Bob Baker
Bob Baker is a creative resource in Marblehead whose memoir-in-progress is “Outlucking Gatsby: From Greenwich to The Green Light.”
You know the expression, “Thinking outside the box.” The “box” referred to is straight-on yawn-yawn linear-assed conventional logic. Mathematically expressed, the box is — watch this — 1 + 1 = 2! Oh, wow. Whoopee do … thud.
The ingenious Brit Henry Ernest Dudeney came to the rescue with his concept of thinking outside the “box” of conventional logic in the early 1900s, opening veritable galaxies of possibility for us creative cuckoos.
Quite simply, go beyond the usual: Free your mind to think theoretically, express things creatively. As an example, that same 1 + 1 could also = … 7! Like so: 1 (Tom Brady) + 1 (football) = 7 (Super Bowls).
A verbal example of thinking outside the box: In the late 1970s, the I (heart emoji) NY started a stampede of “I Love This-es” and “I Love Thats.” Driving up to Montpelier to meet with Vermont Director of Tourism client Don Lyons in 1980, the fact that there’s a “ve” in “love” and a “ve” in “Vermont” combined in beatific vision as “I LOVERMONT” in my mind. Sold in a heartbeat to the Vermont Chamber of Commerce that day, it appears on T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and what-have-you tchotchkes to this day.
A graphic example of thinking outside the box is the idea I came up with when I was concept director at Harold Cabot ad agency, guest-teaching the Boston Ad Club’s creative course for young people trying to put together a sample portfolio to get a startup job in advertising.
The class’ previous week’s assignment had been to come up with billboards or posters for the Red Cross blood drive, which I was to critique before launching into my subject matter.
It being the Vietnam war era, many of the ideas were rough layouts of guys on a battlefield with IVs in their arms and headlines along the lines of: “He needs it more than you! Please give.”
All of a sudden, it just popped into my head. “Y’know, the ideal poster is graphic … no words at all, y’know. What if … what if the Red Cross didn’t have a lot of red in it? Just a thin band of red at the bottom.”
Art director Russ Veduccio designed a grabber: Against a dramatic black background, the cross shape all emptiness-white … save a thin band of red at the bottom. The agency donated thousands of blood drive posters to the American Cross, I was awarded Best of Show in the Boston Art Directors Show, and the idea won national acclaim.
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Outside the box has been my operative M.O., from the get-go and throughout my abundantly creative freewheeling life. In the lifestyle sense, I’ve mostly managed to avoid or escape confining corporate, societal and behavioral boxes.
In the realm of ideas, I’ve had the fun of creating from an inspirational vantage point somewhere between left field and da Vinci, along with the occasional perspective of Mark Twain and street savvy old pal Killer Kane departing Maddie’s chapel of spirits together at 1:37 a.m.
You’d think that the anti-Catholic prejudice that assured my spending the first 13 years of my life without an after-(parochial)-school friend to my name would’ve cramped my style plenty much. To the contrary, compadres.
The 1940s was what I call The Golden Age of the Imagination — the amazing confluence of three idea-charged golden ages: The Golden Age of Comic Books, The Golden Age of Hollywood Movies, and the goldenest of the golden, The Golden Age of Radio, the “theater of the mind” — wellspring via powerhouse dramas, true crime programs, westerns and soap operas when I was home sick of a thousand voices, a thousand personas, 10,000 insights into the way people think and what moves them.
Needless to say, in a sense, I was missing out on a lot. Other kids were happily being kids in organized after-school activities, sports, scouts, lessons.
But in the grand scheme of things, they were prepping for life in the “box,” while I was storing up a color-dazzled confetti of ideas for my future career as … guess what … an idea guy.
Better yet, make that, “a happily ever after, outside-the-box idea guy.”
(To be continued.)