Coming from a design background I'm going to say something heretical.
Logos are useless and everyone who design logos for a living had better find something else to do with their time.
The company I use to work had a complicated business to say the least and was not terribly brandable. I believe that most companies are going to be this way going forward. It might even be hard to create a logo for even a sandwich shop, it might seem easy but what would differentiate it from the sandwhich shop down the street?
“What do we do?” is the million dollar question for any company, and one rarely asked. I doubt just a logo can answer that question and more often than not that is what is being asked of a designer in the logo creation process. A good designer will do the research, and create media friendly iconography, and then hope that the company is willing to attempt to make a brand connection to it.
There in lies the challange to companies. Once you engage in the creation of a logo, the willingness to put the full force of the company and it’s people behind the logo to breath life into it.
I like QR codes but for the life of me I can’t think of an application for it that would be worthwhile. Yet.
The QR (Quick Response) code is a 2D barcode that is huge in Japan and trying to get a foothold here in the US. QR codes can be scanned by applications on smart phones using the phone’s camera. The QR code usually contains a URL, a short text message or contact information.
This can be a boon to a digital marketing strategy. It can track responsiveness, stickiness, and take advantage of user feedback. I think the potential for social games is huge. I think as a counter-part to the foursquare and gowalla’s of the world are huge.
But the QR code has a last mile problem big time. Outside of the name which doesn’t mean anything to anyone, and as a first step ‘QR code’ should be dropped—quickly. The last mile is one part behavioral, one part technical and one part usefulness.
On the behavioral side, the actual act of scanning is a clunky process at best. However with the advent of location based services, whipping out the mobile phone to open a casual application is over-coming that hurdle big time. Even now, the more I get into the habit of checking in, the easier it gets. QR codes will follow the trend I suspect.
On the technical side, sometime the information that is scanned is not very actionable. If I scan some one’s contact information, the application should recognize it as such and give me the option to add it to my address book or more options when it’s a URL I should also get more options, whether bookmark it view it, and it should certainly lead to a mobile site. Applications just need to be smarter.
Finally we need to be smarter on how we use them in campaigns. What is the added value of the hassle of scanning a QR code? The challenge is going to be figuring out what the user wants when they are scanning and are we giving it to them. Is it information? Is it a coupon? What can I give the scanner that will prompt a next step? What are the expectations? Am I adding value?
I think it’s something that needs to be figured out before QR codes can really ever catch on.
There comes a realization that some problems will need to be solved by future generations, in the business world this usually means the person that will have your job after you leave.
The problems we leave behind could be for several reasons: political, technical limitations or just plain trying to get a minimum viable product out the door. Some of the concessions we make for progress is a headache waiting to happen for someone, in a worst case scenario, a headache for ourselves six months down the line. Just in the past couple of weeks a couple examples have cropped up
Example 1:
Icon creation can be a challenge, the simpler the metaphor one can use the better for all involved. For example, a down arrow could have several possible meanings, the most likely is ‘download’, but it could also mean ‘apply’ or ‘move down’. What if the application has an ‘apply’ feature but not a download? Do you assume that at some point in the application roadmap that a download feature might be added and go with something else or do you go ahead and use the simpler, more direct metaphor and let future generation sort it out?
Example 2:
According to standards on a website I was involved in we could not have orphan pages. It forces us to make very deliberate decisions of document taxonomy. But occasionally, there is a business need for what could be an orphan page. What do we do? Do we set up a new rule? Do we use development resources to create a new branch of the document tree? What if this really is a one off page and there does not appear to have other pages created like it in the future? Do we throw the link on a backwater internal page where no one will find it and let a future generation revisit it?
The only way to can feel okay about screwing the future is to document, document, document. Put down somewhere why the decisions were made, what the context was and/or the limitations that may have boxed you in to a less than desirable situation. At the very least the person taking up the mantle after you has somewhere to start and does not need to re-invent the wheel. it’s the least we could do.
Once upon a time when I first started filing federal income taxes I had no idea what I was doing. I remember even asking the money guy at my first job whether I even should be filing taxes since I was a freshly minted college graduate. He told me the government doesn't care whether I was a graduate or not, the governments knows I had income, and I need to file. Needless to say I did.
Fast forward several years, I was still talking about taxes, and this time it was with a woman that worked in my father’s church. I asked her about getting it wrong on taxes. What would happen? She told me that the in her mind the key to doing taxes was to do the best you can, always try to learn more, and when you know better, do better.
Logical errors aside, for some reason this always stuck
Working in an inhouse department certainly has it’s challenges, one of them being the notion of promotion to your internal clients. This was a recent question on In-house Designers Linkedin group. While I have a bunch of suggestions, here are three favorite tried and true methods:
Make friends and influence people. There are always a few people that really take advantage of the services of your department. Conscript them to be ambassadors making sure that whatever project they are involved in, that your group is pulled in.Check in on your ambassadors from time to time to see what projects they are working on, and where you might help. It also helps to have a few friends in every department to let you know about new projects coming down the pipeline. Bonus points for friends that work across departments like yours does.
Be nosy. If you see anything that does nto conform to standards or just plain ugly, step in and offer your services. In some cases do the work and present them the alternative. If it is breaking corporate standards (and always say ‘the corporate standards’, as if it is beyond your control, even if you came up with the ‘the corporate standards’) and they need to get in line. It helps to provide the tools for them to use. Such as an internal wiki..
Get a module in employee orientation. Contact HR to get some time in new employee orientation to talk about branding, the services that your department offers and the tools at their disposal. Get them early before the bad habits set in.
Finally, some people will never get it, but persistence matters, be sure to document the efforts at outreach to the hold-outs. Either they will be told to work with your department or be left behind, but you’ve done your due diligence.
“Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors…...Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.” Hat tip
Oft times in my profession it's hard getting started. This does not change no matter how extensive you project brief, how well your creative brief is done and no matter how many times you sit down with the client. There are times when jumping into a project is next to impossible. This can especially be true in a large project which can seem even more daunting.
I had an experience with this recently. Here's what I like to try to do in effort to push through:
1. Define the scope. This is usually handled by a project brief. Sometime it’s hard to start because you don’t know where to start. With a scope of work at least you have an idea of what you shouldn’t be thinking about.
2. Think small. Most projects can be broken down to small task. If a task seems to big, spend some time in breaking the job down. The only thing to be careful about here is becoming a task robot, keeping busy does not mean you are working.
3. Make some good habits. If you have problems getting started on a job, dedicated time to it in your calendar every day or every other day. Like in the previous step it’s really easy staying busy, but if you schedule time to work on a particular project, you’ll start to make a habit of it. During your dedicated time stay focused. Here’s a tip: don’t allotted an unreasonable time to a project if you don’t have to. Make your dedicated time something you know you will complete. If it’s twenty minutes then it’s twenty minutes.
4. Don’t worry about being right just get started. After all it is part of the creative process. Also if you start at the very least you and your client or co-workers are both starting from the same starting point.
The bad ideas that I am refering to here are the small ones. The ones not worth fighting against. Those bad ideas that are easier to get them done and over with.
In times like this I go back to what professor said once upon a time. He said that as creative people out job is to make even the smallest job and make it beautiful.
This is a little had to do with a bad idea.
However, I’ve found that even with bad ideas, at the very least I can make the execution beautiful. Shallow, I know, but when execluded from the conception process with these small bad ideas, sometimes you have to just get in there and do the work and make it beauticful.
I've set myself the task of cleaning out my delicious bookmarks. Since I've had the account for a bout 4 years, there are a lot of dead links, sites I really don't need bookmark and some rediscovering some wonderful sources of inspiration. Here are a few:
Embrace your bottom - This article is about spending time designing the footer of your webpage
Greatest internet moments - This site is a lot of fun. It’s amazing what held our attention when the web is young
The Art of Kadir Nelson - I love some of this guy genre paintings. It reminds me when I was a painter once upon a time
Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 in Business • Design
Your business card sucks
I don't want to buy business cards.
Not one primarily for contact information anyway. I think it's a waste of paper and a waste of time. The business card concept might be a dead one, but like email, what else is there? It's the currency of business contact information when meeting someone face to face. Electronic exchanges is the future, once there is a way to make the exchange easily or everyone gets hip enough for an iPhone so they can do that bump thing.
There seems to me that this transaction is superficial at best. My name is unique enough that a quick google search would yield not only contact information but so much more so much faster. Much more than having to dig out a business card. The business cards I receive go right into my contact database, along with any information that I remember about them that actually makes person on the business card not just a name, a number and a title. To me that is much more robust than a business card in a roledex.
We are ramping up are newsletters again at The Budget Fashionista. We will have two flavors, a person can receive a daily newsletter or a weekly newsletter. The daily newsletter are for the hardcore folks who would visit the site pretty regularly anyway, I think it will be the weekly newsletter that we are going to find the most return on investment.
Email newsletters have laughably low conversion rates as its industry standard. TBF tends to run about twice that, and the people we work with are usually delighted by the return. This could be that we keep a tight reign on our newsletter list, we double opt in and we make it painfully easy to leave. People who are on the list want to be on the list.
