.
She best projected, we decided some of the values our print and web content business stood for:
* Practicality
* Dependability
* Competence
* Trust
Her clear gaze and youthful looks stood for energy and dynamism. Her smile for someone who was at ease in the new media. Her dark looks hinted at mixed ethnicity, important in a global market place not dominated by Aryans.
It's ironic perhaps that what gives our firm those characteristics is its very eclectic mix of age, talent and skill. Our youngest designer is barely 20 while we have a long-time editor who perhaps should have retired long ago (come to think about it we don't see him in the office that much any more).
So, with the Friday rush hour almost over and everyone thinking either of the projects that would be worked over the weekend or the weekend itself the brunette became a no-brainer, the choice itself informed not just by convenience but also the knowledge of how the brain decodes visual stimuli and we respond to superficial input in ways that we are barely aware of.
This is knowledge, of course, we bring to bear in the execution of our work. It is knowledge we apply in print and web projects and the development of material that has to work fast and work well - whether that is email shots, newsletters or Power Point presentations.
We didn't overlook the fact that popularly brunettes are perceived as being more intelligent. We definitely liked that!
The point to all this is simple of course: we can all use visual shorthand and stereotypical images in our promotional literature and websites to create a certain look and feel, to engender empathy with a particular demographic and to identify ourselves as possessing certain characteristics. Ultimately, however, we also have to be intelligent in our use of it. Back it up with hard evidence of what we promise, otherwise what we are creating is a downward spiral of dashed expectations, a re-affirmation that all advertising is pure hokum, that all ads are sleight-of-hand lies and that print and the web are nothing more than an extension of ads and ad copy and cannot be trusted.
This may re-affirm the world-view of some individuals but it's not a good world to live in and, really, we all live in it, so we owe it to ourselves to create as much positive energy as possible.
Source...