1123 Presents
1123 is an advertising agency based in Omaha, Nebraska. We are constantly learning and evolving, not just for ourselves, but for the brands we champion. Join us as we delve into a multitude of subjects related (or adjacent) to the world of advertising.
1123 Presents
1. Embracing the Challenge of Creative Commercial Design w/ Emily Smith
Emily Smith, our lead designer, joins us as we delve into the intricacies of fusing artistic vision with the demands of the commercial world. We share our journeys through crafting iconic athletic brands and whimsical amusement park logos. This conversation isn't just about the final product; it’s an exploration of how we balance the scales of client expectations with creative flare and style.
Emily Smith is Lead Designer at 1123 and has worked at the agency since 2015, starting as an intern, then transitioning to full time staff. Dave Distefano is Chief Creative Officer at 1123 and one of its founding partners. Dave has spent 25 years in creative, 20 of those years within the agency creative world.
Hey everybody, welcome to 1123 Presents On today's podcast. I have an amazing guest with me, emily Smith, our lead designer at the agency, who has also been here since 2015. She's done tons of design for us in the past for tons of different clients and tons of industries. Emily, welcome. Today we're going to talk about the difference between, or the balance in, artistic quality and commercial quality, what those things mean. A little bit of artistic integrity explanation, a little debate about that. We're going to cover a lot of things that are going to be kind of cool when it comes to what the balance is in life, especially in our industry, between advertising and that creative and design and using that artistic talent to help brands succeed and look different and be unique. Alright, well, let's kick off. First of all, right off the bat, I'm going to ask you what do you think when you hear the word artistic quality? What do you think?
Speaker 2:I think of like a specific style that's recognizable, like Picasso or Warhol. It doesn't really even need to have the artist's name on it to recognize it. So that's what I think of with artistic quality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, recognizable right from the jump. You see it, it's immediately like, oh, that's this or that's this style. Yeah, fits into a style.
Speaker 2:And even if it's not a specific artist that you know, it just has its own kind of look to it.
Speaker 1:So commercial quality or commercial objectives? What does that mean to you?
Speaker 2:Definitely more buttoned up, not necessarily corporate looking Some brands might be a little bit more corporate and some may be more fluid but definitely more consistent and like product based.
Speaker 1:Product based, okay. Okay, I think a lot of people like, if so, when somebody says this to me, I'll go. Now. I think the artistic quality side of things is what you said. It's exactly that. It's maintaining sort of an appearance and a style and like being identifiable as a certain thing, but also having a nice like you know, like in a painting where it's a you know it's hopper or it's a Monet, or like we'll go off into like classic stuff. There's things in it where, like there's there's meaning behind the design, there's meaning behind the image, and none of that was compromised, right, like none of it was, like it was just for the artists. I want to do this. This is what this is going to say. That's what it says to me. Like that's what that means.
Speaker 1:The commercial quality thing, I mean, I get, my brain goes to corporate, my brain goes to, you know, filling a square, filling a bracket, you know filling a bucket, so like that kind of thing, and just being like, okay, well, we need a blank, here's a blank, and there's no, you know, there's no judge to it at all. That's kind of where I land. So, introing those two things, saying what we, what those things mean to us going one step further from there. You know what's it like for you when we have obviously, as an agency, I can, I can, I can. Grab this example close by me we have corporate clients, we have financial clients, we have all kinds of things. What is it like for you in your mind? You know, to be an advert, a designer at an ad agency and have to constantly balance this.
Speaker 2:Um, it's definitely a balance. It leans more towards what the client wants, but I think there's still room to put my heart and soul into design as a designer and artist. It's just. It depends on the client and the freedom that we get with that. What about you? What about me?
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, okay, she's interviewing me now. I think, well, for me, I think that's I. My thing isn't. I think I've been able to be a little bit of a chameleon all the years that I've done stuff. I definitely have a style and I know you'd be able to pick it out. There's stuff where you'd look at that and be like, well, dave did that for the client, you know, obviously. But that comes from.
Speaker 1:For me, that comes from years of like, because I worked in, you know, I worked in like a, like a religious place, as a marketing person. Then I worked as like a, as a sign guy and doing vinyl and like race car graphics and the whole thing like. I went through all of these routes, you know, got into video and my first agency job and there was a lot of like learning on the job and being a chameleon. And I think that's a quality you have to have as a creative. If you work in advertising is you kind of have to be able to kind of change the hats, and that's the balance here between this artistic quality and commercial quality. I can pull an influence from a piece of art and I can reference that or or or give a little nod to that in a commercial piece. You know, hopefully, when we, when we've let's see, we've worked together since 2015,. Right, and again, our agency has tons of different industries that they've touched and helped out, and whatever. Give me a favorite project, just anything.
Speaker 2:Um, there's been a few, I feel like definitely the athletics that we've worked with, and then even some of the social media, um, like food styling and photography that we've done. That's kind of fun as a designer to kind of get out behind the camera. And then also some of the amusement park stuff has been fun. We've got to create logos for them and kind of brand them through the years.
Speaker 1:Um, and yeah, the athletics thing that Emily mentioned. I mean you, you're referencing the basketball team that we did stuff for the college basketball team and that was nine years, almost a decade. Um, that was a great example of like the best part of a marketing objective, a commercial process. You know our commercial product needing to be, you know put out there visually, but also you know latitude to do some fun, creative things. I mean we got they, let us do some stuff you know, and they.
Speaker 1:I think that's important, Like I know, in that situation there was, you know there's, there's a coach in that situation who knew the power of of marketing and having a good image with those things, and so, you know, let us, you know, use the players for photo shoots for longer, or like a video shoot took a little longer, and so that was okay. It was a lot of rearranging schedule for them and a lot of stress or whatever, but I think everybody knew the objective at the end was you know, this is going to, this is going to accomplish something that they want, and we were allowed to concept and kind of give influences. They gave influence and we had a. We had a lot of boardroom discussions and lunches where we would talk about like, oh, I think we should do something like this or we should do something like that. That's important, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, how many years did we work with them?
Speaker 1:The nine, like nine years, I think it was yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think by the middle or when I came in. It's really about trust with the client, like trusting us to kind of have that balance of our artistic quality and then still following their brand also.
Speaker 1:Right, and so, yeah, as a designer I mean that's as a creative at all that's super valuable. That lets you. I think for me and tell me if you think I'm wrong that that allows, that allows some of this stuff to shine a little bit better. Branding work and you know, design work for a brand it just allows, at the end of the process, it allows the product to actually shine, whether the product is something tangible or intangible. Right, let's talk a little bit about logo design, and you know I can talk about our process. I mean, I think our process is probably the most recent. We had a little thing where we shifted. Tell me a little bit about, like, when you were creating, when you were kind of brainstorming with us. You're designing logos and trying to come up with ideas. What was, what was the process like? Trying to get there, knowing what we did and the whole thing. Like how did you wear up your head around it and start for?
Speaker 2:1123?.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's this book that my college professor shared with me. I think it's by David Airey or something. It's like logo, love, design and he always Recommends starting with the word map. So I just took words from Dave and Shayna that represented the brand and kind of mapped out with the visual thesaurus, those words, and we kind of got to like the fluid, watery Kind of vibe with that and then we started just drawing out with pencil on paper. And then I went into Illustrator and made a huge art board. I don't know if we can share that maybe someday, but it's gigantic with so many different ideas and I Would reach out to our creative director and art director to kind of see when we were going with that. Yeah, and then we landed on one that we changed our mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I mean tell me like okay, so I know this. I mean like the, the for everybody listening, the process went pretty far in, right.
Speaker 2:I mean yeah, we like, chose one that isn't the final one, yeah we had final files.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the little mini reveal with some upper-level staff and it was like okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the reason for the switch. We just Started applying it to things and it didn't fit, whether it be like Letterheads or a logo, or I mean email website and we just kind of had to redirect right, right and that's.
Speaker 1:And that goes back to what we're talking about, like the reason why. So why did we redirect, for example?
Speaker 2:Um, it just it didn't feel right, I don't know it. We just kind of looked back at the old art board and all of a sudden we saw that Logo that we chose in a different light.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally. I mean, the meeting was all there. We were just kind of we went back around, kind of back around the journey and and when we came back around to this one, it was like, oh yeah, this actually does. This actually is okay, this does make sense, this does further what we want it.
Speaker 1:You know our brand to be and our you know what it's, what we wanted to represent, you know and for those of you will do is maybe a breakdown on that later, those of you that are listening but the the fluidity of the logo and the appearance of the logo and sort of like a fluid shape Was very important. The one before that no one has seen was a little more rigid and stampy, kind of like a rubber stamp, kind of an older, like could be cut out of metal kind of thing, wasn't nearly as freeform looking or as as versatile looking. And that was a big thing for us was versatility, fluidity, morphing. You know, because we, we as an agency, have a lot of, you know, we have a lot of versatility in what we handle. You know we're we're full service, so we do creative, we do video, you know, we have production, all that stuff.
Speaker 1:We wanted something that embodied that, without us like flat out saying the words constantly on everything, like, eventually, this logo represents that and that's what your brand should be, that's what anybody's brand should be. So you know, the impact on brand presence, I think, is huge when you do this the right way and even if you have to ask some questions. I mean, don't you think like, even even when it's uncomfortable to make a change like that, it's important to do so, right?
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm, yeah and yeah, like I remember Alex saying like this is our Decision for the next ten years, so we might as well, you know, change it now, while we can.
Speaker 1:I know I was like, I know that's why the old one was done. Yeah, so we got that finished. But, um, you know what? You know how much impact and this is I mean this is a silly question because it's so wide open, but it's like obvious how much impact does a simple logo design or brand presence on a package have on a brand?
Speaker 2:Um, it's huge, I think. Um, right, just like, even if it's a shape or I can't think of, maybe like Coca-Cola, it's just like so recognizable, like the fonts, and Once consumers get used to that, it just kind of is ingrained in their mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, takes a minute. It's. It's especially if you make a change and somebody's used to one thing and they change the recognition there's. There's a lot, there's some recoil. There's always going to be some ups and downs of people who are like, oh, I love it, and some people are like, oh, it's garbage. You know like there's all that, especially now Last couple decades or last decade and a half. You get social media where people can just pop right on and tell you exactly what they think. The second, the thing appears.
Speaker 1:So you know, having that journey, I think internally in that discussion between the, you know, the corporate side of the commercial side of a business and also the creative side, hammering all that out super important and I think taking a little risk is important too. So I Thought of an example where a change was made and then a change got changed back, like kind of our, our process, except if our process would have been public Was thinking about the gap and a while ago the gap changed their logo. I can't remember when this was, but it was not too terribly long ago, but it wasn't you know, five minutes ago they changed their logo. It just completely fell. The other logo had this establishment. It had this like it had this following at an appearance To where you know this. It was just the second you glanced at it. You didn't even have to see the whole logo and you knew what it was. You knew that GAP, that design was them, and they had a huge backlash and it was too much of a departure. They took a risk.
Speaker 1:But I think sometimes that's important because then you find out, okay, well, that's actually where the line is and now we got to go back and make regroup and make sure that we're doing this the right way and follow what we've had all this time. We actually had something great that we didn't have to change. But the process of going through it I think a lot of creative directors will tell you a lot of art directors will tell you going through that process Is just as important as if you'd have popped out and had a different logo at the end and it would have succeeded. Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes the money to go through that process. You learn something about your brand. You learn something About how your audience feels about your brand or your image.
Speaker 2:That's huge like the owner of 1123 and just creative director, what Motivates a brand to rebrand?
Speaker 1:Do you think? I think there can be a lot of factors. So I think in the you know high-level Time, you know, sometimes internally the group is like we need to refresh, we're not relevant anymore, and it could be relevance visually. It could be relevant as far as like a voice or an audience change. I think my first thought would be a Prop, like a product that has technology affected, or you know some type of brand that has a service that was One way in a process, but then on the consumer side it changes completely and so maybe that means you know, you look a little more advanced or a little more tightened up or techy, or you look a little more free-form, depending on how you, how your, your business has changed. So a change in industry Trends, a change in audience expectation, that's a rebrand.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes there are devastating Issues with a brand where something goes wrong and you have to distance yourself visually from what the old brand was. Maybe previous ownership did something and there was something mishandled like. That's the worst case scenario. That's like a PR nightmare plus rebrand, but I think that's that happens. Those are things that we've. We've heard people. They've come to us and said you know this happened. We don't want to be represented this way. We want our message to be this it starts there.
Speaker 1:So you know, those are the factors, I think, that come into play. There's probably a ton more, but off the top of my head, definitely those things. You know, the the industry changes for you, you have a big change or change in ownership and there's a whole vibe change to how you do business. That has to be represented visually somehow. So, yeah, I think one longevity isn't bad, like like having a long-standing logo isn't bad the gold, the old Coca-Cola logo, right, but it just has to do with, kind of the ethos of your, of your brand. All right, well, I think, I Think we'll probably stop there. I am super grateful for you and your input, emily, today. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me and I want to tell everybody who's been listening to please subscribe, like, do the thumbs up the hard thing. Whatever it is on the app that you use, please do that and follow us so that you can see when we pop up new episodes. More of them will be coming soon. We'll be covering all kinds of stuff in creative, maybe, culture, maybe styles of things, media, analytics so there's something kind of out there for everybody that I think we're gonna hit in the future. So please keep an eye on that, make sure you're following us, and until then, I have been Dave Stefano and thank you for listening to 11.3 presents.