How many times have I heard a co-designer expess their desire to find a better [...] (insert external resource who delivers goods by specification of a designer – aka Developer, Printer or Print Shop, Media Buyer, …). Not because the current service provider or vendor does a bad job, but the main reasoning goes like this: “They should get back to us with suggestions how we could make the [...] (brochure, website, catalog, mobile app) better, faster, smoother or more interactive by using the latest technologies – after all they are the experts of their fields.”

And in that reasoning lies already the answer – they are the experts in THEIR fields. An external service provider will always try to deliver your project with solutions they know well – therefore with the least amount of effort. They are not interested in making your project “more” anything – unless they have a ready solution to sell you at high margin for them – thus making it “more costly”.

And this is rightly so – this is their business. It’s not their business to find great solutions for the communication challenges of your client. So stop looking for this kind of vendor because you know them already – they are your competitors.

It’s part of the job of a designer to research the latest technologies and materials to adapt them for the communication needs of their clients. It’s important as a designer to know what is possible and what not – you don’t have to know exactly how it is done, but at least now what there is. You have to push your vendor into new fields or find the right vendor for a specific job. You are the one who should know, because your client relies on you to get the best solution to his problem. Don’t try to outsource your competence.

#design #workflow #outsourcing

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3 Years ago I posted an article about content called “Your client is not a copywriter” and all the points are still valid today. What changed in the last 3 years is that now we have “content strategy” and everybody talks about content. Content strategy is an abstract concept about copy, photography, graphical elements and the guidelines to keep these elements consistent over time and aligned to the communication strategy. But does the client actually understand us, when we talk to him about content?

We just assume a client knows what content is

In client services we often assume that the client knows about the creative business as much as he knows about his own business – and sometimes they let us think they do.

Most clients business is not to produce content, in fact it is the business of writers, photographers, musicians, videographers, artists, designers, … also known as content creators. The business of our client is accounting, making coffee, build machines, … you name it, that’s their “core”, this are the things they know about.

It’s not in their core business to know if they have user focused, high quality content. Even worse, they will most probably not have the competence to know where to get or produce new content if they realize that they have no content.

Content Strategy is not only a buzzword

Educating our client about what content is, is in my opinion the most important part of content strategy. It is actually one of the first things we should do when talking about the project – because it will affect our proposal.

There are many great blogs and podcasts about content strategy out there, so I will not go into much detail. It’s a great tool, and you don’t need a dedicated person with that role for small projects, as long as it’s part of the process.

A quick recommendation is the Content Talks Podcast where you can get a great insight into what content can be and how to educate your client about it.

Get the content before we start

Even if  you don’t want to dig into content strategy – ask for all the content even before doing  the proposal. If you find that to extreme, introduce an initial step in your process called “content audit” – a billable step where you ask for the content before you start working on the project.

In either way we have in an early stage the possibility to get back to the client if the content hasn’t the desired quality or if parts are missing. Document the communication about this as it is important not only for planing the schedule for the project, but also if a deadline fails because the content is not ready.

Go ahead and take control

After the content audit it’s time to do proper content strategy, lining out guidelines and take control over the production of the content. I will say that 90% of the time a project will end up in a success when the responsibility for the content lies in the hand of the agency/creative side – we know what content will get the results and we push for quality.

Build up a vendor network

Networking for me means to build a list of vendors/partners I can contact for specific projects. You should have a couple of trusted “preferred” vendors and some for special needs. It’s a common in the print design world as you have to deal with printers, media etc. but I still see many freelance designers lacking a trusted network of professionals they can reach out to if they need to.

Strengths and Weaknesses

In the end it all boils down to recognize strengths and weaknesses, our client weakness could be our strong point – and our weaknesses can be overcome by partners. The result will be the famous “win win” situation, where ideally everybody wins – our clients customers, our client, we and our partners, isn’t that something to aspire to?

I use podcasts to learn while I work. I listen to design talks, keynotes, interviews and news from science, culture and some entertainment. Especially during the tasks every designer can do without thinking (photo retouching, filling in content, corrections) are the ideal activities to up your game by staying in touch with the latest developments.

Even though graphic and web design are visual media, the most important part in my opinion about design is not visual – the mindset and the different approaches behind design solutions. In the old days it was really difficult to get the inside view of designers because not many had the opportunity to publish books or discuss their point of view in a magazine. Design Blogs fill this space a little bit but mostly podcasts can give you the opportunity to hear what designers think in their own words.

For a selection of interesting Podcasts about design subscribe my Huffduffer Channel – available as RSS or Subscribe in iTunes

To give you a further starting point for the design podcasts I listen I publish here my Subscription list from Google Reader (if you want you can even subscribe to it) – this list will update itself automatically.

Photo by Melvin Gaal (Mindsharing.eu)

Do you know about the cross posting problem? … you signed up to all the social networks and services and enabled posting to Twitter, Facebook, tumblr and the other services. Neat. Did you remember that you connected facebook to twitter as well? Probably not, and the result is double postings and posting loops.

How to avoid this cross posting getting out of hand? Simple draw a chart. You might wonder how many services you actually linked to other services and where the problem might be.

I do my chart in Illustrator – but you can obviously use any charting software you want – aviary or the drawing tool in google docs works well for that. Just keep it updated. In the image above you see my chart. You see it’s quite complicate because I have my personal and my professional accounts listed.

BTW: You can also see if your “communication” strategy fits your goals and if you can centralize your efforts.

Stock images are cheaper than ever and access to creative commons material is great, but often not available in print resolution. Having your own stock photography is better – and easy. I show you how.

This will be quiet short and is more a reminder.  Yes a reminder – I want to remind you to take some more pictures for your stock library while you are taking photos for your private albums.

How many times have you bought a wood texture background or a crowded place or a busy street? I have many times. Once I needed a picture of Picadilly Circus, nothing fancy, but all the photos I had where with some of my friends in the middle. I lived in London for 6 month and have not taken one picture of the place except those “tourist” photos.

So remind yourself when you are on vacation or on a business trip – take a few extra pictures with the eye of the graphic designer. You don’t have to have the greatest gear to take good pictures , but you need a little bit of practice. A blogpost over at Boagworld actually tells you how to make unique stock photos for your website

And most important, tell your wife/girlfriend/friend why you are taking pictures of the floor, the wall and the scenery without them on it. The photo of this post for example was shot on my old balcony during a bbq session – perfect for various uses, don’t you think?

So go out and take the lens cap off (as they say in the TWIP Podcast)

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

Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.

One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.

The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time.

Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.

The available abbreviations for the units are:

• Points – pt
• Picas – p
• Pixel – px
• Centimeter – cm
• Millimeter – mm
• Inch – Inch (in English) Zoll (in German)
• Cicerco – c
• Agate – ag

I’ve moved my email accounts to Google Apps a few weeks ago and I’m quite glad with it. The search is great and I looked for a way to search my Inbox directly from the Firefox search box without another addon. After looking around I’ve found a way through the Opensearch capability of firefox. Since it’s handy I wanted to share it with you even when it’s not strictly design related .

Just make a text document with the the extension .xml in the Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/searchplugins directory (on Windows) /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS?/Search/Plugins/ for Mac, cut and paste the following lines of code and replace the highlighted parts (Shortname, Description, yourdomain.com) with your details.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

</OpenSearchDescription>

After saving the file (eg. mygmail.xml) restart Firefox and you will see the new search engine in the drop down box.

Note: This works only with Gmail for Google Apps and if you choosen to remain logged in – to find out more about Google Appz follow this link.

In the last couple of month I’ve attended to a few workshops related to the new tools we are going to use in our marketing departments. Let me share my thoughts about why workshops are important.

The two main tools I’m talking of is the DAM (digital asset management) and a translation management and approval system based on a indesign workflow (very handy if you manage publications in 32 languages). I know both systems already because I was one of the initiators of the group wide projects and because I tested them before choosing the solutions. This enables me to have quite some notion of “how to do things” with the software. But this does not mean that I already now the fastest way, or the most effective or future proof way to do it.

It’s much like when you learn Photoshop or Indesign. There are many ways to get results, but you might not figure out the best way by yourself. I’ve expected to get from the software vendors some advice, some “best practices” as they are called, what is the most effective way to get your taxonomy (keywords and structures) right and what are good workflows to follow. They should know as they see what theyre clients are doing and what works well and what not. But this was obviously not the case. You get the usual “Every firm has it’s own way to do things.” and “Our system is so flexible that it can be customized and setup to your needs.” This might be true, but if I just match my current workflow I could miss some great improvements or even worse, I discover later on, that if I structured the system or prepared the documents a little bit different in the first place I would get much more out of it. Nobody starts over such a project without a bad need. I hope, that with the spreading of this kind of systems there will be more user groups and tutorials to help firms setup their DAMs, in the meantime I will stick to this subject and bring my experiences.

Foto by foreverdigital

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.