Summer in the City

It’s summer around the house. We’ve had spates of hot and muggy weather, but the past few days have been delightful: in the upper 80s, a mild breeze. This does not promise to last long, though, as another blob of subtropical moisture is heading our way from Mexico (hurricane Fabio was our last moist visitor), bringing possible thunderstorms this weekend and into next week.

We go up and down the stairs a dozen times a day, and it was only this week that I stopped at the bottom and looked at the art in the stairwell. I was so pleased, I took a couple snapshots to share. Up the walls we have a collection of eight lithographic plates from “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder. My dad gave the book to me as a Christmas present when I was a kid: the clarity and simplicity of the writing captivated me, and it was the first book I’d ever had that included lithographic plates as the artwork. When the binding started to fail, I decided to rescue the art and put it in the hallway. On the facing wall above is a blowup of the famous Life magazine cover of Marilyn Monroe, made up of small Life covers from the past. It’s from the last 1990s, when such things were thought of as digital wonders; this kind of image is commonplace now.

In the corner is what I call the world’s largest paperweight: It’s a Rollin Karg sculpture that I picked up when we were visiting Eureka two years ago. It weighs about 80 pounds and is solid glass. Here’s a clip from Karg’s website showing them making one of these monstrosities. It’s a really beautiful piece, and I keep threatening to construct a lighted base to really show off the depth and refraction of the piece.



Things are going well with the business, although not as busy as I’d like to be. But I am getting calls from potential clients, and handing out my cards and the brochures is slowly paying off. I have two appointments for next week; one with the publisher from the American Society of Cinematographers (I’ve been working on their new handbooks, and I think there’s more to come on those), and a local restaurateur who is contemplating redoing her website. Beyond that, I’ve got a couple of book covers, one which I just finished and one that’s in progress, and I have a bid in with the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce to design and layout their annual business directory and community guide. We’ll see how that goes. There are other potential clients out there that I poke at every so often via e-mail, but a consistent and scheduled marketing campaign still eludes me, especially since I can’t throw hundreds of dollars a month at it just yet.

Out on the patio, I’ve developed a real consistency since the spring, and the plants are getting watered and fed on a regular timetable. It’s amazing how lush plants can get when you give them what they need. The shots above are of the ivy that replaced the dead vining ficus that was caught on the patio when the house was tented and, of course, Beuford reclining among the roots of the now-eight-foot-tall ficus benjamina.

I’ve got a webinar scheduled in about an hour and a half covering the major points of launching a consistent and successful e-mail marketing campaign for the studio; of course, it’s hosted by the website that wants to charge me for the service, but doing it on my own takes a lot of time, and I just don’t get the open and response rates that a service does.

This is one of the things I do not like about being in business for myself: Being a one-man band. Doing the marketing, tracking billable hours, networking, and lots more have all got to be attended to without anyone else setting the pace. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a dozen balls in the air at once, and I probably do. It’s still something I’m getting used to but, every now and then, a part of me longs for a nice corporate job where I don’t have to think so hard and don’t have to shine for everybody all the time.

Fire? What Fire? Oh, That Fire

It was a typical Thursday evening here in Pasadena. Things had just started cooling off from the 90-degree high of the day. We had just finished a nice piece of chicken and some cornbread stuffing for dinner and we were sitting on the couch, remote in hand, one again in awe that, with the hundreds of channels on cable, there was, again, absolutely nothing worth watching.

Then the fire engines came. Now, this is not unusual, because the fire station is just two blocks away and our street (Villa), being one of the lesser traveled east-west streets, is often used by the fire department to get somewhere in a hurry: We get our fair share of sirens blazing by on their way to provide aid and assistance.

It is most disconcerting when the sirens reach the our block and stop, and, just as we had decided to pop in the Blu-Ray disc of the last Harry Potter movie yesterday evening, that's what happened. Steve checked at the window and said there were paramedics. Then another siren came. And another. And another.

"Do you smell smoke?" I asked, because I couldn't. "No," Steve replied, "but their are firemen out there."

Well, who can pass up a chance to check out firemen? So, as another two sirens approached in the distance, we went out front to watch the commotion. Most of the neighborhood had beat us to the punch, and it was like a small street fair. We noticed that there were two fire hoses running into the apartment complex next door (own by CalTech and rented out to students and faculty working and studying there). We walked back to the gate at our building and ran into one of the neighbors from our complex (our condo is one of seven in our building, with 14 units total in our HOA).

"There must be a fire," Steve said. "Oh, yeah, there's a fire," the neighbor replied, "it's way in the back." So we walked back to the last unit and, sure enough, smoke was coming through a broken, scorched window. Jesse, the resident of the back unit, had taken some iPhone videos of the fire in progress, and those are included herein.

We had six fire trucks altogether respond to the blaze, which was contained to one unit, with the unit above receiving some damage. No one was injured, thankfully, although one cat was seen scrambling out of the burning apartment and had gone missing.

The street was closed off for several hours as the firemen did their work which was nice, because it meant we didn't have any sirens screaming down the street while watching Harry ultimately vanquish Voldemort (I don't think that's a spoiler any longer).

Steve has to get up at 5:45, since he has to be at work at 7 a.m., and even though it's only about 10 minutes away, it's still a drag. Upside of this is he gets off at 3:30 in the afternoon. In any case, he's usually in bed by 10:30 or so, and I stay up later, because I am a night person and there is nothing specific requiring my early rising. I take the opportunity for Steve's early retiring to watch some television that I know he's not interested in. Recently it's been rewatching "Twin Peaks," followed by the Joseph Campbell's philosophy series, "Mythos." It's quite a metaphysical combination.

So that's the excitement of the week from Villa Street in lovely Pasadena. This is an opportunity to make sure your homeowner's/renter's insurance is up to snuff. Remember, smoke damage can be as costly as fire damage, if not more so.

Late Nights

One of the consequences of working at a home business is that your schedule becomes your own, for the most part. You have client meetings scheduled and networking functions to attend, but when you get your work done is pretty much up to you, as long as you hit your deadlines.

I am a night person; always have been. This was one of the reasons I worked so well as a theater artist, because my workday began at 2 in the afternoon and ended at 11 at night. Unfortunately, a theater career paid a dismal salary, and the politics of the arts world just wasn't my cup of tea, so I abandoned that career in my early 30s.

So, of late, I have put in a lot of late nights while working on the ASC handbook, or working on the coding for some interactive part of a web page. I look up at the clock, and all of a sudden it's 3:30 a.m. and I didn't plan to stay up that late.

The night is cool and quiet, and I find it easy to concentrate. And when I go to bed, I am really tired, ready for sleep.

The past few weeks, every other night or so, a mockingbird has taken up residence in the trees across the street: not so close as to irritate, but close enough that you can listen to the varied songs it sings, up alone and attentive to its tune.

Summer is upon us. The rest of the nation has gotten the heat before we have, although there have been a couple days when it reached into the 90s. Mostly, though, we have a morning marine layer that works its way into the valleys and keeps the temperatures in the mid- to upper-80s.

Really, there's nothing much to report of consequence. I still have several potential clients who are on the edge of moving on new websites or website redesigns. I keep networking at the monthly breakfast and luncheon meetings at the chamber of commerce and following up with current clients, trying to not be an irritant.

At the chamber networking functions, they always have a raffle at the end of the meal, and last breakfast I won a 30-minute marketing consultation with (what else) a local marketing consultant. He sent me a fairly long form to fill out, but I have to sit down and write out some questions for him about how to approach marketing.

I want to get the reputation for being the design guy you go to with any problems, a senior statesman of graphics who can take a communications problem and create meaningful, satisfying and cost-effective solutions on a one-to-one basis. I'm doing good work on my own, but how to develop that reputation, I'm not sure.

I'm thinking of putting out another mailing with a purchased mailing list from one of the many list services available online. No free sticky pads this time, but a note inserted urging business people to contact me with their communication problems.

This is a very boring entry. I'm in a hiatus from work. The mockingbird is not at its nocturnal post. With all the potential of the future swirling just out of sight, I am oddly peaceful at the moment, but not yet ready for sleep.

I'm going to enjoy this slice of surcease, because things will start zooming about me soon enough.

Has it Been Almost a Month?

I know it’s time to put something down here when I get a call from someone asking why I haven’t put anything down here in nearly a month.

I have busy with business (appropriately). One thing I’ve learned in the last month is that you can never tell where the work will be coming from. I had related signing up for AdWords on Google, and I did get some calls from people because of the ad, but none of those projects ever panned out. The real work simply came out of the blue (or actually came to me by reputation and networking).

That “simple uploading of a website” that I reported in my last blog entry turned into a complete site redesign, since the site had been hosted by a company that placed its own proprietary coding into the pages, so there was no way to just upload the site. As with most people, Grace (the woman I was working with on the project) didn't understand the complexity of web design or how radically it differs from print design. The result of our efforts together is the new website for World Musics Initiative, a nonprofit group that not only gets music programs into the schools, but helps teach musical diversity, as well. The group had gone dormant over the past few years, so hopefully the new website will help to reinvigorate their program.

The salon in Arcadia, which I also wrote about last entry, was a very interesting experience, and I got a pretty good haircut. The man I’m dealing with called the next week to say his sister had died and he had to fly out to attend her funeral, so I've allowed for some grieving time before I jump back in with a website proposal (I’ll be calling him tomorrow about that). He’s in his 70s or 80s and isn’t very tech savvy. Part of my job will be getting some sort of e-mail connectivity into his shop, because he has no computer there now (though he does have one at home).

Networking breakfast with chambers of commerce.

I’ve also been busy going to the monthly breakfasts and lunches hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, and have gotten some contacts there, though nothing that's panned out into work. Still, it’s good to be seen, and it’s good to become recognized by business owners who are involved in the community. The more people who know about me, the likely referrals are to come my way.

But the big news is, about two weeks ago I got an e-mail from Deeann, the woman who was Art Director at The Hollywood Reporter while I worked there. She’s working free-lance now, as well, and she wanted to know if I would like to work on a project she had going. BUT OF COURSE!

It turned out she’s doing a redesign of the American Society of Cinematographer's handbooks for their publisher, and she wanted to have me do the charts and tables that accompanied the text. There are 161 of them in total, and some of them are real bears. Add to this the fact that they are currently in Quark and I am converting them into InDesign, and things get really interesting. This will keep me busy for a couple of weeks, I'm sure, and put a significant amount into the coffers of the business. It’s just the income boost I needed, and having the ASC on my client list isn’t too shabby, either. (Now all I have to do is build a client list and put it up on my website).

I’m also consulting with a woman here in town, an acupuncturist who's expanding her clinical practice to include a holistic approach to wellness. She’s planning on renaming her business, developing a new logo and website, the whole nine yards. No contract signed yet, but I’m hoping this will be my first really big local job.

Steve is still at Pearce Plastics, still counting the days before he can officially retire and get some part-time work instead of working a 40-hour week. That won’t be for at least a year, but hopefully my business will be strong enough by then that he can take it easy…and maybe do some of my marketing for me!

So that’s about it for now. I really should be getting back to those charts, and getting ready for work tomorrow. Hope this finds everyone well and happy.

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.

The Tyranny ofThemes 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.

Suspension Bridges ofMadison 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.