Creative Eye for a Comms Guy

The communications field is broad and rapidly changing – but one thing is for sure, creativity is timeless, marketable and essential. Today, in a world of 140 characters, 8-second sound bites and 5,000 competing advertising messages per day, we literally have but a moment to capture an audience’s attention; point being, if it’s not creative enough to fight through all of that, it might as well not exist. This is a space where I share my own experience of creative communications work I have done or am currently working on, use as an opportunity to try new things and report back on the success or failure of such, and utilize as a forum to highlight and discuss the most intriguing creative work of others.

[wmatthewsutton]

What I learned about blogging

So there are lots of things that I have learned throughout the semester about blogging, how to drive traffic to my blog, and how to monitor it.

Since my blog was a creative blog talking about different creative projects I have worked on, I sometimes used the blog as more of a how-to and sometimes more of just an outlet to show what I did.  I noticed that the blog posts that were more of a how-to, such as the one entitle "Turning a Picture into a Graphic", got a lot more traffic and the bounce rate was a lot lower.  

I feel like these were the most successful posts, because...

1) They teach the reader how to do something.

2) They keep the reader on your page longer, because they are trying to do what you are showing them to do, verses just reading something, where they can skim through it.

3) Many people google how to do things, so blog posts such as these will be more likely to come up in those searches, driving readers to the blog.

I also noticed that consistency and timing is key... I received better traffic on my blog when I was consistently posting on Friday afternoon, rather than days like today, when I am posting on Sunday.

Another very important part of my blog was to make sure it was very visually appealing --- it was a creative blog, so had it not been visually appealing, it would have defeated the purpose and quickly driven people away.

I plan on continuing this blog after the semester is done and taking these things I have learned to make it more successful, and I hope they will help you the reader as well if you are considering blogging.

[wmatthewsutton]

Sending Powerful Messages through Graphics

One of my personal passions is reducing the rate of incarceration in the United States.  The US only makes up 5% of the world's population, but we make up 25% of the world's prison population.

This is a digital art project I created to show the effects of incarceration.  In the physical form, each image is accompanied by a jar, which change in it; the change represents the costs of incarceration and the people affected by it.  The art is interactive in the sense that it asks the audience to put change is the jar that most directly affects them, so that they can make the connection with how incarceration costs them - everyone.

The graphics were created very simply using photoshop.

[wmatthewsutton]

Shareable Graphics

Shareable graphics are great to try to get your point across on a specific issue, rally support and drive traffic to your social media page or website. This was a graphic I created for Congressman Beto O'Rourke when I was working as his communications assistant.  He is a active supporter of immigration reform and we knew that our constituents cared deeply about this issue, being that our district is on the U.S.-Mexico Border.  By creating this graphic and putting it out on Facebook as a promoted post, we were able to get lots of our constituents to see it, share it and draw traffic to our Facebook page.  The value of this, of course, was once we got them to our page, we could get them to like our page, and then we could keep in constant contact with them.  

[wmatthewsutton]

Political Event Flyers

At the beginning of the 2012 election season, some colleagues and I founded the El Paso Stonewall Young Democrats to give LGBT El Pasoans under the age of 40 a voice in the elections.  I was elected our public relations liaison, and in order to ramp up our membership and get the community to take us seriously as an organization, I was tasked with promoting our events within the local community and to the local news media.  In order to be effective at doing so, I crafted political event flyers, mostly using photoshop, that were then easily distributed through social media, email, and as print flyers.

Below are a few examples of the flyers I created.  I feel like creating bright, visually appealing flyers for events, is very important in drawing attention to your event, especially if you are going to be publicizing it online.  For example, going through your Facebook timeline, it is easy to to just skim past things, but if something is very visually appealing, there is a much better chance the viewer will stop and take a second look to see if this is something that may interest them.

[wmatthewsutton]

America: Chaos on the Cover

So this was actually a digital art project that I did recently.  The topic was basically what it meant to be an American.

Since I am obviously passionate about media and communications, I decided to do my project using popular/well-known magazine covers of important events throughout American history, primarily the last 60 years.  

So that this effect wasn't completely obvious, in most of the images I tried to just grab the image itself, without the magazine text, unless it was specifically relevant to the message I was trying to convey.

As I began putting the collage of images together, it quickly turned from all events in American history to the most tragic and chaotic events, which I felt had more of a story to tell.  I then put a layer over top of the collage that contained the text to "America the Beautiful" over and over.  I left the text mostly transparent (just enough to have a subtle effect and so that you could still read it), so that it did not take away from the images.  

The overall narrative I was trying to convey is that we have this attitude of superiority, or "America the Beautiful" if you will, and we act like these horrible events going on on the other side of the world - of war, prejudice, lack of basic freedoms (such as freedom of speech as represented by the dixie chicks), political unrest, corruption, protests, terror, etc. - are so outrageous, yet it's happening every day here in "America the Beautiful" as well.  We are no different, we just choose to imagine ourselves differently.  That is the irony.  

*This project was put together entirely using Adobe Photoshop.

[wmatthewsutton]

Turning a Picture into a Graphic

I wanted to turn a photograph I had taken of my friend into something more graphic that would show his personality more.

Below is the original picture I started off with...

I started off by removing the background in photoshop using the background eraser tool.  In order to best do this, it is good to put a bright colored layer underneath, so that it is easy to see as you are removing the background on the picture.

Then, when you click the little box (with the eye) to the left of the layer, it will remove the background, and the background will then be transparent.

I then completely removed the background and saved a version that could be used for anything really.

Then, I decided to put the red background back on the photo to give it some extra color.

From there, I decided to add his name...

But I still felt like the image could use something more, so I took a moment to think about this person's personality and interests.  He is really into fashion and loves fashion models, so I had to think about how I could project that onto this image without taking away from his photo too much.  Then, I thought of the RuPaul song, "Supermodel" and decided to pick a verse of it to fill the blank space on the left of his image, and used some simple white lines to give the effect of spotlights.  

In order to have full control over the text, I imported the photoshop image into Adobe Illustrator, pasted the text, and then used the Touch Type Tool (a feature that is new to Adobe Illustrator) to stretch and move the individual letters of the text around to conform to the his image.

Finally, the last thing I did was change some of the words to a dark red to make the words pop out more (it makes the white and red words pop more because of the contrast).  The reason I picked the dark red is because a dark color red works really well on a light color red (almost like an engraving feature) and this is the case with any color (i.e. navy on light blue, etc.)

Overall, I think the graphic came out very nice, and was relatively simple to create.

[wmatthewsutton]

So I decided to challenge myself to take a walk around my neighborhood and find some cool things to take pictures of.  This was the outcome.  I think it actually came out pretty cool.

I feel like lots of time what makes a good picture is how you take it, not what you take the picture of...

[wmatthewsutton]

Capturing Personality for Professionalism

This man hired me to take some professional photos of him.  He runs his own business as a consultant and fundraiser.  He wanted something that would look professional, while still capturing his personality.

We walked around Dupont taking pictures in various areas, so we could get some that didn't look to posed, while having a variety of different backgrounds to work with.

I especially liked the ones with the row houses in the background... I feel like it almost gave it this story tale look that ended up being really interesting.  

The photos were then edited very simply, just using iPhoto.  For the time of day, his look/personality, and the dupont themed background, I felt like the antique effect on iPhoto really gave the pictures something extra that worked really well.

[wmatthewsutton]

The Underdog Makes the Connection

When I was working on the Beto O'Rourke for Congress campaign, we were running against a 8-term incumbent in the Democratic Primary.  Since, we appeared to be the underdog in the race, the incumbent automatically seemed to pick up all the endorsements from organizations, other politicians, etc., and we didn't really have a fair shot at winning any of them.  

Things really got rough, when we found out that Bill Clinton was going to come to town to campaign for and endorse the incumbent.  What were we going to do to fight back?  

I came up with the idea to turn the tables and use these endorsements to show that the incumbent was out of touch with local El Pasoans and instead more concerned with political elites and special interest groups.  We then would highlight that we were not endorsed by these political elites and special interest groups, BUT WERE ENDORSED BY LOCAL EL PASOANS.  I posted on our social media platforms for people to email us pictures of them with their Beto yard signs or t-shirts and encouraged them to be as creative as possible.  

The day Clinton came to town, I started posting all of the pictures people had been sending us, saying "Maria Gonzalez endorses Beto for Congress" or "Even the Feuille's dog knows Beto is the right choice for

 Congress", etc.  People loved it!  The more pictures we posted, the more we 

kept receiving.  After a few weeks time, we had received in excess of 1000 personal endorsement photos that we continue to push out through the campaign and it became a generally theme to show that we were the people's choice, that we were staying local/connected to the local people, etc.

Now, of course, this wasn't the only thing that we did right, but in the end, we unseated a 8-term incumbent in the Democratic primary, one of only three races nationwide that this happened in 2012.

[wmatthewsutton]

Graphic Design - Creating Promotional Flyers

My brother-in-law recently got his real-estate license and is trying to get his business started, so he had asked me if I could help him come up with some promotional materials.

His request was a flyer consistent with the Century 21 colors providing his information and advertising a free iPad (contingent upon a successful closing).  He further requested that the iPad promo really pop off the page.  At first thought, this seemed very challenging, especially given the colors (gold and black).  However, after playing around with it, I was able to pull together the flyer below.  

Key Elements that transformed this flyer:

Gradient bar at the top of the page

Semi-translucent ribbon across the iPad

Starburst background

Then, my sister showed me a picture of this other flyer, which I thought looked horrible.  It was very bland and did't leave a nice impression of the property or the realtor, so I decided to keep the current format, but just clean it up and make it pop more.

Image she sent me (below):

What I transformed it into (below):

From the previous flyer, I decided to use the same format to create his business card - The bottom black part would be the front side of the card and the colorful house would be the backside of the card.

Why is a fresh palable design so critical?

Adding these design elements to promotional materials, especially in a business like real-estate, can make all the difference between whether people take you seriously or not.

Promotional materials are the first (or possibly the only) impression the consumer will have of you and your business - we want it to be a positive and lasting impression.

All of the design was created using Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

[wmatthewsutton]

Telephoto Zoom Lens on Close-up Shots

This week, I bought a new camera lens (Canon EFS 55-250mm Telephoto Zoom Lens with Image Stabilizer), and so I enlisted the help of some friends to be my models while I got a feel for it. As you can see, these photos were taken pretty close up, so you may ask, why do I need a telephoto zoom lens to take close up/profile shots?  Using a telephoto lens allows you to more clearly isolate your subject in the highest quality, while further blurring your background. 

With a shorter lens, in order to get similar results, you would have to get right up in your subjects face, which can obviously be uncomfortable for you and the subject and will limit the effect of being able to capture their raw emotions/expression.

Alternatively, the downside, of course, is that you can't get as close to your subject, unless you only want to get a small portion of their face.

More experiments with this to come...

*Note: Some of the photos were slightly edited using iPhoto to crop and adjust colors.

[wmatthewsutton]

About Matt and Why the Blog?!

A little about me....

My name is Matt Sutton. I am about to graduate (in December) with a degree in political communications from The School of Media & Public Affairs at The George Washington University and I am currently working at a Public Relations/Public Affairs agency in DC.

Previously, I served as Communications Director for Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s campaign that successfully defeated eight-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes, in the Democratic Primary.  Subsequently, he hired me to come to DC with him and serve as the communications assistant of his DC congressional office.

I have held various other professional and volunteer roles that have dealt with various aspects of communications – from PR and media relations to graphic design and photography. 

The goal of this blog...

The communications field is broad and rapidly changing – but one thing is for sure, creativity is timeless, marketable and essential.  Today, in a world of 140 characters, 8-second sound bites and 5,000 competing advertising messages per day, we literally have but a moment to capture an audience’s attention; point being, if it’s not creative enough to fight through all of that, it might as well not exist. 

I plan on using this as a space to share my own experience of creative communications work I have done or am currently working on, use as an opportunity to try new things and report back on the success or failure of such, and utilize as a forum to highlight and discuss the most intriguing creative work of others.

I have had my share of experience, but I obviously still have so much to learn, and so I hope that this blog will propel me, as well as others, to push our creative thinking to the edge... and beyond.