If you haven’t been asleep for the last month you know there’s been a project around here called Killed Ideas. It’s purpose is to pick the top 50 ads that never saw the light of day. In other words, all those great ads your creative director, account manager or client killed.
The final 50 have been chosen and will appear in Killed Ideas Volume I which will publish in May. For now, we’re keeping the selected fifty under wraps. After all, revealing them now would kind of defeat the point of the book, right?
But we can share some of the ideas that almost, but not quite, made it into the top 50. Here’s one:
When someone commits suicide, it’s not always clear why they did so. In a memoir written by Joan Wickersham, the author attempts to make sense of her father’s suicide by putting together the pieces which led up to his death.
To visually convey the author’s need to solve the puzzle of her father’s death, designer John Hamilton created a book cover design consisting of blocks of wood in need of arrangement. As a book cover, it immediately conveys the task at hand.
Very likely, it was the gun imagery that caused this idea to be…oh no…pardon the pun…killed. Even so, we like the design and think it’s compelling given the subject matter of the book
