By Christopher Medford

Learning a new name for old techniques, this technique is called scamping.

What is scamping? Scamping is to execute a rough sketch of the idea, mainly used when planning and testing headlines, straplines, and composition, this is a vital process aiding you to illustrate your thoughts.

The ability to illustrate your thoughts is a hard and difficult process, the ability to intertwine your perspective to a brief with restraints is something that has to be learned the hard way, no shortcuts or cheat sheets can be used when scamping.

Scamping doesn’t need a hundred percent accuracy in drawing but has to be clear enough for the idea to be understood. Adding the finer details such as brand positioning and underlying messages such as your single-minded proposition to your scamping requires additional skill. These skills are obtained by increasing the consumption of creative input, such as reading, visiting exhibitions and exploring a variety of advertising from what works as a successful campaign and paying close attention to failure.

Crushing failure is the best way to improve on scamping, but persistent to produce as many ideas as possible until the right idea becomes sticky (1.Simplicity 2.Unexpectedness 3.Concreteness 4.Credibility 5.Emotion 6.Stories). Not every idea will be award-winning but every idea produced may hold small parts of a better idea that could be constructed later when reflecting over a quantity of work.

Being able to see abstractly while being able to illustrate the message clearly takes practice and failure should be taken lightly and all criticism welcomed, for pride and ego will cloud your judgment when choosing the right scamp to move onto the next stage of development.

Having too much personal attachment to initial ideas will not help when Scamping, failure is the missing link to creating better ideas.

From personal experience being told that my ideas are shit ( as much as I may of been offended) have been something I have needed to keep me grounded and been able to push on and create something multiple times better, because no one learns if everyone thinks that it’s alright, the more critical, the more honest, the more analytical criticism the better my next scamp shall be. Sometimes the truth is hard to swallow but the rewards gained from other people’s perspectives is valuable as well as priceless, for at the end of the day we are in the business of appealing to the masses and all opinions matter. But what you do with that information is the most crucial.