Picture a half-dead tree

Here’s a quick snap of the front of a post­card I did for a client this year. It’s to announce their par­tic­i­pa­tion at the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Col­lege and Uni­ver­sity Busi­ness Offi­cers con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco this month.

Just a quick bit of com­men­tary on this one that I found inter­est­ing. When I first stum­bled on the tree image on iStock­photo, I was really moved. There’s some­thing about the life that is com­mu­ni­cated through such a stark bifur­ca­tion of the tree that hit home for me. Seems only a lit­tle trite to apply such a cool image to a tradeshow post­card, but it works.

In any case, we got our first bit of direct feed­back on the card from a recip­i­ent on the mail­ing list. The list is made up of col­lege and uni­ver­sity busi­ness offi­cers — pre­dictably, I guess — and this par­tic­u­lar respondent’s title is “Vice Pres­i­dent for Busi­ness & Finance/Treasurer” for a major east coast uni­ver­sity. The line that struck me from his response:

The half-dead tree is a rather graphic thought-provoking device and illustrative.

The orig­i­nal of the image has the tree dying from left to right. I flipped it because I thought the metaphor worked bet­ter sim­u­lat­ing growth rather than death over a sim­u­lated left-right time­line. I wanted folks who looked at it to see that trans­for­ma­tion, that growth.

There’s this con­cept that never fails to flip me. When cre­at­ing a piece, you want your reader to either feel the pain, or see the hope. In this case, we were shoot­ing for hope. The response illus­trates that we may have hit the pain more squarely.