Effective marketing and communications efforts start with a clear understanding of the audience and goal. These simple creative principles will help ensure your project is successful and has the desired impact.
Start with a brief
A creative brief consists of a series of questions or prompts that can help you build a solid structure at the start of a project. It helps to clearly define the goal you are trying to achieve, identify your audience, and gauge success throughout the duration of the project or campaign.
Show, don’t tell
Let your program speak for itself. Use emotive, straightforward, and illustrative storytelling to create memorable and effective content. Avoid exposition and dense blocks of copy, and select imagery that reinforces your primary message so that your audience can quickly understand it.
Serve your audience
Prioritize the content that’s most relevant to your audience. Know who you’re trying to reach, understand what information they need, and make it easy for them to find it through simple and clean design.
Play to your strengths
Plenty of schools claim academic excellence and a beautiful college town. Highlight the ways in which your program is genuinely unique among competitors through your content and imagery selections, clearly demonstrating why someone should choose you.
Brand in action
Browse creative work that shows how these principles can be used effectively.
