It’ll Take Time. A Lot of Time.

There’s a great link on Daring Fireball about SEO. It’s a nice opinionated article about how SEO is bunk, -but there’s another bit that makes it worth reading. At the end of the article is the secret to web marketing. Print it our and pin it up somewhere.

“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.

It’ll take time. A lot of time. But it works. And it’s the only thing that does.”

Read the rest here: http://powazek.com/posts/2090

Embrace the Ownership Mentality.

“The owners mentality is difficult to describe. You either have it or you don’t (although you can learn to have it).”
– Chris Tingom, www.brainfuel.tv

Of course your graphic designers love to design, and your programmers love to develop, your copywriter loves to write, and your AE (hopefully) loves client communication! But do they all have the ownership mentality? It’s undervalued, and it’s what gives smaller studios an exceptional capability to stand up against those larger agencies. It’s not just one person taking the lead with this thought process- it’s everyone taking every fire drill seriously and going to extremes to make sure their end of the job is taken care of- all to satisfy the needs of the client. 

Pride in getting something right should absolutely be the enjoyment of the owner of a small studio, but every owner would want to share that with his/her employees- everyone who touches the project and everyone who doesn’t. Knowing that you worked your tail off to get a project back to a client ahead of deadline, and then seeing how pleased they were with it brings out a satisfactory feeling, doesn’t it? 

Some might say building that camaraderie in a small studio is more difficult, maybe because you all work remotely, or for whatever other reason. If you feel that’s how it is in your own studio, change it. Make it easy. Get to know your co-workers. Make them laugh. There are several things you can do to make those you work with feel more comfortable in their work environment (that’s an entirely different post!) but all with the goal of bringing out that owners mentality in them. 

A great sense of responsibility within the employees of a small business (or any business, really) knocks over a line of dominoes that lands at a bigger bottom line for your company. Not that it’s all about money, but who’s going to complain about it? Encourage the ownership mentality in the people you work with daily. Certainly look for it in potential employees, and develop it as much as you can. It can only help you in the end.

When 99% Accuracy Isn’t Good Enough.

The design industry is competitive, there’s no doubt about that. There’s always someone else who wants to do it better, quicker, cheaper, or any combination of the three. You’ve got to constantly evaluate your workflow, and adjust it so that you’ve got the best combination. 

You can do things right 28 days out of the month, but when one of those remaining days doesn’t go as planned, there’s a chance you could be fighting so you don’t compromise the quality, effectiveness or bottom line of a  job done on your watch. So, what happens when that inevitable mistake makes its way to the surface of your carefully managed workflow? 

You grow. 

The real test is what you do with that mistake. Analyze it. Has it been made before? If so, why? Trace it to it’s origin and find out if there’s a way to improve the process. Leave room for human error, give learning curves the respect they deserve- but nip the mistake in the bud. There is always room to get better. There are always areas we can improve on. Part of what we love about this industry is the continual learning process. The pace is quick, and you have to strive to keep up, or it will leave you behind…

Take mistakes lightly, but take them seriously. There is an agency down the street, or maybe even hundreds of miles away who is waiting to snatch up your business. It’s an every day reality, you see, and 99% accuracy will never be good enough.

My Client’s Taste Was Tacky…

If you’re sticking around to see if we call out a specific client for having bad taste, go ahead and quit reading. The real answer is that many of our clients suffer from temporary, or permanent lack of taste in design.

To be more honest, most of them on that list would not argue. If they were fantastic designers, they wouldn’t need us. If they could art direct, they would attempt to do so. But, after this purposefully tacky intro, we have something uplifting to say; your taste is relevant, and it’s important even if it’s not what insiders would consider “good.”

At Entermotion, we really believe that we should listen to our clients about their preferences, and their tastes. Great design comes not from doing what the designer wants, but solving the clients’ problem within the budget, time, and parameters given. Taste is a funny thing… (Almost) nobody is right. There is literally only one rule when it comes to taste as it pertains to graphic design… The clients’ client is always right.

So if you’re our client, and you love art-deco, but you’re product is targeted at 18 year olds, we’ve probably had an uncomfortable talk with you at some point. If you love POP-art, but run a nursing home, we might have also had a rather specific, and carefully blunt conversation with you. (neither of these examples are real!)

Like on the recent episode of Mad Men when Don tells one of the potentially biggest clients he has ever met that “nobody wants to think about mice being in a hotel” when shown ad mockups with Jerry from Tom & Jerry in them -Don knows that honesty is the best policy. Regardless of feelings, regardless of how much you need to bill in a month, it’s imperative that you evolve an honest, and realistic relationship with your clients as it pertains to the success of a campaign in your clients’ customers’ minds.

But let’s look at another possibly trepidatious situation.

You, really firmly, with a decade of experience behind you think that you ought to go with a subtle calming green in the background of an ad, but your client wants blue. Blue, you think, does not express your beliefs of figure/ground as a designer in this case. Plus you think it’s too masculine. Also, you think it will probably cause you to rework a lot of art, and possibly injure a few of your teammates’ egos. Also, you’ve been on a green kick lately, because you painted your kitchen that color, and you love the Banana Republic sweater you got a month ago that looks like PMS 324c.

Not good enough. If you can’t clearly, explicitly, and as it pertains to marketing concepts express why you’re right, and your client is wrong, shut up and do your job. Blue, like any color has emotions, trends, printing issues, and branding issues tied to it- but it’s just a color! Like every color, you can imbue it with emotion, shift it gradually, or force it to print correctly. Your taste as a designer is of no consequence in this case, because you have made decisions that are founded in preference rather than fact.

But your taste does matter.

If you have done your job, or your AE has done their job, your taste does matter. The client has picked your studio to work with because they trust you. It’s the job of those dealing with clients to be persuasive, confident, and assertive. But assuming you don’t have an endemic problem of confidence in your process that causes clients to doubt you, you imperatively need to listen to their tastes, and take them as part of the challenge.

If you’re client loves paisley, and that’s part of the project specs, work it in and figure out a way to do it within the parameters defined for the project. If your client wants pink, make it sing. If Verdana is the corporate font, track it, kern it, and make it look like it didn’t come from a Microsoft web initiative.

Like the challenges on Project Runway, not every project is a chance to express our own vision. We’re not fine artists, we’re artists for hire. If Heidi tells us to make a dress out of newspaper, it’s our job to make it look couture. Imagine Tim Gunn hopping in at the twelfth hour and telling you to “make it work.” It’s your job to deal with short timelines, bad materials, poor specs, and vague goals. It’s the job of a designer to succeed against the odds at telling a visual story that sells products through type and image. It’s that simple, and there are no excuses.

Over the course of your career you might get better at controlling the situation so that you avoid pitfalls, but the essence of the job remains unchanged. You’re the hero that starts with zero…

Back to the point of all the projects you’ve done that aren’t in your portfolio…

If you’re a designer- it’s OK to be your own steward, and connoisseur in your portfolio. If you’re a client, you don’t need to have your feelings hurt because your amazing project is not in your designer’s portfolio.

A designer’s portfolio is not to show off projects where they solved problems quickly, or with disparate elements, or with tight, or exotic budgets. It quite specifically exists to show off where client work brushes against the studio’s own aesthetic to recruit the type of clients that the studio is looking to recruit more of. We’re proud of hundreds of projects that aren’t in our portfolio…

In our case, we keep a pretty large portfolio, but we’re always cycling in the projects that we think represent more succinctly the momentum of our business. If you’re a small studio, a student, or a freelancer, take some advice that probably cost us clients in the beginning of our business: don’t show more work than you have to. You might feel pressure to show quantity rather than quality to appear bigger, and broader than you are. It’s counterproductive, and costs you more than you know.

While not every client project gives you a chance for portfolio material, We think you should chase the solution to the problem rather than your own aesthetic, or your own needs. You’ll be farther ahead in the long-run if you do. The question of client taste is something we’ve run into countless times in our career, and we can’t imagine it stopping any time soon. Part of the business of pleasing clients and solving marketing problems means that you have to be firm, honest, friendly, and… tasteful in your dealings with them.

The Happy Studio- Email.

Why on earth would a whole post in this series be devoted to email? Because quite honestly, it’s an enormous part of what we do these days. It has affected our workflow, our technology budget, our client list, and even our hiring practices.

Email survival
If you are responsible for a significant portion of your company’s communication (i.e. are an owner, a sales person, or account executive) you know that the effectiveness of your correspondence is tantamount to virtually all other attributes of your skill-set on a daily basis. If you’re like us, you started out being a good designer or programmer, or copywriter, and have (abruptly) evolved into a digital communicator.

Do you shy away from email? Do you excel because of it? Whatever the case, it’s an important part of your job. When it comes down to it, if we had to choose between corresponding and working, we’d choose the work. But obviously you can’t have one without the other. So even though we might not have the exact social attributes you’d be looking for if you were hiring specifically for a correspondence position, we communicate. We communicate well, and we have clients who love us.

We have evolved habits that make huge amounts of correspondence manageable, and sustainable. We like to think that if we can learn it, anyone can. Start with GTD. Start with whatever system you like, but eventually you can learn to survive in a continual onslaught of communication. Here are a few of our survival tips.

• Respond quick to pacify, and explain that you received the email.
• Triage! Learn to prioritize better than what’s at the top of the stack.
• Use a great email client. We use mail.app of course- but learn all the tricks you can to make your flow more efficient.
• Type. Type fast. When you think you type fast enough, type faster.
• Get an assistive program like “typeitforme” or “textexpander” to make often-typed bits develop faster.
• Learn keyboard shortcuts. Bold, italics, indention, fonts, and even size can all be done via the keyboard on most email applications. Do you know how? Check out these keyboard shortcuts for Windows, or these tips for a Mac.

The old A.E. is the new inbox manager
Never let your A.E. staff give up on real world communication. Continue encouraging them to buy drinks, lunch, and donuts, but make sure they can handle email.

We’ve started hiring, and making workflow rules based on inbound emails. New jobs are tagged with dates, and subject lines of inbound emails. Job ID’s are based off of the email they came in on. It’s a survival technique we’re evolving constantly.

Our workflow has always been digital, but is becoming increasingly so. Account executives must be able to survive and thrive in a digital communication world. If you don’t have staff that already do so, work on rules and tools that help them be more responsive (and accountable) to your clients who communicate through email.

My court, your court
The difference between a shrinking studio and a growing studio is how it anticipates client needs. If your studio is dying, you don’t have a workflow problem. If it’s growing, you’re continually evolving to meet the demands of the flow.

In the beginning, all you need to worry about is what you have in front of you. We call it “my court, your court.” If the ball is in our court, we are trying terribly hard to get it back into yours. If it’s already in yours, we could care less until it comes back into ours.

That being said, we must add that this works really well up to a certain size of company. Eventually, your workflow and your success depends on getting jobs done on a certain schedule, regardless of whose fault it is that the job is not yet complete. Passing-the-buck is something for amateurs.

So, despite the fact that you asked the client two weeks ago for the copy for their “about us” page, it’s still your responsibility to follow up.

You may be asking, “how is this relevant to email correspondence?”

The answer is that email is designed around getting a reply, not a resolution. Studios are contracted by clients to get more than a response- they want a problem solved.

Keep this in mind: if your workflow rapidly responds to clients, but does not produce the projects they contacted you for, you have a broken workflow, and email is not working for you.