Outakes, Failed Experiments, and Other Oddities

Some images from our marketing department, which for one reason or another, didn’t get officially released. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t compelling.

It’s a fact of life that when you put together a major project, like the SSCS website we just launched, a lot of ideas come forward, some better than others. In our time as marketing communicators, we’ve seen an awful lot of rejected ideas. We keep telling ourselves that it only seems like most of them are ours.

When it comes to images and artwork, sometimes the concepts that don’t make the grade are as interesting as those that do. Actually, sometimes they’re even more interesting, for better or worse, so we thought we’d share some with you to see if you agree (and there’s a few, like the one that leads off this post, that were good enough but maybe too similar to or not quite as good as what we had already published). It may not be as funny as a blooper reel, but we guarantee you won’t be bored.

The Microscopic Sea Otter

By now you have to know SSCS’s identity is woven into its surroundings, namely, the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Peninsula. One of the most iconic (and by far the cutest) symbols of the Peninsula is the sea otter. They tend to be hard to find, so imagine our delight when we saw one frolicking in the water off of Perkins Park in Pacific Grove on one of our evening walks. We slipped out our iPhone, but alas, the otter ended up being far too small for us to use. Plus it was getting kind of dark so the detail was going to be more muddy than desired.

Sorry, Wrong Specs

The art department was working on an ad for the upcoming NACS show, and came up with the following…before they found out they had the wrong specs and had to redo their work (they decided they should make the onscreen text more legible, too). Here’s the original, which features our Big Data solution, Transaction Analysis. Actually, we kind of like it.

Just another Sunset in Paradise

We thought a Pacific Ocean sunset might be something worth posting on the website, but our iPhone wasn’t quite up to the task. An interesting result, nonetheless.

Psychedelia Gone Wrong

We had a heck of a time coming up with a banner idea for our webpage’s Online Training page. Under the gun, one of our well-meaning staff members came up with the following which he thought showed off his Photoshop “skills.” It did, but not in the way he probably wanted. It reminds us of an experiment in bad 60’s psychedelia.

It Must Be a Fairy House because It Won’t Let You See It

The second part of our blog series on Carmel featured the town’s famous fairy houses, for which we took many, many pictures. This one is okay, but we thought the trees did too much to hide the structure and blew the chance of us seeing any fairies that might live within.

C’mon Now Touch Me, Babe

We were having a little trouble with the “Personal Touch” theme of our Support webpage. When we asked for ideas, this one came through, an amusing combination of the literal and the bizarre.

What Child Is This?

Thinker Toys is a really cool store in Carmel, and when one of our staff was out shooting photos for part three of our blog on that town, he took his granddaughter along with him and stuck her in this photo. Not wanting to be accused of nepotism, we didn’t run the photo. But it is kind of cute so we changed our mind. For now.

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Well, that’s it for this time. We’re working on a couple of interviews that are taking a little longer to come through the pipeline than we had hoped, but hopefully we’ll have one of those ready to go next week. See you then.