How Not to Ruin a Perfectly Good Idea

Have you ever taken a perfectly good, simple idea and added so much to it that you totally obscured what was great about the original concept, burying it in an avalanche of words and pictures? 

Why do we do this, and what can we do to stop ourselves from ruining perfectly good ideas?

'Is That All?' Embrace the Simplicity

If we have a nice, simple idea, somewhere in our heart there is this fear that our client, or our creative director, or whomever will say, “That’s it?” So, we overexplain and embellish the idea to make the concept feel more “fleshed out.” The effect: We muddy up a nice, clear idea. 

What can we do about this? 

We can take that possibility of criticism [which might only be in our heads] and turn it into a strength. We can acknowledge and embrace the simplicity of the idea. If you feel like you need to add something, extend the idea backwards not outwards. Talk about how you got to the idea, so that the audience is with you and understands your thought process. 

Be OK Leaving Things Alone 

In a lot of cases, iteration can improve the work. This is especially true of headlines and captions, when often another pass or two makes the writing much more original and inventive. 

At the same time, we have to learn to leave things alone. We all want to seem like hard workers. As we move through rounds of review, we always want to present new things. If we have a week to do something, we feel like we need to work on it for the entire week. What can happen is we spend two days thinking of a cool idea and five days making it worse by adding a bunch of needless words and pictures around it. 

What can we do about this? 

We can stop. We can put down the idea and slowly back away. If we feel compelled to keep changing things, we can save the version we like and go back to it later. After all of the changes, we can humbly say that we liked the energy and simplicity of the first pass and we can hope other people feel the same way. 

Captions Are Your Friends

How many times have you seen a page with text on one side and four or five photos on the other side? What are the pictures trying to show? Are they moments from the story? The photographic style? The casting? The vibe? Are we supposed to just add up all the images and divide to get some sort of average that tells us about the idea? Each additional picture takes our simple idea and makes it less and less clear.

What can we do about this?

The best answer is a single perfect comp that captures the idea in one powerful image. If we have more than one picture, a little captioning goes a long way. It lets everyone know what they are looking at. It prevents people from getting confused or caught up in an unimportant detail that distracts from the simplicity of the idea. 

Simple Doesn't Mean Shallow

It just means we have to talk about our ideas in a simple and clear way. One of our favourite campaigns ever is Levi’s 'Go Forth' (see the work) The final films were incredibly vibrant and textured, full of nuance and depth. No one would refer to these final films as simple. At the same time, the idea itself could be expressed in a clear way with a few lines and images.

Let your ideas shine. Let them breathe. If they are simple, embrace the simplicity. 

Gabriel Lichstein is a copywriter at RPA, and Eden Han is an art director at RPA.