Writing this one harks back all the way to my college days. In a design class, we were given a competition. A local clay company had a market for one of their by-products- kitty litter- and it wasn’t selling well at all. The class would all come up with designs for a kitty litter back to replace the poor selling one. Yay. Three entries were chosen, and prizes were given. We heard later from the reps at the clay company that when the CEO saw the new designs, he said they couldn’t use any. They did not have HIS cat on them, like the old bags did. We said, no problem- we can use photos of the cat and modify the designs. Turns out, no. There was only one, tiny, black and white photo of the cat, which was long dead. The packaging kept the same eye-gouging, grainy, over-enlarged, gray tone photo for years more. I learned a LOT in that class, but not about graphic design or illustration.
Writing this one harks back all the way to my college days. In a design class, we were given a competition. A local clay company had a market for one of their by-products- kitty litter- and it wasn’t selling well at all. The class would all come up with designs for a kitty litter back to replace the poor selling one. Yay. Three entries were chosen, and prizes were given. We heard later from the reps at the clay company that when the CEO saw the new designs, he said they couldn’t use any. They did not have HIS cat on them, like the old bags did. We said, no problem- we can use photos of the cat and modify the designs. Turns out, no. There was only one, tiny, black and white photo of the cat, which was long dead. The packaging kept the same eye-gouging, grainy, over-enlarged, gray tone photo for years more. I learned a LOT in that class, but not about graphic design or illustration.