Outside the Box

I went over to Katie's office to show her some copy I'd just written. While I was there she asked for my comments on a postcard she's designing. It's a tough one.

The card is supposed to serve as an all-purpose event invitation shell. It is to be used by more than 40 alumni clubs for everything from lectures to theater evenings to dinners. It has to look inviting, and it can't bland, but neither it can it be too specific.

Katie has come up with the clever tagline, "We're saving a seat...for you." This should cover just about any event, except those at which everybody would be required to stand all night, but when your age demo skews heavily to 60+ this happens rarely.

She wants to surround it with images of empty seats in theaters, banquet rooms, lecture halls, and so forth.

This sounds easy, but it's not. Finding the right seats in the right settings, photographed and styled properly takes some doing.

I tried to be helpful, but as we talked it over and looked through online libraries of stock photography I couldn't resist pondering how the tenor of copy might change if we used pictures of:

• The Last Supper
• the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey
  
• Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater
• the electric chair at Sing Sing
• a deck chair from the Titanic
• a set of gynecologist's stirrups

Why not offend as many people as possible with a single print piece? It would be far more efficient than my usual practice of pissing off trustees, major donors, and high-strung volunteers one by one.