stillness, indeed! two full days of jury duty.
visiting the courthouse = not my favorite thing. (i’m also a CASA and so go to this courthouse for more than jury selection pool hell.) hanging out at the courthouse = a particular kind of inertia hell.
in this grand exercise, i bump up against people with whom i don’t regularly associate with, who have what i perceive as little awareness of much i identify with, much less my precious artform that i’m writing about here.
so. two full days, during a crunch to a deadline, thank you, to have no access to my li’l laptop and its contents, email, anything. the government cut off my umbilical, and it was. . . uncomfortable. aside from taking a design book to read on breaks and visiting the bookstore at lunch to thumb through publications, no design was accomplished, and no creative ideas (okay well, one) bubbled up.
but what i did get was one big window into several types of humanity. from the jury selection to the jury group selected to the trial itself, i got an eyeful of types of people whom i don’t get to have an extended conversation with in my daily routine.
you know how we (creatives) work: we work with visionaries in some operation or corporation or enterprise; people who have ideas about how things should go forward for the business they’re in. we talk colour, we talk concept, we operate on this high plane of ‘what if’.
what we often DON’T see firsthand is the audience. and i got a good cross-section of ‘audience’ in my jury duty stillness: old. high school-young. lower-middle class. educated. uneducated. over-educated. simple. ethnic. blue collar. executive. trade occupation. you get the idea. and you know where i’m going with this.
HOW in God’s name do we as creatives consider the vast differences in the audience we are tasked with reaching, with this logo or that slogan or this piece of copy or that image? is that why Burger King commercials or the (name that) beer commercials are so banal? or the Intel ads are so austere? the audience? with no taste other than their circuit board memory or their willingness to make asses out of themselves in the name of a drunkgoodtime, or their . . . tastebuds?
yep.
i figure there are audience-players and client-players in each creative project and in each creative’s ethics arsenal. just like there are movies that play to the audience (Indiana Jones series) and films that play to the, um, artist types (No Country for Old Men).
what we as designers/copywriters, etc. have to decide is what the audience will really perceive, which leads to a whole other discussion, maybe to be picked up in these pages, about what & whom we associate our craft with, and how much truth is behind it.
but more than that, to realize these are people we’re talking to - not demographics - with views and needs and circumstances that might not be terribly reassuring to us who get to play ‘what if’, but a personal audience, nonetheless.
but for now, i confess i got a good dose of reality in viewing the ‘general public’ in this jury experience, and seeing firsthand who my audience might be and a bit about how they think. and it’s a challenge. and it was good it got this break in my monitor madness to see it, consider it.
but don’t call me for jury duty for another few years, please.
