When the ideas flow, concepting is fun. When they don’t, I grind away over award books, archives, and stock photo sites producing page after page of tedious, trite, irrelevant, stupid ideas. Yes, I may be laying the groundwork for later brilliance. Or not. That’s why, when the deadline looms, it pays to have a few different approaches to concept development in one’s mental toolkit.

Here are more than 100 creativity techniques to unclog the brain. Many of them are actually information-gathering or evaluation techniques, but there are still a lot of different ways to approach a problem here. Three techniques that I’ve found useful are Brutethink, Laddering, and Osborn’s Checklist.

http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques

An ad concept does not exist to win awards, or to set trends, or to break rules. It exists to solve a problem. That’s the challenge of commercial creativity.

The glory part is that if you solve the problem in an unexpected way, you sometimes achieve those other objectives too. But, you have to solve the problem. And, to do that, it helps to start with a good creative brief.

Here’s the form I’ve used as a starting point for 20+ years. I like that it’s short, yet comprehensive enough to suggest other avenues of exploration. I’ve tweaked it many times over the years, so feel free to modify, copy, and use it as you please.

CREATIVE WORKSHEET PDF

As promised yesterday, here are a few more places I often visit for inspiration.

Simon’s Skip: Advert and Brochure Archive. Simon Moses graduated from the University of Brighton (UK)
with a degree in Design History. His personal website houses a small collection of British ads and
brochures for household appliances, mostly from the 1960s but extending into the 1970s.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/adverts.html

Design students might also explore the sections on vintage electrical appliances, Art Deco buildings, and this page housing a small collection of 1970s car brochures.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/carbrochures.html

Finally, Simon has posted an academic paper looking at retro industrial design trends as sanitized social nostalgia. Worth a read.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/nostalgiaessay.pdf

American Package Museum. This online museum shows about 140 examples of 20th century package design.
http://www.packagemuseum.com/

Dan Goodsell’s Tick Tock Toys Archive and Gallery. Food packaging, store displays, fast food merchandising, ad mascots, newspaper ads and early television commercials, gum card art, and irresistible snapshots from times gone by.
http://theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html

Advertising Character Collection of MLT Creative. This creative services agency in Atlanta, GA has a private collection of about 45 advertising mascots to view online, each with a brief history or commentary.
http://www.mltcreative.com/collection.html

TV Party! Saturday Morning Commercials. See what creative teams did with 60 seconds of broadcast time, an almost unimaginable luxury today.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomsat.html

Also, on the same website, see how cigarettes were marketed on TV.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomcig.html

Prelinger Archives of Moving Images. Look for the short films and collections of classic television commercials.
To Browse, click here

When I get tired of leafing through current award books, it’s often more productive to reach deeper into the past for ideas to steal inspiration. That said, here are some classic advertising and design archives.

Key things to think about as you browse the archives are:
• the graphic history of iconic brands
• the evolution of the relationship between advertising and its audience
• the ebb and flow of design trends, including typography, illustrative styles and proportions, and color.

The first three are from Duke University; tomorrow I’ll show some more from all over the web.

The Emergence of Advertising in America. About 9,000 categorized, searchable ads from 1850-1920. It’s also worth looking at the timeline, to see how far back the roots of viral and buzz-marketing concepts go.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

Ad*Access. This picks up roughly where the previous collection leaves off. There are about 7,000 categorized, searchable print ads from 1911 to 1957.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

Medicine and Madison Avenue. This specialized collection has about 600 categorized, searchable drug and health-related ads from the 1910s through the 1950s, and a timeline that runs from the 1840s to the 1990s.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/