Manipulating Resources
Over at Creative Think Roger von Oech His All-Time Favorite Print Ad. I love the simplicity of the notion of just manipulating a limited set of resources:
This idea is reflected in one of my all-time favorite print ads, which was created in the 1960s by Charles Piccirillo to promote National Library Week. The headline consisted of the alphabet in lower case letters like so:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
It was followed by this copy:
At your local library they have these arranged in ways that can make you cry giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand.
Its astonishing to see what these twenty-six little marks can do. In Shakespeares hands they became Hamlet. Mark Twain wound them into Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce twisted them into Ulysses. Gibbon pounded them into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. John Milton shaped them into Paradise Lost.
The ad went to to extol the virtues of reading and mention that good books are available at your library. There are several messages here, but to me the most important is that that creative ideas come from manipulating your resources no matter how few and simple they are.