The Creative Circus

The Creative Circus

source: Ad in Communication Arts Design Annual 49, November 2008, p245

The Creative Circus is a 2-year educational program for advertising, design, and photography based in Atlanta. Their mission "is to graduate the best-prepared, most avidly sought-after creatives in the industry." Their website does a great job of demonstrating the concepts of creativity. The site is energetic, colorful, playful, fun and informative. I like how it incorporates so many of the issues we've discussed in class - the use of internal scrollbars, the page titles that are purposely overlapped, the way some pages are laid out slightly differently yet the key elements are the same so that the whole site is visually unified. The handwriting, doodles, and paint strokes seem to signify that creativity is a process and they add a nice contrast to the rigid rectangular photos. The site also includes videos, flash elements, pop-ups, and links to graduates' websites. My favorite element on the site is the stringed cups icon used to represent "contact us". (Remember using cups strung together to play "phone" as a child?)