Creative Kickstarts: The Art of Image-ination

When I first started out in this business there was a story doing the rounds that filled my impressionable young head with awe. For all I know it was an urban legend, but it was the talk of the office back then – a tale about a pitch for the City of London.

As the story goes, a plucky creative director for one of the shortlisted firms arrived at the pitch to find his competition’s submissions arranged around the room in board after board of sketches and renderings. When the client asked for his submission, he simply removed from his pocket three Polaroid photos he’d taken on the way there. With those three images, he communicated his understanding of London and (pause for the drumroll, please) blew every other firm in the room out of the water in the boldest and most unexpected way.

It was after hearing this story that my love affair with the power of images began.

Fast forward 20 years. At my firm, we try to approach every project without preconceptions about the end result. We don’t have a house style; for us it’s all about the collaboration with our clients, inching toward the final concept iteratively and with measured steps. And that’s where the pictures come in.

At their most basic level, images are the ultimate conversation starters – especially useful early on in getting the client to tap the fountain of knowledge in their heads. What follows can take many forms. We can use the photos to determine the tone of the brand and its visual expression. Or we can use them to dive deep on the details, moving from a 50,000-foot view to one rooted in the granular decisions around the smallest elements. We might need to begin by exploring themes that are emotive and abstract, or our early conversations might get very specific and literal. In many cases, the beginning of a project is a mix of both.

The forum for discussing these images is a meeting we schedule a few weeks into the project. It’s critical to get the right people in the room – it doesn’t work otherwise – and as such we stress with the client the absolute importance of this exercise. We let them choose the group with one caveat: It shouldn’t be just the bigwigs, because then the room can be a little stifled. I have sat with ceos and the heads of marketing, construction and store design, but we’ve also had the head of IT, the head of HR or the buyers. On a couple of occasions we’ve had the person who runs the front desk. The filter we encourage the client to apply is: Will they contribute? I’ll take the motivated junior employee over a ceo who doesn’t want to participate any day.

Once everyone’s assembled, the moment when we reveal the image boards is always magical. Imagine up to 500 snapshots arranged on the walls or across the table. Sometimes there’s a predetermined order and sometimes it appears to be completely random. After the unveiling, we inevitably arrive at a point where the meeting shifts dramatically from polite conversation to an instant gravitation to the meat of the project. It’s a moment of great excitement, where two teams come together in a way that binds us to the task at hand.

But before we get to this point, there’s a lot of work to be done in the selection of what we show. Bring the wrong images and the end result will be, well, wrong. And yet it’s by no means an exact science. We begin very broad, filling entire war rooms with everything from pictures to articles to p-o-p from the client and their competitors. Those images are then ordered around general themes that start to emerge. For the final cull (always a spirited meeting, and a messy one) the goal is not to limit the selection we present, but to make sure we’re clear around what we’re bringing and why. We always throw in a healthy dose of contrarian images that deliberately go against the grain. And, on occasion, these “ringers” rise unexpectedly to the top – although they’re always the subject of the fiercest debates.

Our clients debate and vote on the pictures. Sometimes this exercise reveals disagreements over the direction, which allows them to get these issues on the table early. At other times the exercise cements the conviction that the direction is right. We’ve had sessions where the solution came quickly and sessions where it took a whole day. And on only one occasion was the client unable to complete the exercise, unable to agree on the images in front of them. You don’t need me to tell how that project went.

This approach has only grown in importance now that so much of our work is done internationally. The last couple of years have seen these sessions taking place in Delhi, Dubai, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Paris and Seoul. When you introduce differences in language and culture, the discussions around direction can become confused. Images can help immensely with this – they remove concepts like nuance and subjectivity from the mix. For example, in our work in the beauty business, we’ve seen how a Western perception of beauty actually runs contrary to people’s preferences on the other side of the world. Images are a wonderful tool for expressing and exploring these differences.

It’s true that two people might look at the same image and simply see different things – but when they explain what they’re seeing, you learn so much more about their feelings. And when we can’t rely on language to explain our thoughts, the images can act as a creative shorthand. As the clients look at the images, it’s often clear just from their faces that “this is us!” and “this is not!”

Images have led clients to tell us that we can’t use wood in their country because it connotes poverty, especially the distressed types of wood so popular on our shores. We’ve had clients tell us to avoid certain colors because they have religious or cultural connotations. We’ve gotten into very specific discussions on the first days of the project about construction methods and detailing, based on one specific image. We’ve even used these images to align the end product with the budget.

In recent months we’ve been expanding the process to include objects, and we invite the clients to bring their own inspiration as we all sit cross-legged on the floor, ripping pages from magazines or pinning up a blurry snap they brought from home. And the content can be anything. We’ve had clients fixated on the color of a flower. And a senior vice president from one of the biggest brands in the world holding up a picture of an angel and saying, “I don’t know what this means, but this is us.”

The City of London designer I mentioned in the intro got lucky, frankly. It’s one of the reasons I abhor the free pitch. How in the world are we supposed to give you what you want without ever talking to you, or worse still – in the most despicable of free pitches – ever meeting you? But the image as a tool for collaboration? For dialogue? For debate? That’s what inspires my awe today.

Christian Davies is managing creative director of FRCH Design Worldwide (Cincinnati).