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“We need a flier (brochure, website, logo),” is how most design projects are initiated. That’s when the possibilities start to dissolve.
Maybe it’s a mandate from on high.
Maybe it’s what you’ve done every year.
Maybe you hope the flier will clarify what you want to accomplish. But that’s backwards.
Even when you really know you need a website or an annual report or an event logo, you should first ask why.
A brochure or a flier is merely a form — the what. They are just vehicles for your message.
The form could be writing in the sky.
The form could be a wine and cheese party with a presentation.
The form could be a short video.
Don’t limit the possibilities by starting with the what. Since you (as the client) are always right, you might get just what you ask for. But the most beautiful flier in the world can’t make up for the lack of why.
Even if you do describe the function as well as naming the form, you still risk thinking in limiting terms. You’ll always see a flier as a two-sided piece of paper folded in thirds. You’ll always see an annual report as an accounting of numbers. Maybe the flier can also be a lampshade. Maybe the annual report can also be an invitation (invitation in a broad sense, not a literal event).
Start with why. Now there’s potential for surprise or clever reuse or delight.
This new approach has a built-in problem though. What exactly do you ask for? How do you budget for why rather than what? How can you ask for a cost estimate if there’s no what to describe?
It requires a shift in thinking.
You’ll see design as a way of thinking, a problem-solving tool — not an end in itself, a poster or a website. This shift in thinking might cause you to hire different people, to ask different questions, to engage in a different way than you had before.
The end result might still be a logo, but now you’ll see the logo not as colors and fonts but as a container for your values and aspirations in a way you hadn’t before.
Designer Yves Behar of FuseProject told an interesting story at a sustainable design conference called Compostmodern. As a partnering design firm with Puma, he and his design team noticed that the plastic sleeves that t-shirts arrived in from the manufacturer could be folded just one more time, making the plastic sleeve smaller, thereby reducing waste and saving Puma tons of money. This was able to happen because of the unique relationship between the design firm and Puma that gave designers access to the inner workings of the company.
This ingeniously simple solution came about by chance and because the why was about a sustainability, not about redesigning t-shirts.
On your next project, let the form remain a blank slate until you’re really sure what the function is.
See related posts:
• The Tree of So-So? Or the Forest of Effective.
• Design Briefs: Don’t Get Caught Without Them
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(Image credit: Flickr / Amanda Wood, under a Creative Commons license)
“I want to work smarter, not harder in 2012,” a friend resolved at an annual New Years Day party where guests reflect on the past year and state intentions for the new one.
Working smarter often involves working harder at first, but not harder on the same old stuff. Working smarter means putting systems in place that conserve time, energy and money. But that work often means asking hard questions. Otherwise we would set up resource-saving systems more often.
Which brings me to marketing budgets. It’s easy to squander time and money, equally valuable assets. Read the rest of this entry »
“Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly.” —Seth Godin
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Diving in head first not only goes against conventional wisdom, but it goes beyond most people’s comfort zones.
We’re always told to plan, to be level headed, to be prudent, to be structured. The only problem is that our fear, doubt, procrastination, worry, perfectionism, definitions of success (add as necessary) trick us into staying put. But we believe that our delay is really prudence. Read the rest of this entry »
When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open. —Bob Marley
With the closing of the year, December is a perfect time to consider the doors you’re keeping open, the doors you have yet to open and, often more importantly, the doors to consider closing. Not slamming. Not locking. Just closing. (You can always reopen them.)
I talk a lot about closing doors so you can open others, not because it’s easy for me to do! It’s because I know it has to be done in order to conserve energy, create success, explore new opportunities and maintain enthusiasm for your work.
We keep doors open that are better shut, and for good reason.
We fear a potential loss. We’re hard-wired to avoid loss, a concept called loss aversion. Barry Schwartz talks about it in his book, “Paradox of Choice.” Even if a loss will really be our gain, we often make decisions that don’t benefit us because the primal part of our brain kicks in. Just by knowing this, you can override that automatic response and make a different decision.
You will always have a loss, but you will always have a gain, too. The problem is, the gain is unknowable and the thing we have is knowable. It might suck, but at least it’s familiar. We also don’t want to disappoint people, another form of loss aversion.
Opening a new door takes energy and time. Yes and no. It depends on the door. Most of us are so risk averse that we’re not likely to open a brand new door so wide that an ocean of possibility rushes in that we suddenly have to deal with. And remember that we’re also closing doors.
We have to figure out what we want. Many of us work on auto pilot and we also do what is nearest or easiest or most crisis-oriented. We rarely leave time for the kind of reflection that can open up new opportunities. This affects all of us — the in-house marketing or project manager, the sole proprietor, the small business owner.
Other people are involved. If you work for or with other people, closing doors might be a little trickier. You have to justify a change. But maybe your staff plugging away at an effort that isn’t beneficial. Or you’re working with companies that don’t bring out the best in you. Maybe you can’t seize another opportunity because your time and effort is tied up elsewhere. You might need to step up and gently closes a door.
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Years ago, I got rid of a large part of my book collection. I thought it was sacrilege but I wanted to simplify my surroundings. I created three piles: Keep, Get Rid Of and Maybe. I let the Maybe pile sit for a few days. I discovered I kept books I thought I should read but didn’t really want to. They were a cognitive drain. I got clear with what I was really curious about, what made me feel expanded and what I deeply wanted to learn, which meant having to acknowledge the opposite.
Business and work decisions are more complicated than books. But most likely, you don’t need to think about which doors to close; you already know what they are. Look at your business efforts that leave you anxious, frustrated, bored, unappreciated, angry or uncertain. The doors to open? They say those will open magically, but only when you’re courageous enough to close some first.
You have good and important things to offer. You have to make sure that the right doors are open for those things (and the right people) to move freely about.
Good luck! And if you have a good door-closing story to share, I’d love to hear it.
It is always easier to do than to plan to do. We often have an internal knowing about where we’re going and what we want to accomplish, whether it’s a visionary decision or just a project. So we skip the kinds of meaningful questions that help us chart the best path.
But that’s because the questions can stop you in your tracks (proof that you’re getting somewhere!) because they’re hard to answer. They involve having to think critically about who you are and why you do what you do. They call to mind selling and marketing, which most of us avoid.
But most of all, we’re not clear about who we’re walking towards. Or we’re walking towards everyone and no one. Read the rest of this entry »
Oatmeal, while healthy, is also an off-white blob composed of distinct particles loosely hanging together by a gelatinous substance.
Sounds wonderful, right?
Now picture a real meal, a dinner plate with a juicy seared steak surrounded by roasted potatoes, sautéed greens and wild mushroom compote.
They’re all in it together but the steak is the meal’s leader. The steak wouldn’t be as effective without its supporting cast. A one-person-led project can work, but it can also lack the pizzazz and ideas that a group of people bring to the table, each with their own perspective and expertise. (Assuming the team was selected to create a balanced and broad understanding of the subject at hand.)
But the problem with teams is that many are unfocused and lack a real decisionmaker — someone who can keep the project alive with decisiveness.
How does indecision kill your efforts? Read the rest of this entry »
Way back when, in the days of t-squares, triangles, waxing machines and lots of bloody X-acto cuts, I met my first Mac. The year was 1987. I was a design student at the University of Maryland.
I had a paid internship in the university’s publications department where I spent the next six years. And this is where I met the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, the Mac Plus was the third in its line and cost a whopping $2499. It had a 9-inch monochrome display and a resolution of only 512×342 pixels. Typography was still fairly crude but far better than what the PCs in the school’s lab could do.
In our design program, there was one lab with a few PCs and crude paint software. And yet, to draw a squiggle on the screen felt like magic. Not many students took interest in these computers. Our projects required clean typography. One way to do that was to trace by hand and paint with gouache. Yes, we actually hand-painted our type, mainly headlines, but if you were insane enough, small type as well. I was insane and also poor.
Students who were bankrolled by parents could afford INTs — a type of transfer like a custom Letraset. We gouache types felt superior in our willingness to hand-craft our type, but really we were just jealous. And yet, even though this was painfully slow, we knew we were developing an intimacy with letterforms, drawing and spacing them just so — a skill that comes in handy even now because out-of-the-box type often requires some manipulation.
I digress, but it’s important to put this into context. For one thing, phones were still largely connected to walls (younger readers take note). There was no free music on the internet. There was no internet, at least for common folk.
I had never seen a Mac and I’m not sure I had heard of one.
I don’t recall why but I understood that this computer was cool. Probably because our boss would allow only certain of us to touch it. It sat unused much of the time because A) is was very small and hard to do a newsletter layout with it, and B) we weren’t yet able to output camera-ready layouts. We still hand-specified our manuscripts, sent them to a typesetter and used cave-man like tools to put a layout together.
There was also no such thing as halftones on the computer. In fact, it would take a few versions of the Mac before we stopped making halftones in a dark room (oh, the drudgery) to mash up with our computer-created layouts. Back then, we knew we were a little slow to adopt all the technology. Our new boss was resistant to the computer and discouraged us from using it fully, much to our annoyance.
Steve Jobs’ story of how typography came to the Mac is well-known. But for those who don’t know, he had taken a random calligraphy class at Reed College because he had seen beautifully done posters around campus. He spent hours learning about letter and word spacing, thinking he was just killing time and having a creative outlet.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
—Steve Jobs
Steve also said he wanted to put a “ding in the universe.”He certainly did that. And he also put a ding in people’s hearts.
(Image Credit: Blakespot / Flickr)
A wave of admonishment ran through the design world recently when the Department of the Interior (DOI) used a popular design crowdsourcing site to solicit ideas for a new logo. (You can read petitions and arguments here and here.)
It raises the hackles of designers when high-profile organizations (last year it was the National Endowment for the Arts) use the design equivalent of trolling—capturing everything in its indiscriminate net for very little investment.
There are a number of unsavory aspects to this practice, but most importantly, the client doesn’t benefit.
It is a terrible waste of time for a company.
Even though I wanted to ogle the submitted design work, my head spun to take in all those solutions (600+), many of which were inappropriate or just plain bad. There is much to say even about the creative brief submitted by DOI, but I’m focusing here on the cost to the organization.
Faced with too many choices, we reach an overload and we fail to make good choices.
Many books have been written on the subject of choice and decisionmaking, and there is science that supports the conclusions about the impact of too many choices. Armed with a little bit of knowledge from some of these books, we can all make better choices and decisions (see list at end of post).
In his book, Paradox of Choice (affiliate link), author Barry Schwartz talks about the pitfalls of too much choice. (You can also watch his TED talk on the same subject.)
“All of this choice has two effects on people. It produces paralysis rather than liberation. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we’d had fewer options to choose from.”
The fallout from these two key effects of the staggering choices in today’s world manifests itself in more ways. There is an inherently lower satisfaction level which causes us to regret our choice more. It makes us imagine that there had probably been a better choice. And this regret makes us even more dissatisfied.
More options also creates higher expectations, simply because of the sheer number of choices. Faced with many options, we’re convinced we can pick the best one. The final blow to our happiness in our choice when we have many options, as opposed to fewer, is that we tend to blame ourselves for our lousy choice.
Suddenly, your job, which was probably already taxing just got taxed further.
One of the reasons Trader Joe’s is so successful and popular is that they limit the choices. They are aware of how a mindboggling array of choices affects our ability to choose and be satisfied. Think about the last time you stared openmouthed at the cat food or cereal shelf of a grocery store. You sigh, your shoulders sink and you tire just thinking about making a choice. There is a cognitive cost exacted with this type of decision.
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In the case of a crowdsourced logo, many organizations lured by almost free and hundreds of choices don’t take into account the massive cost of staff time to adequately evaluate the choices. The money they imagine they are saving will get spent on staff time probably better spent another way. Factor in the time lost on confusion and second guessing, and the cost is even higher. Now, instead of evaluating a few very solid solutions based on a really useful brief, you’re navigating through too many wrong solutions that make choosing harder.
This is why crowdsourcing design is fundamentally flawed. All the focus is on the form of the thing (its looks). Form is important. But the form is only a small part of an effective identity—strategy, appropriateness, uniqueness, flexibility, lasting power.
These same theories apply not just to crowdsourcing design work but also to soliciting too many bids (unless there is a requirement to do so).
It’s something to consider if your staff is already wearing too many hats, you’re concerned about cost (in a broad sense), you reputation to protect, and most of all, you want the quality of the output to match the level of the work you do.
There are two ways good ways to avoid all this. One is to be very clear about your goals, purpose, tone/personality, audience, uses and needs. And the second is to sharpen your skills and confidence in selecting and evaluating the right designer (or design team).
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Have you ever used a crowdsourcing site for design? Do you know anyone who has? If you’re willing to share your experiences, please do. There’s very little out there on what happens next.
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Books on decisionnmaking and choices
These are all excellent books on making both personal and business decisions. They cite similar studies but each book’s focus is slightly different. (These are affiliate links.)
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
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{Above: Creative commons image from “flickr/iamdonte”}
Michael Pollan needs little introduction. But even a celebrity journalist can’t rest on his laurels. Much ink is spilled on the common pitfalls of presentations, and the suffering they inflict on audiences everywhere. Yet presentation best practices are still lost on most presenters.
Not so with Pollan who drew a crowd of some 4000 at University of Portland’s Food for Thought conference last Saturday. Pollan, a little incredulous at the crowd’s size, wondered if some of us were in the wrong place. “You’re sure you’re here to see a food writer?” he asked. Read the rest of this entry »
Or, How you can get the most out of a necessary evil
(Download the white paper The RFP: Make It a Win-Win as a PDF.)
The RFP (Request for Proposal) signals opportunity for a creative firm! They’ve made it to your list of qualified firms. You (the client) will have multiple options from which to choose, pouring over creative work samples and pricing ranges. On the surface this sounds like a win-win for both parties.
Not really.
For every creative firm who sees opportunity, another sees a cost to avoid. For every client who sees opportunity, another sees it as an onerous task that takes them off their real work, and is confused about the process.
If the process seems to favor you, it’s because you create the RFP, choose who bids and choose who gets the job. But there are real costs that aren’t obvious up front. Even the best-run RFP process has built-in flaws. You can get the most out of the process if you recognize the built-in flaws and costs, and then use workarounds. Read the rest of this entry »
