Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Back to Basics

I’ve been pontificating about graphic communications here for the last couple of entries, taking a stab at getting clients (and potential clients) to read the blog. This, however, does not seem to be happening. So, while I’ll be talking a bit about business, I’ve decided to revert to making this a location for friends and family to keep tabs on what I’m up to these days.

The business has begun to take off. My billable hours have been increasing slowly each month, and I’ve even made the first of my quarterly income tax payments. And while still far from being a burgeoning fount of plenty, running my own business is turning out to be a very interesting experience. The biggest challenge is keeping motivated at marketing and finding ways of advertising myself that are cost-effective (that is to say, nearly free) and that produce results in the form of new clients.

Primeval Redwood Forest at Elks Prairie
I’ve got my Facebook page up and I’m adding to it. I’m only eight “likes” away from having metrics added to it, which will allow me to keep track of visits and such. It’s kind of a long-haul thing, and I don’t expect to have the complete knack of this social network marketing for quite a while. Included on the page here are the three different “flavors” of cover pictures for the page. I swap them out every week or so to keep things looking fresh. I also have a Photoshop template I can use to take more of my own photographs and turn them into cover shots for the page.

I have subscribed to AdWords on Google, which puts me up front thousands of times a week when someone in my area googles things such as “graphic designer.” The placement is free, but if someone clicks on the ad, then I get billed. In the 10 days since signing up, I’ve gotten almost 60 clicks (which sends people to my website) and four actual calls or e-mails asking about my service. So far, none of those has turned into an actual job.

Central courtyard of the Louvre in Paris
Steve kept pushing me to get onto Angie’s List, so I signed up there and got Pearce Plastics to post about how nicely I’ve done for them. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman who looked me up on Angie’s List and wanted help getting a website uploaded onto a new host server. I was honest and told her she could do this herself and she replied, “Yes, I know, but I don’t want to.” So this afternoon I’m going to drive to her house in Alhambra and upload her website (actually for a nonprofit corporation called International Music Initiative, or something like that) and get her set up on the new server.

If someone would have told me in college that I would spend the afternoon uploading a website to the Internet, I would have said, “Do what to what on the what?” I took computer programming classes in college, but we put the programs and data sets on punchcards and left stacks of them, bound with rubber bands, in piles in the computer lab. They got fed through the monster IBM computer at school and a printout issued at the other end, usually with several fatal errors in the coding, which required fishing individual cards out of the stack for corrections; then the whole thing would get a new rubber band and go back into the pile. You were lucky is you saw your results in two days.

Now I’ve got a computer sitting on my desk here and a laptop I use for client meetings in the field, each of which far outstrips that old IBM monster in power, speed and capacity. Of course, that was thirty-some years ago.

A cloudy day at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen in Wisconsin
Tomorrow, I’ll be getting my hair cut and pitching a website to the salon owner at the same time. Madeleine, one of Steve’s at work, found out her hairdresser was thinking of putting up a website, and she suggested me. I called the guy a couple of times, but he was always too busy to talk, so I made an appointment for a haircut, figuring we’d have to talk, and my mop top is getting a little shaggy in any case.

I had a meeting yesterday with a gentleman who wants to redesign some packaging for his business. It’s not a huge job, but one that might extend, if his product catches on. I had arranged to meet with him at 4 p.m., and I was on my cell phone talking with the woman who I’ll be meeting with today when the office phone rang. I had to put her on hold while I answered the office phone and adjusted the meeting time for that afternoon to 4:15.

It was such as rush to actually have two phone calls going simultaneously, like a presage of a busy business a few months down the road.

Steve’s doing well. His job runs from mundane to insane, depending on what’s happening on any given day. He’s only a couple years away from retirement, and I think he looks forward to being able to gear back, take a part-time job and enjoy life a little more. My goal is to have a solid studio running with a healthy income by the time he hits retirement, and I think that viable and possible. From what I’ve heard at chamber meetings and mixers, the first year of a business is the toughest. After that, you start getting a sense of the pace and flow of your work, and word starts to get around about what you have to offer.

One problem I’m having is trying to connect with other designers in the area. The few that belong to the chamber of commerce were pleasant enough, but one woman was downright paranoid when I approached her. I’m not sure whether they think I’m going to steal customers or take trade secrets or something, but I think it would be great to have a group where we could discuss what works for you, what doesn’t work for you, and experiences with clients in general. Let’s just say no one has been enthusiastic about the concept when I’ve brought it up.

Whatever. I figure there’s plenty of work out there for good designers, especially those who know web design as well as print. And even though there’s a lot of do-it-yourself design sites online (see my previous entry titled “The Tyranny of Themes and Templates”), I think most savvy business owners know that putting out the money for a professional designer is worth it. And, even on my first meeting with a potential client, one of the items I focus on is ways to save money while getting good, comprehensive design for their dollar.

So I continue. Running your own business really is a day-by-day thing. But, then, so is life.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Tyranny of
Themes and Templates

Just like you have an accountant and a lawyer for your business, it’s important to have a graphic designer who’s there to help you on a daily basis with your business’ marketing and communication needs. A designer can help you avoid the pitfalls of the labyrinth of modern communication options.

The last few decades have seen an explosion in visual mediocrity. The avalanche of visual stimuli that assaults us on a daily basis is astounding, and growing; we react to it by becoming numb. The marketers’ respond by putting more flash and pop and sex and action into the content without any good reason other than making us look. Clever computerized graphics get ever more real — and surreal — and we become accustomed to casually watching animated images that used to be perceived as delusions or hallucinations. And we get even more numb.

But perhaps the most diabolical and banal of actors in this visual overload are themes and templates. Do you have Microsoft Word? You have themes and templates. Use Quickbooks? They're there, too. Every document-building program has them. You also can go online to any do-it-yourself print or web design site and find them: Pick from half a dozen color schemes, choose from hundreds of templates (most ranging from ugly to hideous), pick from 10 or 12 typefaces, add your own picture and a personal message and, presto: instant design for business cards, stationery, brochures, return address labels, etc., etc.

The resulting collateral looks nice enough, and it has the information you want, but it says nothing about you or your business, your vision of what your goods and services can provide: Instead of motivating your potential and repeat customers, you are supplying them with more numbing imagery. Not only that, you’ve now joined the masses who settle for meaningless visual mediocrity, and that’s what’s communicated to the public. You may have saved some money, but you’ve dedicated yourself to a bland visual image for a long time, because you’ll have to use up all those business cards and all that stationery before you have a chance to change your mind.

Like any professional, a designer is trained to find out about you and your business, he or she gets to know your personality and your outlook and how you approach working with your clients or customers; it’s part of his or her job. A designer can synthesize all that down to a unique visual solution that will fit you and your business' needs, and create a meaningful core identity for your communications with the public.

Another important point when choosing a graphic designer: you want to find someone who can create a seamless match for that visual image across all of today's communication platforms, from print to website to social networks. Find out if your designer builds your website from scratch or, instead, uses services like Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla. All these services are theme-based or template-based. And while lots of themes are available, they result in the same banal visual bromide as other prefabricated media design: Choose this theme, add this and that plug-in, change a color and a typeface and you’ve got a website.

A good graphic designer can provide thousands of color scheme choices, tens of thousands of typefaces (in print and online), and deliver a one-in-a-billion visual solution that will match you needs and be memorable in the public’s mind. Also, if you have specific interactive needs for your website, like online shopping or reservations, a good designer has the resources to create that functionality with your business in mind. And a good designer will work within your budget to create a unique identity and collateral that will grow and change along with your business.

So, revolt against the mundane. Look around and find a good designer to add to your list of business advisors. Because the visual image you present to the public should be as unique and important as you and the goods or services that you supply.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Suspension Bridges of
Madison County

Design is the process of creative problem solving: Because it is about solutions, it’s a practical process; because it is about creativity, it’s an aesthetic process. It’s not always easy to get these two aspects moving in harmony without letting one or the other take over. The practical requires logic, hard information and numeric accuracy. The creative requires subjectivity, critique and emotional evaluation.

I think everyone can agree that the Golden Gate Bridge is great design, even timeless. It is the marriage of an engineering feat with an aesthetic design perfect in scale and proportion. It achieves the solution of providing passage over the inlet of the San Francisco Bay while providing room for the shipping lanes below, and it is breathtaking to behold.

But say you’re a rural town of 30,000 people and you have to build a bridge over a 100-foot wide river flowing through your community: building the Golden Gate Bridge or anything like it would be absolutely ludicrous. That’s because, although both are bridges and both address spanning a course of water, the problems are also very different in their scopes and environments and the needs of the communities they serve. The rural community has to approach its problem as unique, and the design it ends up constructing may be as or more beautiful than the Golden Gate, but only if the bridge solves the problem both practically and aesthetically for its community and its course of water.

Shift over to graphic communications and apply the same concept: the practical aspect of a graphic communications design solution is getting information transmitted effectively (and cost-effectively) to a target audience. If you’re a local business that relies on your community to purchase your goods or services, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to produce a national television ad campaign. The commercial spots might be visually stunning and wildly creative, but you’re wasting your money delivering an extravagant spot to an overly broad audience when good design (practically and aesthetically) dictates targeting local neighborhoods with locally relevant information. You will have wasted a lot of money sending the wrong message to the wrong market.

Many businesses make this same mistake when approaching their website design. A retailer may look at the website for a national department store and want to emulate that, but the amount of purchasing traffic that will move through a local website may not even warrant an online shopping module. Also, purchasing elaborate third-party online services can be a mistake, since most are sold “packaged” or “bundled,” and you may get charged for a lot of services you’ll never use. Before letting your emotions and subjective decision-making take over, look at what communication functions your website will shoulder best, then budget and design around those needs and strengths.

One big responsibility for a designer is making sure the client doesn’t skew too far away from his or her main goal during the design process. The toughest thing a designer has to do is inform the client that his or her ideas or concepts are going in the wrong direction, or that the client’s decision is not using the marketing budget effectively, no matter how large the funds at your disposal are. If you’re working with a good designer, trusting his or her advice can be the first step to running a lean, clean promotional machine.

After all, communicating with local markets is about developing personal relationships with your local customers; finding ways to cultivate and motivate those over time. No matter how high-falutin’ the technology gets, it’s still word-of-mouth that get customers and clients through your doors and onto your books. It may show up as posts on Facebook or Tweets on Twitter or reviews on Yelp or other social rating sites, but it all comes down to people trusting people who say good things about what you do.

Even here in the 21st century, local marketing still comes down to generating backyard gossip and water-cooler buzz, even if it is taking place in cyberspace.