The Off Season
Advertising, like sports, has seasons. It depends on your specific client mix, but you’ll likely have trade show season, quarterly retail seasons, end-of-budget season, and all sorts of publication seasons. One thing tends to be true for everyone though; at the end of the year things die down. The advertising budgets are spent, the big retail season is already prepared for. Clients begin to think more about winding the year down than starting new projects.
This is the off-season for advertising and design, and after the last few months we’ve had, it’s a much needed break. We take off the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s every year, and like to make sure that our job list is sufficiently wrapped up heading into the holidays. As we try to finish things up, -here’s a few of the things we’re doing to get ready for the upcoming busy time when new projects and budgets get approved after the first of the year.
- Paper. We just recently got a cool scanner/fax/printer that creates PDFs on the fly. We’re going to concentrate on eliminating some of the paper we’ve accumulated over the last 12 months. Filing cabinets are soo 2008.
- Fonts, and serial numbers. We’ve got a couple of machines with font problems, and weird warnings about system fonts that are going to get some needed attention. Serial Numbers? aah yes, it’s finally time to gather up all those upgrades, install discs, and emails and get them organized into a digital file to keep track of.
- Backup. Also on the list is a RAID array that’s starting to run out of space. We’re generating more files now than ever, and we need room for a new year.