Give Your Ideas Legs
Or, in This Case, Wings
Some ideas solve the assignment.
The better ones keep going.
Years ago, I was sitting in a meeting about a marketing piece for an aviation event. Everyone was talking about how to make the piece stand out.
Maybe it needed an unusual fold.
Maybe it needed an interesting shape.
Maybe there was something clever we could do with the printing.
And, as usually happens when you start talking about unusual folds and shapes, the conversation eventually got around to all the reasons those things are difficult to produce and mail.
I asked a simple question:
How is this going to be distributed?
It wasn’t going to be mailed.
It was going to be handed out.
Well, that changed everything.
I picked up a piece of paper, folded it into a paper airplane and sent it sailing across the room.
Why don’t we make the piece a paper airplane?
Suddenly, the production problem wasn’t a problem.
The fold was the idea.
And for me, that idea had started a very long time before that meeting.
My First Aeronautical Engineer
When I was a kid, my father and I used to have paper-airplane contests.
My dad was an electrical engineer who worked with Honeywell on NASA-related projects, so naturally we couldn’t just fold one airplane and call it a day.
We engineered them.
He would show me how changing a fold changed the way the plane flew. We’d make different shapes and test them across the room.
Some flew farther.
Some flew straighter.
Some probably went directly into the furniture.
But we kept changing them and trying again.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he was teaching me something I would use for the rest of my career:
Don’t just make something. Ask what else it can do.
Years later, sitting in that aviation meeting, all of that came back without my consciously looking for it.
Paper.
Airplanes.
Flight.
Of course.
But the Idea Didn’t Stop There
The piece itself worked, but there was another opportunity.
We had a call to action.
People could request additional sales information after the event. Normally, you would fulfill that request, send the material and consider the job finished.
But why should the idea end just because the first piece had done its job?
Along with the requested information, we sent instructions for making a better paper airplane.
Now the concept had traveled from the event into the follow-up.
The first airplane got their attention.
The second one continued the conversation.
That’s what I mean when I say:
Give your ideas legs.
Or, in this case, wings.
Don’t Decorate the Idea. Extend It.
This is something I think gets lost when people talk about branding and design.
They’ll create a visual device for an invitation and then abandon it for the program.
They’ll have a wonderful idea for an ad and forget about it when they get to the event.
They’ll develop a concept for a campaign and then treat every subsequent piece as another isolated assignment.
That’s decoration.
A good concept should be able to travel.
If you’ve found an idea that’s strong enough, ask:
Where else can it go?
Can the invitation become part of the event?
Can the packaging become part of the experience?
Can the response mechanism continue the joke?
Can the follow-up bring people back to the original idea?
Can something people were going to throw away become something they want to play with, keep or show somebody else?
That’s when design stops being a collection of individual pieces and becomes an experience.
Sometimes the Best Ideas Have Been Waiting for You
I certainly wasn’t sitting in that meeting thinking about being a little girl making paper airplanes with my father.
But somewhere in my head, that experience was still there.
That’s one of the wonderful things about being a creative person.
Nothing is really wasted.
The odd things you’ve seen.
The places you’ve been.
The people you’ve known.
The ridiculous things you’ve tried.
The things somebody taught you when you were eight years old.
They all go into this enormous mental drawer.
And then one day, somebody gives you a problem.
You open the drawer.
And something flies out.
Literally, in this case.
So when you have a good idea, don’t stop when you’ve solved the first assignment.
See where else it can go.
Give it legs.
Give it another chapter.
Give people another reason to remember it.
And every once in a while…
give it wings and see how far it can fly.
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