![\"'Balls'](\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/balls_1.gif\" "\\"'Balls'")
'Balls' Advertising Campaign<\/p><\/div>\n
As far as not using design services goes,\u00a0using Microsoft Office clip art is as transparent as water when it comes to saying “I think I know what I’m doing, and I really believe that I’m good at it, but obviously I really don’t have\u00a0a clue”.<\/p>\n
My manager (well, my manager’s manager’s manager) was putting together a group-wide presentation to explain the importance of Teamworking\u00ae to the future of the department and the rest of the known Universe.\u00a0He had come up with the idea – I don’t think I could ever work out, even then,\u00a0what this was about\u00a0(that’s another thing about design: you have to have a logical motif that everyone else<\/em> understands) – that the whole concept of Teamworking\u00ae was like juggling a lot of different balls in the air.<\/p>\n It’s important to understand that this guy was one of those people who had just ‘discovered’ computers, partly by virtue of having to use one every day for email and other stuff. He was a technophobe who had decided he was a technophile. It’s also important to bear in mind that in the late 1990s\/early 2000s Microsoft’s Office clipart was both limited per se<\/em>, and limited to American themes. The presence of a soccer<\/em> ball in the library was as British as it got.<\/p>\n Anyway, this manager came up with a logo almost exactly like the one above (again, bearing in mind that clipart then was not to as\u00a0high a standard as it is today) using an American football, a baseball, and a soccer ball (i.e. in ‘English’: a rugby ball, a tennis ball, and a football). The whole thing – clipart and presentation – took him months, and he was incredibly proud<\/em> of it. That aside, I warned him that when he did the presentation to the already-cynical\u00a0shopfloor, they would say it was “all a load of balls”. He didn’t listen, and the\u00a0shopfloor responded exactly as I’d said.<\/p>\n So, the point I am making is that the kind of advertising you would expect to see nailed to a tree or tied to lamp post requesting information about a missing cat or advertising a church jumble sale can easily be misused by cost-cutting bureaucrats, and become elevated to the level formerly dominated by Saatchi & Saatchi. It happens when you give an important design task to someone who isn’t skilled in\u00a0 the art.<\/p>\n
![\"Nolls](\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/bus_1.jpg\" "\\"Nolls")
<\/a>