More and more I hear influential people talking about graduating college as a waste of time. There are even “scholarships” for not attending college. I think this is the wrong direction to go and here are my five reasons why a designer should graduate a college or university.

1 – Open your mind

The new “don’t waste time on college” crowd often refers to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as examples of successful entrepreneurs, which dropped out of college. But these are just exemptions from the rule. Most of the people are not “early birds” and they don’t know yet what is the right direction in a certain business field. As for designers – the examples of designers who attended colleges and became successful are far greater then the self taught ones. Most designers who graduated college will say that the college was a waste of time and not so helpful, but this is a distorted impression. While technique can be easily self-taught, the mindset a design course in college can give you is not. It opens your mind when you are immersed for the first time with a big group of people interested in the same topics, as you are – an effect with long lasting effects.

2 – Learn something different (e.g. business)

You can study something non related to design if you think you can learn the craft by yourself in a better way or if you cannot find an appropriate design course close to you. Maybe you get your inspirational talks in meet ups or at conferences. A successful designer is also a business man. If you want to become a freelancer or own a creative studio you may consider study business. If you are interested into sociological problems and want to design for that area you can study sociology. Can you see the pattern? Get a degree.

3 – You need it to work outside your country (visa)

This is one of the most important reasons to get a degree. The world today requires people to move around the world. You may work your whole life in the EU or in the US, but maybe not. The visa and labor laws are not as flexible as you might think and having a degree is a huge advantage – really it often makes up 50% of your changes to get a work permit in other countries. The type of specialization is not so important – actually a normal business degree is the most widely accepted.

4 – You have achieved something

It might seem silly that a successful designer goes back to college in his mid 30s just to finish the college. But I know more than one designer who actually did that. They all told me that they missed something. They had the feeling to have failed by not completing their studies. I myself can relate to this because I didn’t start my college education right away. I worked five years before I started and every time one of my friends finished university in the meantime I felt a little sting. I was working and was advancing in my position, felt successful, but something was missing, especially when I talked to other designers / developers at the time. It may be a European thing, but self-taught is never canonical.

5 – You can work for Google

Many companies have strict rules about what education a person must have to be part of their “ecosystem”. You think that this is discriminating, because you cannot rate a value of an employee based on education levels. You might be right, but these rules are part of the culture of a company and often part of guidelines to avoid discrimination and favoritism. So if you can foresee for the rest of your life that you will never want or have to become part of an organization where they have this kind of rules go ahead and don’t get a degree.

Conclusion

The time invested in education is never wasted. You can lay the ground for a career in multiple ways, getting a degree is one of the better ways and opens more possibilities.

Having a single inbox can be a life safer for small design departments. Scheduling graphic design projects is hard enough, make your life easier with this best practice.

The case

Small design departments often have one project manager/account and a few graphic designers and copywriter. While the pm (project manager) is the main project lead, small jobs are often handled directly by the creative team. Things like sending out a logo or making a small text for the website for another department.

In theory this should work great. But the problem relies in the direct access to the creative team by clients (or even worse to coworkers if it is a in-house department).

The direct access will quickly be abused by the coworkers to override the project manager and get things done on their schedule. Graphic designers and copywriters are in this work setting not able to deny a request by the client and so they accept.

This screws up the scheduling made by the project manager, but he/she is not aware of it. Even worse, the project manager might accept additional workload.

Even notifying the project manager doesn’t improve the situation as the he has lost the lead and does not manage anymore.

Solution: Single Inbox

The solution to the problem is easy. The project manager has to be the only “inbox”. All requests must pass through this single point. It might seem a bottle neck, but in fact this is by far a smaller problem than the not controllable scheduling of multiple access channels.

Even when 2 Minutes lost by reading an email about a logo request and forwarding it to the graphic designer is well spent. This way the project manager knows how much times is occupied by this recurring jobs.

Note that I talk about the single inbox, not outbox. Graphic designers should still send out themselves the files etc. they just shouldn’t  respond to any request.

Photo courtesy of Matt McGee

I discovered that many small firms are discovering branding as the new formula to success. The understand that having a nice logo and a coherent branding helps them to build a trustful relation to their clients. To make it short – a small firm can look professional and bigger with a good branding. But too much branding can hurt. Why?

We seen this online all the time. Small 1-man firms build have a great website and you think you are communicating/buying/… with a corporation – not a small business.

The big mistake many small firms make with branding is, that they think that the more branding they do, the better it is. It mostly happens when they expand into a new business area. Sometimes the name of the firm does not reflect the new area and they expand into a new brand as well.

This is not a good idea, as you weaken your established brand. It is already an effort for small sized (and even medium sized) businesses to maintain “one” brand. In the screenshot above you can see an example of heavy overbranding. It is a small advertising agency with online and offline departments. As you can see each “department” has received it’s own brand (even with brand in its name – how ironic). This does not only look bad, but it’s not in their best interest. Who are they? Are they one or are they many – and if I call them how do they respond?

Especially if you are a service oriented firm this overbranding does not make sense. Even if you think that your brand name is tied to a business area you are better off investing in your established brand or do you think that Apple should have changed their name when they entered the music selling business?

Secrecy is important to any firm who wants to launch a new product. By surprising the competitors with a product the firm can increase its market share, reputation and have generally an advantage. If another firm knows about the new product he can potentially launch a competing product earlier. Especially in the B2B world this can be disrupting. As an Art Director you are often directing also the overall communication of your client – so even this topic is of your business. After the break I talk about how I discovered a secret product line through crowd sourcing and how we can prevent such an event.

Discovering a secret product line

Two weeks ago I discovered through a crowd sourcing portal for graphic design that a competitor of my client is preparing to launch a whole new product line. They where pitching for a “name” and “logo design” for a range of products.

I informed my client about the pitch and ask them if they knew something about the new product line. They didn’t and neither did the market – a scoop so to say. The information in the pitch was valuable to my client since it contained a very good description about the features of the new product line and when it will be launched. Therefore the client informed its sales force and they are now prepared to answer questions of their clients.

What can we learn from this experience?

1. Do not crowd source design of “secret” products – especially if the pitch can be seen without any registration
2. Do not describe your product in the project brief – send the description to an interested designer after he has signed a non disclosure agreement
3. Do not link directly to your competitors site – I’ve found out about the pitch because I’ve seen hundreds of visitors coming from a non-industry related site
4. Do prohibit your employees to blog, twitter, Facebook about a new product
5. Use a project code name that does not relate to your industry or product
6. Do not use Cloud-Services for your product development - unless you are sure that none of the information can be made available to the public

How can you use crowd sourcing and the internet for spying on your competitors?

1. Visit crowd sourcing portals on a regular basis and search for projects related to your industry and competitors
2. Use Google Alerts not only to monitor the web activity of your firm and brands, but also of your competitors
3. Use crowd sourcing traditionally by letting the crowd search through social networks, forums and the web for information about your competitors
4. Sign up and monitor the support forums of your main competitors (if they have one). If they don’t have one try to open a user-to-user support forum for your competitors products – and see what happens.

This are just a few examples how you can leverage the internet for doing research.

There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:

1. Quite out of date
2. Not very compelling any more

The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I  started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do.

Hosting the own portfolio site

The good

• Once the visitor is on your site all eye-balls are on your projects.
• You can make a design you choose
• You are not limited on how many project, what media, how many pictures and text etc.
• Basically you are in control

The bad

• Hosting a site is not always cheap, not only the cost of the hosting, but also the cost in time to maintain it (yes you have to maintain it like your pc)
• You have to be fit to get better results (design wise speaking) than the established portfolio sites
• You have to advertise your site to get any visitors
• If you are not a web-programmer you must look for a developer in order to setup the site

Using a portfolio site

The good

• You don’t have to manage a website
• The design is optimized for portfolio presentation
• There are already many users on the site
• You can use them as a social network and find job opportunities

The bad

• You are one among many – The distinction between a Pro and a Student is difficult
• There is advertising which is competing with you for attention
• Integration with Twitter and other Social Media is only sometimes possible
• You are limited by the site on how to present your work

Conclusion

You can see that there are advantages and disadvantages as usual when you have to take a decision. It would be easy to say to do both and get out the most of it – but in the end your time should not just be consumed to do your portfolio.

I opted for a self-hosted portfolio site because I already maintain a few sites (like this one) – but will also have some key projects uploaded to the portfolio sites. To minimize the effort of maintaining multiple presences I write the content for my portfolio in a way to reuse it when I need to.

More on how I setup my portfolio site and how I structure it in a future blog post.

(image © Cameron Whitman on Istockphoto)

In various posts around the web you can find opinions on the new identity of the tv channel SyFy – formerly known as Sci-Fi Channel. While I don’t want to go into the design details I want to express some thoughts why the probably made this change.

At first it seems quite unusual to change a well established brand so radically. It seems even more radical as the new name is also a new term that sounds like the old name but doesn’t has the same meaning – it actually has no meaning.

This puzzled at first even me. Science fiction was born over 100 years ago and the abbreviation sci-fi has become wide spread. Everybody knows what sci-fi is and therefore naming a tv channel who broadcasts sci-fi shows should be called sci-fi. But here lies the big problem. The vast majority of people “thinks” the know what sci-fi is all about. Basically science fiction is all about ufo’s and space travel. Science fiction is obviously much more than that and actually most of the movies and shows on tv are some sort of science fiction. How can you break this misinformation of the general public?

There are two ways. One way is to educate the people, but this would cost much more that just do it the way SyFy has done it. They changed the name and claimed that SyFy is the tv channel where you could “imagine more”. The name sound familiar enough to sci-fi fans to recognize the term and is new enough to new viewers to just be a name.

How far SyFy is more than just space crafts and aliens shows the spot – well done and good luck to the “new channel”.

Update: As @Lazarus2000 on Twitter pointed out giving a brand a unique name has another advantage. You can trademark the brand.

Sometimes things just won’t work. You made a nice communication concept, build a campaign and everything the execution was impeccable. But when you and your client look at the results they don’t meet the expectations. Now what should you do? Normally we would think that we would try harder – but you shouldn’t.

The misunderstanding

It’s a common misunderstanding and our language and how we we all have been brought up leads us into this. You have to get “through”. You have to “win over”. We have to “resist” etc. This concept of being stronger than our counterpart to accomplish our goals is common in all our life. To make an everyday example: Everyone tells you, that if you want to conquer a woman, you have to show your interest, buy her flowers, call her often and in the end eventually she will fall for you. We all know that this happens only in movies and that in reality she will be more likely to be annoyed or drop you of for the next best guy who doesn’t care less if she diggs him or not.

To make a long story short – we think, that if something doesn’t work we just have to try harder. But as you can see, just by doing more of something that doesn’t work doesn’t make it work. Taking down a wall with bare hands doesn’t work just because you punch harder.

The solution

To get out of this situation is fairly easy and difficult at the same time. If something doesn’t work, stop doing it. Try something different – maybe even exactly the opposite. This doesn’t mean that if you do advertising, you should not advertise – but if you try to sell out a product throwing one sale after another you maybe off better if you make the product high class or you limit the availability.

It may seem counter intuitive – and that’s good. If something is counter intuitive it’s different and if something is different it catches the eye. Getting the attention is one of the main goals in advertising and graphic design, so if you get that a good part of the job is accomplished.

Now it’s obvious that you still should have a valid product and have done your “homework”. If you have the wrong product for the right audience and the right communication, then you still will not sell. You may want to change your target group instead of changing the product.

A famous example of such a shift is the post-it from 3M. You know probably the story. The original goal was to make a new strong glue. The result was a weak glue which doesn’t leave traces when removed. A failure for the intended target group, but by changing the use and therefore the target group it became a success.

In short: If something doesn’t work the way you planned it, take a few steps back and look around. There is maybe another way you can go.

Image by dots and spaces

Advertising lies all the time – at least this is what most people think. I must admit that I tend to believe them when I see all the rubbish on various home shopping channels or housewife-magazines (no really, this kind of magazines exist). To be honest, advertising doesn’t lie more than the average human in any position and mansion, but I think advertising should not lie.

In many countries “lying” in advertising is strict prohibited and if you check the ads you probably find small clues for the omitted facts or the specific “conditions” to get the praised results. But this is not my point.

When do you reach the point where it is advisable to not advertise at all a product? Is it ok for a Aspirin to advertise its painkilling for sportsmen? I’ve seen an ad in TV where two girls talk after a fitness session. One complains about her aking muscles and other one gives her aspirin. Hmm. Stretching or not overdoing might be the better advice.

As an art director I was more than once presented to advertise products with small to none improvements or benefits when compared to the competitors products. I had obviously to show the product as if it where the best product of the world but I always avoided to push it over the top. I also refused to do advertising for certain products. I will not do advertising for weapons, drugs, cars (if they claim to save nature), the usual stuff – but where do you trace the line?

Is the graphic designer responsible for the products of his client? In my opinion any art director and graphic designer take a part of the responsibility because he helps to deliver the message to the costumers of his client. If you deliver a faulty message or if you do not deliver the truth you take part in the disguise. You as a graphic designer might not spot on first sight that the product doesn’t deliver what it claims but this is not always the excuse – it should come out when you do the briefing.

What do you think about the morale in advertising, where do you trace the line? Your opinions are welcome.

Foto by tdietmut (traying to catch up)

Sometimes we discover after we finished our education that the job we pursuited doesn’t match our expectations. Sometimes it seems that we are forced to change our job and learn a new one. Is it worth the time and money or should we stick to what we’ve got? I was contacted by Brittany asking me if she (an account manager with a degree) should go back to school to become an art director. Here her mail and my thoughts.

I came across your blog online and it caught me because I have just decided to go back to school for art direction. I graduated with an undergrad degree: Bachelor of Science in Advertising in May 2008.

However, I focused on the business side of things and not the creative. I want to go into art direction but I would like to hear what you have to say about this. My concern: I am about to spend about $xxK on school to do this, as I attend The Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago. I will finish with another bachelors, but in Fine Arts Visual Communications around Dec/Jan. 2011. Can I come out of school and move into the path of art direction right away? Such as assistant art director? What is the typical path people take for this?

I am just scared I won’t be able to pay back these loans. I see that the average starting salary for this path is somewhere around $xxK give or take. I have experience working in large agencies, as I interned during my schooling at Y&R NYC, and McCann Erickson NYC, both in Account Management. I appreciate all of your help and advice.Brittany

First things first. It’s no big news that our generation and the future ones will not stick to their job for 40 years as might have our parents. Changes in toady’s business and our goals will make it much more likely that we will have different jobs in our lives. So the more knowledge and capabilities we can get the better. Me myself went to university at 25 changing completely my career to study graphic design – my passion as I discovered quite late since I was a small kid (I never thought that you can actually make a living out of designing newspaper and logos). So it is never to late to change the path and pursuit a new career.

In the specific case of Brittany the change is both radical and not radical at all at the same time. Let me explain. We can see from her email, that she is focused and structured (she has a plan, got the numbers, knows when she will get the second bachelor), this is fine project management, a typical strength of an account manager and something many creative people lack. But the ability of seeing the bigger picture and to organize is a capability an art director must have. I’m speaking of an art director in a medium to big agency – as usual Art directors in such agencies tend to not do much “hardcore” design work anymore but to lead the general direction of a project. But they still need to know what they are talking about.

The mix of the business side of graphic design/advertising and the creative part is teached graphic designers when they do a master degree in art direction – but I’m not sure if the bachelor degree if graphic design will do the same trick to Brittany (as she already knows the business side from her other degree). Maybe from the knowledge side, but I don’t think for the career.

A “freshman” from university will not likely start in a hiaboutgh position. Depending on the “real world” working experience the best I could imagine is junior art director, which in many cases is a nicer name for a graphic designer. This is in fact a waste of the capabilities, but understandable from the viewpoint of an agency.

I would choose a different approach. I would aim for a master degree in art direction directly. A bachelor in advertising should enable Brittany to be admitted and she could learn the more basic creative techniques and graphic design foundation by herself. It was never easier to obtain the basic knowledge for graphic design and the business part of an art director master course should not be much of an hassle, as she has already studied most of it. This will allow her to focus more on the creative part. In the end the master degree will enable her to enter the advertising career at an higher level using her capabilities at her best.

Foto by Avolore

Trainees or intern as they are called are part of the responsibilities an art director has. I’m not talking about the bad habit of using trainees as regular workers, sometimes referred to as “precarity” or “underclass”, but about the trainees coming from schools doing a few weeks of internship to learn about the real work in an agency.

I had in the past problems finding the right jobs for the trainees as I was caught up in my daily routine and when they actually showed up at my desk I wondered what would fit. I therefore setup a routine for finding jobs around the year to have them ready. Find out how I did it and the 3 rules for successfully managing a graphic design trainee.

The simple job blackboard

During the year you come around quite a few low priority jobs which are easy to do and you postpone them because they are boring, time consuming and other jobs are more important. Instead of keeping them on your todo list make a separate todo list for your trainee. If you have co-workers make this trainee-todo list public, so they can add their jobs too.

Three simple rules

1. Categorize jobs by difficulty
   When you setup your job blackboard give the single jobs a difficulty level, let’s say simple, medium, difficult (for a trainee) and give the trainee only jobs he/she can master. It saves you and the trainee from frustration. Yes, they should learn something, but you can be sure, that something you claim to be easy for the trainee is not.
2. Split long jobs
   Some jobs are easy but take a long time. Try to split repetitive jobs into junks to avoid that the motivation of trainee. Don’t treat your trainee like a mule – you would split up the job for yourself don’t you? If you have more than one trainee is good practice to split longer jobs among them to avoid envy.
3. Don’t multitask them
   This is fairly new. Against previous studies whom claimed that the young generation can multitask more easily because they are the so called digital natives. Professor Martin from Westwell Flinders University, Australia, found out something very interesting:

   
   

   
   

   WESTWELL: Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as multi-tasking. What we do is switching our attention very quickly between doing one thing at a time but interspersed. Now what we find is that actually young people are less able to do that because of their brain development. The area of their brain that deals with this switching between two tasks isn’t as well developed in younger people until their early twenties compared to older people. So actually older people are much better at multi-tasking than young people and I’ve done some research to demonstrate that, to show that. Younger people claim that they can stay on task when they’ve got multi-media, so they might be you know trying to read a book or do their homework whilst they’ve got music playing and whilst they might be instant messaging friends or you know something like that, so they’re consumers of different media at the same time. They may claim that they can multi-task in that way, but the evidence is telling us that they can’t and actually the performance on the task at hand, particularly the primary task – let’s say doing their homework – is actually diminished by trying to deal with all these multiple inputs at the same time. (taken from the BBC Podcast Analysis)

It’s therefore good to avoid to rush to the trainee every 15 minutes with a new task and to not have them read the email all the time. Make a daily plan and introduce new tasks only on breaks.

Finally I just want to say a last thing about the extended benefit of having trainees. Finding graphic designers who fit well into your organization and the projects you work on is often difficult. Often you hire someone to find out later that he can not adapt or doesn’t have the right capabilities. Trainees, especially if you have the opportunity to have the same come in for a couple of years, can not only be judged but you can also train them to your needs, make them fit well in your organization and develop exactly the skills needed. This is a huge advantage and can boost the success of your projects. So invest into your trainees and you will be rewarded.