Challenge: An original Christmas gift for customers, the company’s showcase, presenting its strongest point: non-standard attitude to standard subjects.

Solution: “Custom mug, box of chocolates, wine – nice but trivial. We needed something special, something that shows the spirit of Aude,” says editing director Magda Kozińska. “We wanted the gift to show our communications, journalist and graphical skills. We wanted it not only to be nice, but also to sell our products,” she adds.

“We started as usual – with brainstorming that did not bring us closer to finding a perfect gift, but instead showed us yet again how varied our temperaments are, which can lead to hot conflicts when the atmosphere is heated. Time went by, Christmas was coming, and we still didn’t have the gifts. Still no gifts… And still… Finally, the boss could not stand it and demanded that we come up with something right away under the threat of redundancies. Our creativity went high suddenly. In a team of two, the art director and me, we sat at a computer with a totally new idea – it should be elegant and serious. Deep thoughts, fancy fonts, all toned down and modern. But that wasn’t us. It lacked life, freshness, fun. We wanted to show customers that our projects are good simply because it is good fun for us,” says Magda.

This time we also started with jokes and fun. “We quickly came up with a word play about success. And suddenly we knew…”

A joke with a message – hence our idea to use puzzles based on old sayings and quotes by famous people, a thought-provoking and motivating game. The result was a gift that catches the attention twice: first on the image that you need to decipher, then to think about the discovered slogan. “The burden is on the text and its message, and on solid material – we placed images on firm, eco-friendly and waterproof sheet metal. The design was light and funny. It also had to be clear and neat, hence the use of a simple black-and-white form,” says Marcin Rutkowski, project’s graphic artist.

Intelligent, surprising idea is always better than a banal one. We just have to know what we can do guiding the message to a given subject and a particular recipient. A joke like ours may not be good for all customers. The key to a good message is to treat the matter lightly, at the same time keeping it in coherence with the company’s communications and image.