Today I've been very happy to have made a mistake in my new advertising job. It made me understand something that is crucial.
My job is to primarily create ads or logos for companies who do regular work, like consulting or real estate brokering. The challenge is to have people notice these, over and above the 3000 odd ads an average person is subject to everyday. So my approach is to have an element in these designs that is identifiable. Either as objects which are used in regular plebeian life, or popular mythical concepts.
The mistake that I made, was that I used the concept, but I did not use a symbol that was easily identifiable.
The logo above, was made for a real estate company called Spacecraft, hence the obvious thing to do was to use "alien" as an identifiable concept. The problem here, is that I got carried away. I ended up making this alien which looked like an octopus. A third person was unable to identify the connection between octopus looking alien, and spacecraft immediately. Nobody has the time to mull over something, since people are subject to a visual information overload anyway. Hence I'd already lost their attention.
So the lesson learnt here is, if spacecraft was infact a company that imported aliens, it would have been ok for me to make this image, but since I'm using the alien as just an object of identification, it has to be something that is very simple, and easy to identify as an alien.
