A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson.
—John Henrik Clarke, “A Search for Identity”
Stopping to “smell the roses” might seem like a mundane act, but the cliché carries a meaning that is very powerful for human beings. Stopping to smell the roses has long since become a metaphor for taking the time to fully absorb something and enjoy it.
As it happens, that is exactly the goal of a true Iconist. You are attempting to get someone to stop, look at you, and engage in a focused relationship with what you have to offer. Interestingly, like any cliché that’s been around a long time, stopping to smell the roses has developed an instant conceptual meaning, through repetition, that is vastly more complicated than what it sounds like on the surface.
By now you know that the abundance of choice in the world makes it extremely difficult for your audience to see you. If they do manage to connect with you amid all their other options, do they really see you clearly?
We all need to start thinking like Iconists.
The dilution problem can be partially solved by decreasing what you decide to present first to the world. By limiting your options to what you offer up front, and using intelligent, emotional, aggressive, authentic Blocks as entry points to stand out, you can hook your audience. Making this up-front connection pulls them into making a commitment to discover the more complex aspects of what you have to offer. Which means that, even if you have a complex idea or a robust product line, you should still use Blocks. It is just about determining what you want to lead with.
To start using Blocks, you need to start looking at the world from the point of view of the person you are trying to reach.
What are you, your business, your brand, your art, or your cause known for? How are you remembered, if at all?
Begin with what you do, say it transparently, say it repetitively, say it emotionally, and say it as big or as loud as you can. Otherwise, it will be as if you never said it at all.
You want to limit any major up-front communication to one to three Block statements or visual images altogether.
If you lead with one to three targeted visual or emotional Blocks and present them with more complicated data later, you will find that your audience is able to absorb more of the specific or technical information required to make a decision.
The following made-up ad is a crude but clear example. On the first page is a bold central image relating to your product, service, or idea. Hovering above or below the image is your Block statement, which speaks to the emotional needs of your audience. A bold, transparent Block statement shows your audience that you understand them and are willing to say it, and say it loudly. This boldness communicates that you are committed to what you are about.
Limiting yourself to a few Block choices creates an access point and magnetizes attention. Random and busy communication absolutely begets rejection and leads to obscurity. The things your audience cares about ring true to them. Putting what they care about up front builds instant credibility that will render your audience more willing to look at your complex information.
The jam in the image on page 155 is emotional to those who love it, especially if you understand and speak directly to why they love it. (This example takes up just one page, but if you have multiple pages, make sure you repeat your Blocks, boldly and profoundly, at the top of each page and keep your choices to a minimum.)
If you were to present the same brochure with a list of all your different jams right up front, you would’ve lost those customers. They would have been overwhelmed and repulsed. You gain customers and interest in your message only by what you present at the first glance.
It’s important to keep in mind that a Block or Icon is not a slogan. It’s a statement of purpose or a result you achieve. It tells your customer that you are committed to their needs, interests, or desires. This fosters immediate credibility because it tells your audience you took the time to understand them. If your Block contains the content that your potential customer or onlooker is emotionally concerned with, and it is said large and loud enough, it takes on a whole new meaning.
If you’ve truly figured out why jam lovers love jam, it’s essential that you craft your Block in line with that concept. And if you nail it—getting your Block just right—it will resonate emotionally with jam lovers. The problem is, most people who craft these messages don’t really understand why their customers love jam. Instead, the jam purveyors are more concerned with what they did to create the jam. Which is about themselves, not those they are servicing.
“It’s the number one mistake designers make,” said heralded footwear designer D’Wayne Edwards in an interview: “They don’t think about the consumer, they think about themselves first.”
D’Wayne grew up in Inglewood, California, in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles during the 1970s. He lost two of his brothers before their time—one from illness and the other in an accident. Despite those hardships, he had a good mom who encouraged all his pursuits, including his love of sports. As a young boy, however, D’Wayne soon found that he wanted to draw his heroes, professional athletes, much more than he wanted to emulate them on the court or field.
D’Wayne is unique in everything he does because he is suspicious of anything conventional and ignores anything in life that is not effective. This mirrors the philosophy of martial artist and philosopher Bruce Lee in the way Lee saw martial arts and life itself. It is no surprise that D’Wayne admires the legendary fighter and innovator. As an innovator, philosopher, and artist, Bruce Lee had the ability to look deeply into accepted convention and change it for the better.
Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
—Bruce Lee
In his childhood, D’Wayne loved to draw powerful, poetically graceful athletes. For some reason, he started gravitating toward the shoes that his favorite players were wearing. He found that the footwear was the most complex part of his drawings. By the time he was twelve years old, D’Wayne stopped drawing athletes altogether and was only drawing their shoes.
Though the sneakers of the late ’70s and early ’80s were flamboyant and iconic, the profession of the hip athletic shoe designer didn’t exist yet. And the nature of shoes as streetwear or a form of self-expression for America’s youth culture had not yet been realized in the collective consciousness—that is, as fashion blog MR PORTER reported, until Run-DMC’s smash hit with the 1986 sneakerhead anthem “My Adidas.”
There’s a fabled story in which Russell Simmons, the cofounder of Def Jam Recordings and manager of Run-DMC, invited Adidas executives to a Run-DMC concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden at the peak of the group’s fame, in the mid ’80s. The story has appeared in the Village Voice. When the dynamic group launched into the hook of “My Adidas,” ten thousand kids started waving their shoes in the air. This immediately resulted in the Adidas execs writing Def Jam a check for $1.5 million for the band to officially endorse their shoes. One could also say that the event was a Block moment for Russell, and he used it to get the attention he deserved as an arbiter of hip-hop and pop culture.
The success of this song marked a timely shift toward sneakers as a true form of street fashion, and the age of the sneakerhead (sneaker collector) was born. The opportunity to design shoes for the world’s elite athletes, musicians, artists, and global youth culture began to take hold, becoming a sought-after creative professional pursuit.
Meanwhile, after being turned down for a job at the Foot Locker at Fox Hills Mall in West Los Angeles a total of six times, seventeen-year-old D’Wayne finally got a job through a temp agency as a file clerk at the international headquarters of shoemaker LA Gear. After he’d toiled for a year in accounts payable, he noticed a suggestion box where any employee could leave notes about how the company could be improved.
Every day over the next six months, D’Wayne put a sketch of a shoe in that suggestion box—lateral, no angle, straight-on side view—suggesting that LA Gear hire him as a full-time shoe designer. Eventually his sketches made their way to LA Gear’s CEO, Robert Greenberg. Now, this was the late 1980s, before personal cell phones were commonplace. Still, it must have been shocking to hear a teenage file clerk summoned over the company-wide PA system to meet with the CEO of what at the time was one of the most famous shoe brands in the world. D’Wayne knew his bold designs were going to upper management, but he couldn’t have predicted that very public announcement asking him to report to the founder’s office. D’Wayne was hired, and at nineteen became the youngest professional shoe designer in the world.
By the age of twenty-three, when most kids are just getting out of college and trying to figure out what to do with their lives, he was made head shoe designer at LA Gear. He went on to spend eleven years at Nike (where he was one of only eight people ever to work on and design the Air Jordan) before eventually walking away from the corporate world.
Today D’Wayne Edwards is hailed as one of the greatest athletic shoe designers of all time. He is based in Portland, Oregon, America’s shoe design and manufacturing mecca. He started the revolutionary footwear design academy Pensole, now the most respected, innovative, and successful shoe design academy in the world. Regarded as the global authority on shoe design education, he teaches design classes at MIT and lectures at Harvard, and after just four years with Pensole in operation, Fast Company named him one of the hundred most innovative people in business.
In essence, D’Wayne noticed that shoe companies were having a hard time finding consistently trained and talented designers. In what is now a $50-billion-a-year industry, D’Wayne saw there was a problem but also a massive opportunity. In founding his academy he created opportunities for talented younger people all over the world who didn’t otherwise know how to break into shoe design. “I could see what was wrong in the field. The issues in the industry and the issues of design education, and the disconnection between the two. The students were stuck in the middle,” D’Wayne says.
D’Wayne knew the practical reasons why the creative end of this juggernaut of an industry was breaking down. Having followed a previously untraversed career path, he knew how to improve this flawed and broken system of creating and finding qualified designers. Innovation like this rarely comes from inside the establishment. Instead, it comes from unique thinkers like D’Wayne who have not been assimilated by the machine, who are willing to take risks and stand tall in what they know to be true, even when faced by an economically powerful (but flawed) apparatus.
D’Wayne has always been an Iconist. His command of Blocks and how to stand out is at the foundation of his success, his academy, and everything he does. He passes this knowledge on to his students. D’Wayne encourages in all his students the same design-a-day cadence that got him seen, as well as insisting on the straight-on, lateral, no angle, side-view approach—like you would see at a Foot Locker—as a prerequisite for all work submitted by applicants, who come from all over the world. According to D’Wayne, “Seeing design straight on allows you to focus without distraction. It allows you to see the essence and unique qualities of the individual artist you’re looking at. Anything more pushes you away.” What D’Wayne is describing here is a Block, the anatomy of what makes something iconic.
Undistracted, instantly perceivable communication can contribute to powerful messages. D’Wayne’s number one objective is to prepare his students not just for work in the footwear industry but also to communicate in the real world. “[When] these kids talk about their designs in 140 characters with abbreviated words, that doesn’t work in the real world,” he says. “Getting them to understand that their verbal communication is just as important as their visual communication is critical. And even the visual communication needs to show that you’re a clear thinker and that you can communicate with or without words. I try to get them to imagine that their portfolio is a comic strip because a comic strip has very few words in it. If you can create a visual presentation that uses very few words, or if the words you do use are massive in size so you get right to the point, then you’re a better visual communicator than everyone else. Also, things that are oversized in expression tend to have more emotional impact.” Spoken like a true Iconist.
Iconists like D’Wayne Edwards who use the power of Blocks to galvanize their audiences have been present throughout history. But we are just now defining them and bringing their iconic work to light in order to learn from their example. Mozart, Frida Kahlo, Martin Luther King Jr., Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, and other giants in their fields all used these techniques, whether they knew it or not. None of them were perfect, but they eventually mastered the skill of standing out in a crowded field. They are geniuses not because of the complexity of their works but because of their understanding and desire to use simple, repetitive communication boldly, over and over again, to bring their audiences into the full complexity of who they are. There are so many of us that would be elevated if we were willing to do the same thing. Repetitive simplicity is a major part of genius and is what makes almost anything great.
Just go ahead and communicate to your audience with one to three Block statements. Give them a road sign. Committing to that road sign tends to feel a bit uncomfortable because we know others are going to see it, and we don’t want to get it wrong. Fear of failure or rejection is the enemy of greatness and connection. If we let it rule, we won’t create our Blocks with enough boldness for those we want to attract. We will hide, without even realizing it, in the busyness of our offering to avoid potential rejection. The tragic irony is that, before we even taste rejection, we are often denying any potential for success, connection, and engagement by not Iconing our offering. Most of us would rather be safe and busy and fail to engage rather than be loud and possibly get it wrong.
We shouldn’t play it safe. By putting your Block statement or imagery up front, you always and immediately grab your audience . . . like one married couple did in a small midwestern town almost a century ago.
In December 1931 the young pharmacist Ted Hustead and his wife, Dorothy, wanted to move to a small town where the young family could afford their very own store and go to daily Catholic mass. The company’s website tells the story of how the couple came to the town of Wall, South Dakota, which had only 326 residents and a Catholic church for them to attend. It was just what they thought they wanted, so Ted purchased Wall Drug with his relatively modest inheritance of $3,000. Not long after, however, Ted realized just how small, remote, and “busted broke” his new hometown was—theirs was a little business in a little prairie town. One afternoon in the backroom apartment they had built in their store, as they listened to the weathered jalopies pass by on US Route 16A just behind the shop, Dorothy decided to share an idea to get more customers to come to the store. “Well, now what is it that those travelers really want after driving across that hot prairie? They’re thirsty. They want water. Ice cold water! Now we’ve got plenty of ice and water. Why don’t we put up signs on the highway telling people to come here for free ice water? Listen, I even made up a few lines for the sign: Get a soda . . . Get a root beer . . . turn next corner . . . Just as near . . . To Highway 16 & 14 . . . Free Ice Water . . . Wall Drug.”
Dorothy Hustead was literally saying out loud the simple finite intersection of what Wall Drug could offer and what their desired audience might want or need the most. In the company’s history on its website, Ted reflects, “The next weekend our son and I went out to the highway and put up our signs for free ice water. I must admit that I felt somewhat silly doing it, but by the time I got back to the store, people had already begun showing up for their ice water. Dorothy was running all around to keep up. I pitched in alongside her.”
Dorothy had come up with a literal road sign that spoke directly to the foremost emotional and physical concerns of the people she was trying to reach—travelers who needed a rest and refreshment. Their business took off, even during the peak of the Great Depression in a lonely and remote town. Its signs could be seen around Europe during World War II as a reminder of home and beacon of hospitality for the troops. Today, Wall Drug has become a multimillion-dollar legacy, yet all of its signs are still hand-painted, ice water is always free, and servicemen and -women are greeted with complimentary donuts and coffee in appreciation. And their billboards still advertise Wall as the “Ice Water Store”—Dorothy’s “free ice water” Block remains the store’s Icon. Before “going viral” referred to anything other than a physician’s diagnosis, Wall Drug’s brand virality went global. Wall Drug’s signs spread across the state, and the store’s loyal shoppers took signs all over the world, from GIs taking them to the streets of Europe during World War II to customers holding up the signs at the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal.
Road signs and warning labels bypass all the business and communication overload of the modern world. They give us something to see and connect to. We make one by finding that ONE thing—despite the actual complexity or breadth of our work—that intersects with what our customer actually cares about. In the case of the Husteads, their successful road sign was not any of the goods they actually sold to make a living. This is the power of crafting the correct Block. Blocks create virality. Today, Wall Drug still attracts around two million visitors a year.
Transparent, emotional road signs need to replace any and all self-promotional claims. I’ll put it another way:
Saying how great you are = BAD
Focusing on the concerns of others and where that intersects with what you actually do = GOOD
That’s where the use of Blocks, especially in repetition, comes in. When we start looking to distill our work down to one to three up-front Blocks, we begin to understand the fundamental changes we need to make to ourselves and our own work if we want others to truly see us in this overcrowded world.