I got an "emergency" request yesterday. A client needed an ad to go to press the next day in a magazine published in Africa, promoting a webinar whose topic was, not coincidentally, foreign investment in Africa. The client had copy and specs but nothing else. Could I please, you know, come up with something?
Truth be told, I love a job with a tight deadline, because it means that there's no chance of it being revised to death. And the pressure seems to give a job momentum.
I immediately opened up a computer file I had of a map of Africa, and tried to see if the shape suggested something to me. And it did. It looked like a profile of a rhino, facing east, without the horn. And so the stress of the job had worked: it had taken me only moments to come up with a completely stupid, unusable idea. Often that takes me hours.
Still, I decided to stick with the map of Africa, because that's pretty much the way that Africa is shaped. Also, I believed, iif a rhino was a lousy idea, I was pretty sure that lions or zebras or ladies with baskets on their heads would be lousy too. So I did something I rarely do: I doodled.
I'm not kidding, by the way. Most of my best work comes from closing my eyes and picturing the job before I put pencil to paper. Sometimes I'll halfway imagine something and scrawl it out in a series of worked-over sketches. But I almost never just start scrawling away without purpose or aim.
I was therefore shocked to discover that just throwing a curved shape behind the left side of the map suggested a hand holding up the continent. I matched it with another curve and the other side, and suddenly an image had almost taken shape. It looked like two hands were holding up something that was being weighed down in the middle. This immediately suggested to me a bag or a purse, and I then just drew a bunch of coins -- yens, euros, dollars and pounds -- falling into the middle to make the depression. A little refining of the shapes, a little texture and -- who'd a thunk it -- I had my image. I didn't even have to worry the color: obviously the Pan-African colors were the way to go.
The original image is here.
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