Neal Advertising created this site for Lexus of Northborough to provide valuable information to Boston area Lexus owners. Visitors to the site will be able to quickly access specific vehicle recall information on all Lexus models as well as schedule an appointment for repair as well as research recall responses made by Lexus.

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Hatch Award

We’re proud to announce that Neal Advertising received a Bronze Bowl at The Ad Club’s 49th Annual Hatch Awards. What project won this award you ask? This blog! UnderTheBigTopics.com was the only blog to receive an award in the blog category.

The Hatch Awards celebrate excellence in our creative community recognizing the best and brightest advertising agencies in New England.

Congratulations to illustrators Alexis Pacelli and Bryan Woodbury, designer Danielle Pikus, developers Jason Narciso and Jesse Friedman, art director Chad Foster and the rest of the Neal Advertising team!

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Well, the summer is coming to an end and I have harvested most of my veggies and looking back on the whole experience I can’t help but realize that much of what I learned while gardening rings true for the creative process. I hope the following observations help grow your creative process.

Plan

Creating a vegetable garden from scratch took a great deal of planning.  I had to consider where to locate the garden, if I should build raised beds, what I would plant and so much more.

Planning might seem like an unlikely step in the creative process to some, but it’s importance should not be overlooked. Unlike waiting for divine inspiration or stream of consciousness, planning helps you focus on the task at hand, puts a creative team on the same page before starting a project or brainstorm and can save time.

Consult

I learned early on that I wasn’t going to have a successful garden without a little help. I visited the library and checked out a half dozen books on New England gardening. I talked to my parents, I talked to my neighbors and I talked to coworkers who have gardens. Asking others to shed some light on what they have learned made the greatest impact on my approach to the garden.

You never have to go-it-alone in the creative process. You can always research similar projects in books, magazines and online. Your best resources, if you have them, are your coworkers. Brainstorm, bounce ideas off each other and ask for critiques on how you might make your project better.

Nurture

I didn’t realize just how much I would care about my little seedlings until I found myself waking up a half hour early everyday this summer to water my plants. I spent countless hours weeding, feeding and preventing animals and insects from eating what I was working so hard to grow and you know what? It was worth it.

Developing a style and refining your creative process takes time. Just like those plants in my garden, creatives grow everyday and nurturing your creative process will help that growth. If you find things are getting stale or just aren’t working, try something different. Find inspiration in others and everything around you. How can you apply the life you live to your creative process? What are creative’s doing in different fields? What are you creating in addition to the professional work your involved with?

Adapt

With all the rain we had early in the summer, I had a serious slug problem. I didn’t want to use chemicals so I asked a friend and he told me that you can trap slugs in partially filled beer cans. It worked like a charm! I hadn’t planned on slugs eating my lettuce or the groundhog who lives under my shed to eat my cucumbers so I had to adapt to these situations quickly to solve the problems they were creating.

I can count on one hand the amount of times I haven’t had to deal with an unexpected situation (client changes) when undertaking a project. You have to be able to adapt and adapt quickly. There is always a solution to a problem and quite frankly, I think that finding those solutions is part of the fun.

Share

What I learned in the garden this summer will certainly be passed on to my friends, family and neighbors. The beer can trick I mentioned was a great tip that I passed on to neighbors who were having the same problem.

Sharing your creative input and what you learn through the process is part of being in the creative community. Help your co-workers out, share with other creative teams, blog about recent projects and share insights with clients.  This helps them grow and in turn, will help you grow as well.

Enjoy

I had a great time growing a vegetable garden this summer and I can’t wait to start all over again next season. The planning and hard work I put into my garden this summer paid off in delicious veggies and herbs and a summer filled with fun and satisfaction.

You have to have fun and love what you do if you are going to be good at it. You’re a creative because you love to create. You are compelled to create. This is your passion in life and when something is created with passion and love there is nothing better… so have fun!

What did you learn about the creative process this summer?

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Most of you would not know who I was talking about if I mentioned the name Paul Rand. You would, however, be able to identify the IBM, Westinghouse, ABC and UPS brands by looking at their logos. Paul Rand is responsible for that.

Born In Brooklyn New York 1914, Paul Rand became one of the most well known graphic designers in the field most notably for his logo and corporate identity design. Rand was able not only to produce a quality logo design but he had a great ability to explain the importance his designs would have on branding a company. Graphic designer Louis Danziger says,

“He almost singlehandedly convinced business that design was an effective tool. [. . .] Anyone designing in the 1950s and 1960s owed much to Rand, who largely made it possible for us to work. He more than anyone else made the profession reputable. We went from being commercial artists to being graphic designers largely on his merits.”

Rand’s simple clear cut designs are some of the best and most recognized logos being used today. He said that neither logos nor art need be over the top to be recognized and grab attention. As the says goes..more is less.

UPS just went though a very controversial issue when they changed Paul Rand’s original logo to a more flash and 3D looking logo. Now UPS has a logo that blends in with the crowd. It is a very trendy logo and lacks the creativity that Rand originality put in. What is your opinion about the update?

In the process of paving the way for graphic designer he also helped brands thrive and become more recognized. It is something to think about and appreciate.

Paul Rand

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I hear a lot of people saying that print is dead, and the digital age is taking over. This is something that I disagree with. I am aware that technology is very abundant in advertising, but just because technology has become the new way to advertise doesn’t mean that the art of print design is dying out.

Print design in mainly used in advertising to create products such as posters, billboard, direct mail, magazine ads and much more. What people don’t see is the other side of print design that is needed to make a business run. Business cards are a good example. The design of them is extremely important to a business. That little card that you leave behind is the first impression people get of your company. It gives your company personality and helps support its brand and image.

Let’s take a step back from business cards and think about what is the most important thing for a company to have. A logo. Your company’s logo is what identifies your company. Without it a business is not branded and advertising will not be as beneficial. A logo makes you associate with the brand. That logo will go on anything and everything your company creates throughout print or web.

I am not saying that technology is bad; it is a wonderful tool and I think it has a lot of great benefits. The best way I think of web design and print design, is to see them as two different things. Web design is a new tool to advertise your brand, but the root behind getting web advertisements recognized by consumers goes back to good print design. So while print advertising may be dying, print design itself is not dead.

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We are proud to announce that Neal Advertising has won a Davey award for the banner advertising campaign we created on behalf of The 19th Annual Boston Wine Festival. The Boston Wine Festival is the nation’s longest running,  food and wine pairing series hosted at the Boston Harbor Hotel. The event features over forty dinners during the months of January, February, March and April.

Our flash banner ads were placed on local media websites such as necn.com, whdh.com and wbur.com as well as geotargeted on nytimes.com, wsj.com and foodandwine.com. 36,000 visitors were directed to the website during four months of advertising and the event enjoyed a sell-out success! Congrats to everyone involved on the project!

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All of my fellow cavemen grunted at the notion that this MAC computer could do such a thing! How can this glorified typewriter replace my skills as an artist? Even my professor said it was just a fad and commercial art will always need illustrators. Someone was even so petrified of that notion, that the morning of our first introduction into the world of Macintosh we were all shocked by what we saw, a student or someone they told, stole them. Chuckles and sighs ensued! High fives, YES we can draw now!

Not I. I knew this MAC would someday rear its head into my profession and kick me back into the stone age unless I took measures. It took a while and the journey was long and frustrating, but not only have I triumphed, I have become a successful digital illustrator in my own right.

Using custom illustration in a clients piece not only shows the client that you DO put the extra into their work but care about the piece. If you painted a nice watercolor of a farmhouse and painted the cow in front with crayon it wouldn’t quite match, would it? Try something original, don’t just download some clipart off the web. Take an extra hour and create something original. It’s not the heart of the piece but If you told a client you custom illustrated the artwork, they can take heart in the fact that you thought of the client first.

Logos, characters, mascots…there are tons of uses for illustration still. Just let it be known that deep in the heart of every artist, we want to create new styles and interesting designs, a great small step is original artwork. Keep drawing!

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I spend much of my time, as many of you do, online. If there is one thing I miss while spending so much time sifting

through thoughtful content, it is thoughtful typography. Staring at fonts such as Arial and Helvetica

(not that I have anything against Helvetica) sort of numbs your brain and you forget that there is a world of letterform

out there. Anyway, I’m going start making it a point to find and provide a little letterform on this world wide web of

ours starting now. Let’s start by checking out ilovetypography.com. Do you have a favorite site that is mindful of typography

or features typography? Tell us about it!

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