I have a long career history of designing for all manner of clients, from small businesses to multi-nationals. During this time I have received many strange briefs and direction requests. So, I decided to share some of these, some are mildly amusing, others challenging … and some are just weird. I’ll let you decide which category each of these posts fall into. The following post is both the latest incident and my first post on the subject.
Make the dot more pregnant
I have been branding a company this week that specialises in prenatal medical technology. Part of the brief was to include two overlapping dots over a letter i in the brand name. This was a legacy design consideration, and this was my solution:
The client came back with some constructive feedback which included the following:
Do you think you could make the two dots suggest a woman with a bump? Possibly by moving them closer to each other and maybe by making the blue one smaller?
Not fully understanding this direction, and time being more than a little tight, I decided to fired back this literal interpretation to keep up the visual dialogue:
I was more than a little amused at the response:
The small dot on the big dot doesn’t really look like a pregnant woman. Do you think there are other arrangements of a blue and purple dot that might better suggest a mother with a baby?
I resisted the temptation to return something truly jokey or cartoonish and decided to embrace the brief. In an attempt to suggest a dependent yet individual smaller ‘baby’ dot, I came up with:
So far the events above had all happened within the space of an hour, but we had reached the end of play and decided to review in the morning.
In the cold light of the next day, with perspectives reset and deadlines looming, the client sent one last rebrief.
We finished with:
Sometimes you have to break something to realise it was probably right in the first place.