mobites - ideas, inspiration, insight

I’ve always admired the work of children’s book illustrator Maurice Sendak. In fact, I use one of his books, In The Night Kitchen, to talk about the components of effective brand stories.

So I was delighted to discover that an exhibit of his work is underway in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2008 Delancey Place until May 3, 2009. Check it out if you can. Because as fate would have it, you and I can learn a lot from Maurice Sendak about creating true communications concepts that are more than just words and pictures. And about how visual people and word people can work together to go beyond just labels
to create true, compelling concepts.

The difference between an idea and a label

It’s like the difference between Albert Einstein and Einstein Brothers. One has substance; the other is just a bagel no matter what you call it. And the difference is important. Because somewhere out there in “business marketing land” there’s a writer composing a caption for a visual that was handed to him by an art director. This will be foisted off on someone as a creative concept. It is not. It is merely a picture with a label. A label is not an idea. A label simply describes what you are looking at.

But when visuals and words are developed together, as one, they take on a new life and a more engaging and memorable language to the reader. They’re fused together like Louie Anderson in a wetsuit.

Maurice Sendak calls it “the Other Story,” Bill Bernbach called it “the third language.” But whatever you call it, the visual adds a meaning to the words that did not exist before. In the same way, the words add a unique insight into the visual that would not exist without them.

Words and pictures are inseparable

Check out what Mr. Sendak has to say about “more than words.” Hang in there he’ll get to it eventually.

For those of you who are time and patience challenged, here’s his key idea.

“The next thing you learn is that you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps not even the author was aware of. And that’s what you hold on to, and that’s what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.”

“That will be the mystery that will haunt me until the day of my death: What is that thing that comes into the work that is not premeditated, that you didn’t think of, that actually belongs there but you don’t know how it got there?”

“It’s really about the spirit, and I find that hard to talk about because, you know, I’m a cynic. I don’t know from the spirit, and yet I do. And that is the great puzzle of my life … something deeper is involved, deeper in myself than I know what it is.”

But that’s just Maurice Sendak’s opinion. I think he’s right. But he and I could both be wrong.