You ever wondered why some magazines appeal you more than others? One thing you rarely been teached is how to do appealing covers. Even when you are in corporate publishing and layout the corporate news magazine having a nice cover is good. Besides the text layout having an appealing foto is key. But not every photo does the same good job. Here a few examples and why they work.

Working well

This cover works quite well. The copy and the photography are nice and complement (showing water and the title says “everything flows”). The colors harmonize and it gives the whole a high quality look.

Working better – with a human

Same as the previous the copy and concept expressed by the picture work together. But this covers has a higher appeal because there is a human being. We are hardwired to watch at other humans, so if you compare a picture with a human and one without a human the later will before appealing.

Working best – right into the eye

To do a cover with even more appeal you have to not only show a human, but to show a human eye. Even better when the eye is in the face of a human Humans do not only seek for humans in pictures, they actually seek for the eye to make “contact” with the human portrayed. If you show a human watching in direction of the viewer this connection can be made and it is much more likely that the prospect reader will grab the magazine and have a look.

On a newsstand obviously nearly every magazine nowadays portraits humans facing the reader so the effect is minimized, but the same effect is also true for covers of brochures, web pages etc. By knowing this you can steer the concept of the cover page towards showing humans facing the reader.

At the end of the month when all the work is done the only thing that counts is the money in your pocket. It may sound drastic, but it’s the truth. You can be proud of your work, be passionate about your design and network with designers all over the work – but without the money you won’t last long. The worst thing I’ve seen are designers with plenty of work but no money on their bank account. How can this happen? I will show you a few examples.

Where is the hole in your pocket?

If you have plenty of work, but you are always close to be broke, than there are a few possibilities why this happens. Let’s name a few:

1. Your clients don’t pay you
2. You are too cheap
3. You are too slow
4. Your fix costs are to high
5. You spend your money already and now you have tax debts

They seem so simple, but yet we don’t realize how in sum they really bust your budget. Having no project tracking is the main cause why we don’t realize where the money goes. The other main cause is our own discipline. I want to focus on “you are too cheap” and “you are too slow”, but let me just say a few words about the other points.

About 1) – If you clients don’t pay and you issued a regular invoice you have some options. Actually there are many but one of the easiest is too just call them up – you are a serious business person, so they have to respect you.
About 4) – Fix costs are normally for a graphic designer no big issue, but I’ve seen that especially “fresh” freelancers always have the newest laptop (obviously a Mac), the fanciest office and cell phone, a new car (you know you can detract the car from the taxes), etc.  Come on, do you really need this whole stuff even before you make real money? Calm down, stay humble.
About 5) – In one sentence: The money you earn is only half yours! Don’t spend until you pay the taxes.

Easy calculation to fix your pocket

We presented last week a simple spreadsheet to track your jobs. Using this spreadsheet is only a basic step, but an important one. It helps you with two simple figures to tell you if you are too slow or too cheap, or both.

If don’t have downloaded it yet go ahead and download it now by clicking here.

First you have to setup your income goal and the hours you expect to work every day. The spreadsheet will now automatically give you an approximation of how much you must charge per hour to reach your goal. In this approximation is included a 50% tax fee. Your actual taxes might not be so high and no fix costs are added, but it gives you a hint where you are going.

After you have concluded the setup you have to track your jobs. The most important part here is entering correctly the hours. Be honest to yourself and enter every half hour you spend on the project. Count the meetings as well and commuting – this is time you are spending on this project and you could otherwise work on other projects. You may wonder how much time you effectively spend.

After the first month you can analyze your collected data. In the image I added a column with the amount charged to the client. This way you can see immediately if a project wasn’t covering your expenses. As long as you estimated cost is much below the amount you charged everything is going well – of course expecting, that you have enough turnaround to generate your prospected income. But what if your “costs” are higher than your invoices. The two scenarios here are:

You are too cheap

This seems so simple and sometimes is abused as an excuse to raise the fees in unexpected heights. You are only too cheap if your fees are much lower than the average market and you are below your estimated costs. In other words you are cutting your profits without need. If you are a average graphic designer you can charge average fees. If you are a good graphic designer than you can even charge more than average. Your price depends on the quality of your work. Don’t be too humble, but don’t get greedy.

You are too slow

If you charge the typical market fees for your service and you still see your cost balance not in your favor then it’s time for you to hurry up. Spending too much time on a project doesn’t improve it as much as you might think. Analyze close where you are losing the most time. Is it in meetings with your client, commuting to your client, doing research, the creative part, the correction cycle. Make a spreadsheet with all the phases of the project and write down the hours you spend. Fix the problem zones by cutting them out, training your skills or charging extra fees for extra work.
You will see that it’s not that you are really slow, it’s just that there are unnecessary time consuming steps to avoid and unless you write them down they will blur in the daily routine and you will not see them. Don’t forget, every hour you gain is free for another project or getting new customers.

Conclusion

Using some simple tracking tools you can easily identify important figures to your business. Expand your spreadsheet too your needs to get more accurate data and use it to improve your performance. And as a final tip: include your “internal” projects as well in the tracking – is good practice and you find out if you are working more for you or your clients.

This is a short story about a nearly failed campaign – and we all know, we learn from our failures, not from successes. Find out why you should not always believe statistics.

Offline campaigns do not always convert well to online

Being online is state of the art, actually is a mass medium these days. If you are looking at statistics you may think that everyone uses the internet in one way or another. This is a short story about a nearly failed campaign – and we all know, we learn from our failures, not from successes.  Find out why you should not always believe statistics.

The campaign

My client launched a new product and wanted to promote it to its clients and to architects and other opinion leaders and multipliers. As my client works in a quite specialized B2B sector the main medium is print and direct mailings. There are no internet sites related specifically to the market and even the magazines are pretty bad. Anyway, the new product had so many new features, a sort of revolution, that just lining out the main features would have overloaded the ads.

We decided to put on the ads just as much information as needed and made a special landing page on the website where the visitors could find out every detail about the product and contact a local salesman for a personal presentation.

The client suggested to not put just the landing page on the ad as he stated, that the market (Italy) is now ready for the internet. In fact over 60% of the business with his clients is made through the internet.

Beyond the advertising in magazines we made also a mailing through a postcard-stack (you know, where you get a stack of postcards with advertising ready to be sent back to the firms).

The results

To understand how weak the response was you must think that the circulation of the ads where about 16.000 (+200.000 off main target), and the postcards where send to 5.000 persons. We’ve got 12 visitors to the landing page in one month and about 150 postcards send via mail or fax. Pretty bad.

Why it failed: no awareness

Some of the target group didn’t realize the potential given by the new product simply because it solves problems ignored until now. Especially the off main target (end consumer) was not aware that the products on the market had problems so they didn’t care. The target group ignoring the problem is another thing. The ad couldn’t spark the awareness but this was not the goal of the ads and so they failed.

Why we failed: digital divide

We read the statistics about the internet use wrongly. We looked closer and found out that the 60% of the business mentioned earlier made through internet was made by only 10% of the clients customers. The rest made the orders via fax or phone. It’s a numbers game, the big part of the market where my client operates is formed by very small firms and craftsman – you know father & son businesses who sometimes grow a little bit bigger. This small workshops have a internet connection, but the owner often doesn’t use it – the younger ones do. It’s the digital divide at its best. Especially in Italy we have 50% of the population who has never accessed the internet and many of the customers of my client fall into this 50%.

On this subject I discussed with a leading manager of a training organization in Italy. He told me that 95% of the bookings are still made through fax. The online booking platform they installed is rarely used.

In the end it wasn’t a failure

By reading this you may think that the whole campaign was a big failure. If you where looking only at the numbers you may be right. If you think about the conversions you may also be right. If we had put a toll free number on the ads we may have had better results, but on the good side I can mention, that the costs of this whole campaign where fairly low and that we could measure this campaign well and analyze it.

By failing we could focus the whole marketing strategy on other mediums. We now know (for now) that the target group is not online. The money saved in a costly internet presence (induced by web user statistics) and advertising campaigns gave more ROI (return on investment) than the campaign did cost. By switching the strategy we actually converted quite well and the client was obviously happy.

In the last lesson I pointed to the positive effects that studies can have in improving your projects. In this lesson I will show you where to find studies, how to make project and art director relevant conclusions and how to use them in your creative process. I have also included a nice example-tutorial to make it less “dry”.

Where you find the studies

You find studies everywhere – really. It’s a common trend these days. There is a study now for everything, and a couple of years or months later another one states the exact opposite . Concentrate on the ones from serious independent institutes and don’t use them by the letter. Get the big picture; see what’s going on and what it means to you. Other good resources are scientific publications and blogs/podcasts. They are also really good sources for inspiration on new materials to work with.

Take out a maximum of 2 key points

Some studies are tedious to read and difficult to pin down what they really mean. Try to find the original source of the study and don’t rely too much on news article about them. They sometimes drive the conclusion the way they wanted. If the key points taken out of the news article are close to the original go with them, otherwise read press release of the study (if the study comes from an big institution, they mostly make press releases of them). Try to find out 2 key points of the study and write them down.

Make one conclusion

Now think about what this means for your project. Does it enforce the goal of your project or does the study show you factors that work against your project. Both things are good, you just have to know about them. If the study empowers the project, than you can use it to give strength in your efforts and go along safely. If it is against the project use the information to “work around”. Rethink the goals or the strategy you wanted to apply. If you find something relevant you have to inform your client. But you should already have a solution to the problem ready when you do so. This is called proactive – you found something interesting to you client and provide also a solution – very powerful.

Visualize the conclusion

Now it’s the turn of the graphic aspect to the whole process. You know have the knowledge about the study and the key points. You made your conclusion on what this means. Now you want to use it in your presentation to give strength to your project. What you don’t want is to lose 30 minutes in explaining the study to your client. So you have to visualize it. You can do this with a picture, a drawing or something else – it’s a side project. Don’t invest too much time – you just have to make the point. Add the reference to the study in the documentation you give to your client and it to the visualization (complete original name of the study and the institute).

Use the visualization to get an idea

Now you have the visualization of the study for your client – but this visualization may help you in finding the creative idea you need for your graphic design, advertising or product design project. It’s a paradigm shift. Don’t just use the findings from the study to show you the limits where you can go, but use it as a starting point. It sound a little odd, but it is actually a great time saver and I will go more into detail about this in one of the next lessons.

And now an example

I will explain the whole concept of using studies as an art director (or as an aspiring art director).

Project: You have to make a billboard campaign about a cleaning agent – the claim is that it removes any stains.

You may think, that there is not much creative potential in this job, but consider this. Billboards are outdoors and are exposed not just to the weather. Sometime ago I stumbled on an interesting study. Let’s get through the process:

1. This study is named “Graffiti and litter lead to more street crime” and in the interview the researcher states:
   

   In the most striking experiment, Keizer left a €5 note protruding from a fully addressed envelope that itself was poking out of a mailbox. The team discovered that people were less likely to steal the money if there was no graffiti or litter on or around the mailbox.

   Well you have at least to read the whole interview to get the picture but I’m sure you already have. This study seems to have nothing to do with our art director business – and nothing with our billboard. That’s not true.

2. The key point of this study is that in a disordered neighborhood, disorder gets worse.
3. The conclusion to this study is that your work can be damaged or vandalized if the surroundings aren’t kept well. So now you know, that you have to choose the right surroundings for project, not just by getting the right place for target reach aspects.
4. Now you visualize this concept. Don’t overdo it – a picture with a graffiti or lither on the streets will make you point.
5. At this point you may go to your client and say, that billboards may not be the best way to show the positive aspects of the product. If you show a nice and clean shirt it will have graffiti on it in less than 5 minutes. On the other hand can you use this information the other way round? You could imagine a campaign where you want people to act against your work.

Turning the bad into cool

• Design a poster for the billboard with a nice white shirt on it and the claim “Removes any stains”.
• Part of the campaign is to put a (real) graffiti on it.
• You will have plenty of graffiti’s in a few days – looks ugly you think. Yes, but now comes the cool thing.
• You put on every other night/day a fresh “shirt” on the billboard. You are “cleaning” the shirt.

This will generate a buzz and attention to it – people may have seen the shirt “dirty” and the next day is clean again. Why is that – oh yeah – the cleaning agent takes care of it.

The fictional billboard with Graffiti

Conclusion

Can you see the loopback – you have a straight campaign and you turn it into something really new and cool by using knowledge about human behavior taken from a study.

Now it’s your turn. Build a database of studies that you find intresting, get the feel of what a study can mean to your work and use it when you need it. Good studying.