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Best of 09: 10 tips for an effective design process
A compendium from the Sametz Blackstone design community, this post was originally published September 17, 2009.
“Great clients share many of the traits of great designers: curiosity,…perfectionism, energy, confidence, idealism, wit. And they also love their work.” —Ellen Shapiro
1. Request a creative brief. If you haven’t been offered one, ask the designer or strategist for a creative brief: an outline of the project goals to be adhered to over the course of the project. Both you and the designer should sign off on the brief.
2. Identify the decision-makers. Before beginning a project, identify who in your organization needs to sign off on design milestones—and limit the decision-making to only that group. For larger-scale projects, identify concentric circles that range from a small core group responsible for daily tasks, to a decision-making group involved in key milestones and interviews, to the largest group who will be informed of major plans and progress.
3. Discuss visual preferences up front. If purple will never get past your CEO, then tell the designer. By clarifying the “go, no-go” elements up front, you and the designer can partner to problem-solve—and avoid disappointment. It’s also helpful for designers to see examples of designs you like so they can gain insight into your style preferences and expectations.
4. Consider creative assets. If you’re going to need photography for your project, consider what you may already own. Was a professional photographer present at a recent fundraising event? Do you know a student who photographed his classmates for a recent project? Taking stock of what you own and what you need gives the designer a head start on developing a creative concept.
5. Outline your content. Work in tandem with the designer and/or strategist to outline your content and determine headings, subheads, etc. The concept phase can begin without final copy, but having a sense of the hierarchy and copy length will allow the designer to produce a concept representative of the final product.
6. Consolidate edits. Edits are inevitable, of course—it’s hard to really “see” how your copy will look until it’s laid out. You may also be awaiting contributions from other members of your organization. But consolidating edits into a few “rounds” saves time and expense.
7. Align feedback with your goals. Goal-oriented feedback can be more successful than focusing on specific design elements. For example, saying “Our identity needs more presence” instead of “Can you make the logo bigger?” can result in broader, more effective solutions. It is the designer’s job to identify those solutions.
8. Give an honest and concise critique. As students, designers quickly learn the benefit of critique. They’re not looking for praise (okay, a little praise is nice!) and their feelings will not be hurt if you prefer one concept to another. Designers recognize the value of their client’s knowledge and intuition; direct critique is the shortest route to an effective solution.
9. Stay in touch. Let the designer know the best method for communication (do you respond best to phone calls or e-mail?). Introduce other members of your team with whom the designer will need to correspond (making sure to identify decision-makers). Determine the best method for deliverables (hard-copy or PDF?). For larger projects, set time aside for a weekly check-in meeting. It needn’t be lengthy; a simple status update can put everyone on the same page.
10. Trust your designer. Every pixel, every line of type, every hairline rule is carefully considered—the judgments we make on your behalf are based on our collective experience and education. We are good listeners. In Ellen Shapiro’s book The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Clients, Rick Valicenti says the best relationships occur when the designer is perceived as counsel, rather than a vendor (a mantra we echo here at Sametz Blackstone often). Building a good relationship is at the core of an effective design process.
Categories: Design
Best of 09: Time is your enemy
This post originally appeared on The Marketing Spot blog, a great resource for small business marketers. It was originally published on ’Round the Square September 15, 2009.
They say time is money. Most of us take that to mean: “Spend more time, spend more money”—like that’s a bad thing. Like every minute that ticks by is money out the door or money that we could be making, and aren’t.
But look at it the other way: what if spending more time meant making more money?
Think about it: what successful business ever got that way by spending less time? Success may have come quickly (or at least appeared to), but time was not the cause of success. Yet a lot of us put far, far too much stock in time.
The other day I was reading a pre-release chapter from Gary Vaynerchuk‘s upcoming book Crush It!. Gary is well-known as a small business marketing success story: he went from running a local wine shop to $50 million in sales, all through a daily wine blog integrated well and thoroughly with social media (Facebook and Twitter, in particular). But while most people focus on his 2006-to-now meteoric rise, he points out that the path to his current success started when he was…16. (He’s now 34.)
Gary pairs two seemingly opposing forces together as secrets of his success: hustle (the willingness to work slavishly hard for what you want) and patience (the willingness to wait for all that work to pay off).
What he doesn’t say—but what is very clear—is that he took time out of the equation. As he explains,
“How did someone like me, who is so obviously not a patient guy, cool my heels for so long? Because I was 100 percent happy. I loved what I was doing. I knew down to my core that my business was going to explode, but even if I had fallen flat on my face, I would have had no regrets because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.”
He was willing to work very, very hard to make himself, his business, and his service the best they could possibly be. You can’t do that if you’re trying to do it faster. Faster is the enemy of better.
I know, I know, we all learned that the holy trinity of success is “faster, better, cheaper” (particularly if we can use those words in our marketing!). But when you’re developing your business, the trio is different. It’s “faster, better, easier“—where “easier” means the level of effort you’re capable of sustaining, marketing or otherwise.
And you can only pick two.
If you want success to be fast and easy, your quality will suffer—and you’ll get your lunch handed to you when someone with a better product eventually comes along (and they will). If you want that better product, but still want—or need—it to be easy, then it will take longer. If you want it fast and great, you’re going to have to turn yourself inside out to do it…and there are still no guarantees.
Because really, it’s not about fast. It’s about best.
Best will win out every time. Best is the only thing that survives long-term. Everything else is a tradeoff between speed and sacrifice.
So take time out of the equation—and see how fast time flies.
Categories: Strategy and Management
Best of 09: Stones or Beatles?
This post was originally published on September 9, 2009.
Quick: what’s your answer? We (Tamsen and Matt) have been tossing this question around quite a bit lately, and we think it reveals a lot.
Stones or Beatles? So strong are our associations with both that no one ever thinks we’re asking about rocks and insects. The names are shared symbols, soundtracks to individual memories. You hear the White Album’s spine crack, the Sticky Fingers’ zipper growl. You hear teenage angst, one-night-stands, love lost and found. You hear the music of an era, and music for the ages.
Stones or Beatles? It’s tempting to hedge the question. The bad boys, or the dreamers? The interpreters or the creators? Some people will tell you it depends on their mood. Or the albums in question. Some answer with a different band entirely (Matt usually answers with The Beach Boys, others say Elvis, others The Dead).
But when pressed, most people have a firm opinion one way or another.
Stones or Beatles? Tamsen discovered quite by accident that Matt likes to use this as an interview question (quite by accident because Matt informed her she passed without ever having actually asked her the question…). Being a fan of unexpected questions, Tamsen has since been asking it a lot: on Facebook (where it kind of blends in to the random quizzes and apps), on Twitter (where it got more answers than any other status update she posted), at the Gravity Summit Tweetup (where it was so popular that others started asking it, even to MC Hammer [Stones]).
It’s a question people love to answer because it’s public and personal at once: everyone has an opinion, but everyone comes to that opinion in their own way.
Stones or Beatles? Most people haven’t consciously prepared their answer. So, when you ask it, you get an answer shaped by who they are and how they see themselves. To Matt, the question reveals both a person’s affinity for and knowledge of music (something he values pretty much above all else) and whether or not, in his eyes, that person is a “thinker [Beatles] or a feeler [Stones].”
To Tamsen, the answer (though interesting) is only the start of the story. She likes to ask why someone made the choice they made, which in turn reveals frames of reference: those who cite coolness value status, those who cite creators vs. interpreters value approach to ideas, those who talk about who’d be more fun to see value experiences.
In other words, your understanding of someone’s answer is inexorably shaped by your own.
Stones or Beatles? Yes, it’s possible to overthink this, and we have. But it’s still fun to ask—and interpret.
So…Stones or Beatles?
(And why?)
Categories: Outside the Square
Best of 09: Trust Agent + ? = $$
This post was originally published September 2, 2009.
Last week I read the (now) New York Times Bestseller Trust Agents byChris Brogan and Julien Smith.
There are a million reasons to read the book and to give it to others—particularly those who don’t yet “get” the whole social media thing or why it’s important. Why?
Well, Trust Agents explains the value of social capital and how it can be used in our now highly connected world. It gives step-by-step instructions for how to build social capital and how to use social media tools to put that capital to best use. And, most importantly, it describes what Trust Agents are and the traits they share:
- Trust Agents ignore boundaries. (Make Your Own Game)
- Trust Agents stand out by blending in. (One of Us)
- Trust Agents leverage the present to achieve the future. (Archimedes Principle)
- Trust Agents connect within and among groups. (Agent Zero)
- Trust Agents build and nurture relationships. (Human Artist)
- Trust Agents mobilize people. (Build an Army)
And two attributes, central to the book (but not articulated):
- Trust Agents are self-evident, not self-appointed.
- Trust Agents need other Trust Agents to be successful.
These qualities don’t just show up in successful social media folk, they show up in successful humans. Which, as Jay Baer suggests in his post on the book , begs the question: Can you teach this? Can you teach people how to be human?
No. People ARE human. And you can’t teach someone to be something they’re not. Or at least, not and have it last very long. You can’t teach someone to be Chris Brogan or Julien Smith.
They’re them. You’re you. End of story.
But you can teach people how to be better at who they already are. (This applies to organizations, too.) The question is, how can Trust Agents help you do that?
I’d imagine most people reading the book recognize bits of themselves all through it. “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” “Erm, no, not so good there.” I suspect that was a primary intent: to get people to realize that everyone has the capacity to be a Trust Agent.
But how do you become one? How do you move from capacity to actuality? From realizing you have potential to making potential real? How do Trust Agents make money?
As the book ended, my brain started. As Stuart Foster of The Lost Jacket says, “Being awesome is not a business model.“ Being awesome is where it starts, but not where it ends: business models, by definition, are about how to provide value you can then get paid for. Otherwise, you’re doing this.
My take is that all Trust Agents provide (profitable) value in two ways: through their relationship with information and through their relationships with other Trust Agents. People who operate as Trust Agents, online and off, provide that value very differently. Chris Brogan is a different type of Trust Agent than Julien Smith, who is a different type than Amber Naslund, or Guy Kawasaki, or Robert Scoble.
I see five different models for how Trust Agents provide this value. Models that can, I think, be business models as well:
- The creator. The person who creates new ideas. The generator.
Someone will always pay for a new thing, a new way to do things, or a new way to think about things. - The connector. The person who connects ideas, and /or people, together.
Someone will always pay for access. - The filter. The person who analyzes and prioritizes ideas for redistribution. Their value comes in their ability to pick out the “good stuff.”
Someone will always pay for the efficiency that comes from selectivity. - The interpreter. The person who translates ideas between groups, including from current groups to ones that don’t yet exist. The teacher.
Someone will always pay for leverage—and understanding. - All four types need a fifth: the collector who aggregates information, sorts it for reference of the others, and often help provide backup (in the form of data) for others’ work. These are librarians, of sorts, whose value comes in their ability to provide both comprehensive and easy-to-use high-quality information.
Someone will always pay for raw data, for (searchable, sortable) information.
All types need each other, of course. The best Trust Agents both recognize that and act on it consciously. Creators need Connectors to get their ideas out there, and Interpreters to get them to new groups in ways those groups understand and recognize. Connectors need Creators to provide the currency of ideas, and Filters to provide ways of making sure what they connect to is the best. And so on.
Each of us takes on these different roles with varying levels of comfort, but one form usually dominates. (Although sometimes people end up in a model that doesn’t suit them—think of the wonderful researcher who is a terrible teacher.) By understanding which model is most comfortable for you and your skill set, you can then strengthen those skills and determine how best to turn you (or your organization)—in that role—into something people pay for.
So which one will you use to realize your potential?
Did I miss any?
Categories: Branding, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
Best of 09: The first way you’re wasting your story
This post was originally publishing August 24, 2009
The key to great branding and marketing? Tell a great story. But you’re wasting it.
How? Well, for one, you’re telling your story the way you want to hear it.
My preferred reading falls into two categories: treatises on group and personal behavior…and Regency-era romance novels. It’s very hard to get me to pick up a book that doesn’t fall into one of those two categories.
But we all have our bias. History, biography, sci-fi…whatever the subject, each of us likes to read and hear stories told in certain ways.
Take the Civil War, for instance. You can take a chronological approach to telling the story. Or focus on a key character. You can tell the story of the unsung. Or find the romance in it. Or use it to help define a new genre. However the story of the Civil War is told, the basic elements are always the same. The readers of each version of the story come away with some knowledge of those elements. Because those elements are framed in a way the readers enjoy, they are more likely to remember and understand them—the goal of effective brand storytelling, organizational or otherwise.
When we tell stories, we also have a bias: we tell the stories we want to hear, which is kind of a problem when you’re trying to market to (or get support from) different types of people, all of whom have their own preferences. People want to hear the stories they want to hear.
If you tell your story as a biography, then biography buffs are the ones most likely to enjoy it. But if you can tell that same story in multiple ways—suspense, self-help, adventure—then each new telling brings a new chance at connection.
To do this, you need to know your bias. Look on your nightstand, both literally and figuratively. (Yes, those books are, in fact, the ones currently by my bed. You’ll see they all fall into my two categories:treatise and trash.) From a literal standpoint, looking at what you read most often can tell you a lot about the kinds of stories you like, and like to tell. Based on my nightstand reading (and the stories I’ve told in past posts here), you’ll see I have a very strong bias towards explaining things—with passion.
The organizational nightstand is figurative, but the same exercise applies: Do your case studies sound the same, regardless of their subject? Do the stories you tell tend to fall into a standard format or plotline?
If they do, you’re likely wasting your story, simply by not telling it in multiple ways. Don’t worry about repeating yourself—most people can recognize their type of story by the cover, and don’t ever pick up ones that don’t suit. We make our decision to read and attend to stories based on visual and verbal cues. That’s why titles, keywords, and design are so important. They help us evaluate, at a glance, whether or not to “read” further.
So go back to your stories. Do some rewrites. If you tell a lot of people-focused stories, try explaining your methods, too. If you’ve talked about your tools and how they work, try talking about their impact. If you’re having trouble seeing beyond your own bias, ask for help—from someone who likes different types of stories than you do (or an outside consultant or firm).
At the end of the day, the question isn’t, “What’s my story?”
It’s: “How many ways can I tell it?”
Tomorrow: the other way you’re wasting your story.
Categories: Branding
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