Why Being A PowerPoint God Is Almost Completely Useless, Why We Should Be Entering The AIGA 365 and Why Design Isn’t Free (All The Time).

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

I recently posted about my experience at a freelance gig where I was the interim head of the design department at a medical technology firm and the work I did there. Most of the work was print, but like many corporate clients, much of the work consisted of consisted of things you’d never put in your portfolio, much less admit you were involved in.

Among them was the development of PowerPoint presentations for sales staff. Many designers may mention that the are proficient at PowerPoint but it’s usage as a business applications overshadows any utility for the high-end designer it seems to me… As it works out, working with these folks, I stumbled into some PowerPoint projects simply by doing other work and being around to help solve interactivity issues with the program. All of a sudden, I’m a “PowerPoint God”. When I heard this I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or take a shower.

Turns out its a little of both …

On the one hand the ability to go in and answer communications problems in a business environment is golden in picking up new business. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be saving those PowerPoints for my portfolio. But this got me to thinking about the “why are we here?” No not on earth, silly. Why are we designers? And for me and possibly you it’s a mix of things.

Take a listen to a little Seth Godin’s The Dip and you’ll muse on the value of being the best you can possibly be if you’re going to bother to design/illustrate/photograph. Secondly, this may lead to your whittling down your best you and absent that the best you in your projects that you can find. To illustrate this point, I’ll rely on Jim Collin’s book Good To Great: Why some Companies Make The Leap and Some Don’t.

The book has a theory called the HedgeHog Concept which is illustrated here:

HedgeHog Concept proposed by Jim Collins in Good To Great

Well, as this goes, the being a PowerPoint god was worth it in that it was financially valuable, but not exactly the way I’d like to be contributing to the world. Perhaps your job is similar: you’re making charts, designing brochures that meet some business function, but fall short of your passion. What does this mean? Well, pursue that passion in manageable chunks.

Find a project that’s high on passion, even if it’s short in other areas. When Michael Beirut came to UMBC late last year, he reinforced this notion: “What’s stopping you from (re)designing whatever you want?” He also said: “the only overhead to designing is [ultimately] your time.” So, if no plum design project is coming along the road—particularly in a recession, what’s the harm in taking an otherwise limited assignment and doing it the way YOU want it?

Enter a competition for no one else but yourself if, for no other reason, because design is inherently a democratic thing (as in it gains power in the voice of each individual—not a particular side of the aisle) and that voice is only heard when our best voices are actively contributing to it. So make something over and spend your time developing the craft, without worrying about the financial end of things all the time…

But until they start taking time credits at the gas pump, keep work at converting that “time” to expertise, so that you can find the nexus of the hedgehog aspirations you seek. Go from designing widget catalogs to designing—I dunno—the new J. Crew catalog. Go from highly paid PowerPoint presentations that never see the light of day in the design world to possibly re-thinking what the presentation looks like in the first place or go from taking that project that you put your passion into and parlay it into a project that pays you some dough.

Production Club Event of possible interest to AIGA Baltimore…

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Our friends at Production Club of Baltimore asked us to give this mention…

Interactive Start to Finish

From launch to performance report, learn best practices and innovative ways to implement a successful interactive marketing campaign. Topics will include: email, SEO, rich media and Google analytics.

Join guest speaker Matthew Kilmurry, Interactive Marketing Manager at Crosby Communications, for Insight, innovation and an Introspective look at e-marketing.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010
5:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Baltimore Museum of Industry
415 Key Highway
Baltimore, MD 21230

Cocktails and Light Dinner

Members: FREE as always
Non-members: $20

RSVP required for this event: events@productionclubofbaltimore.org

Quotable …

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Werner Herzog, Filmmaker: “If I opened a film school, I would make everyone earn their tuition themselves by working. Not in an office—out where there is real life. Earn it as a bouncer in a sex club or as a warden in a lunatic asylum. And travel on foot for three months. And do physical, combative sports like boxing. That makes you more of a filmmaker than three years of film school. Pura vida, as the
Mexicans say.”

Misuse of Print: Like A Law & Order Episode Ripped From The Headlines

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

One of the most prolific television series sets the stage for a story that I heard recently and figured I’d pass along. A local college has a new department that needs marcom material to have for prospective and incoming students. This unit within the school uses a printer, presumably has the pieces printed from a PowerPoint presentation and sends these pieces out for printing (color) for distribution for the students AND to “have something to show for their meetings and functions.”

Okay, I as a designer understand this. Or, at least, recognize there is little you can do about the internal pressures of “having something to show” et cetera… No problem. But recognize, there’s a crime happening here. And like that opening scene of the storied show, we can almost uncover a bunch of money being ineffectively wasted like a crime scene. (Law & Order transition chord here: blong blong!! or dum, dum!!)

Without a communications plan or a person, a guardian, who can equivocate the values of measured communications, this unit is over-spending on under-developed design pieces and I don’t need to look at ’em if they’re printing digital color packets to students who’ve already declared their intent to attend to know this.

Of course, the fact that reports CAN be printed in color is great. Digital print jobs are one of the great revolutions of the print industry allowing designed pieces to further reduce minimum runs, reducing overhead for setup despite sometimes higher per piece costs… But that’s just it: that higher per piece cost puts a cap on the value with no discernible gain on quality when a quantity can be planned for the pieces. And there again you have the issue: at what point do you have to say: “Hey, we need to just develop a capabilities brochure” and save the PowerPoints for PowerPoint or have a designer convert them to a professional piece.

I worked with a company that needed a monthly report derived from PowerPoint (I ended up becoming the “go-to” person for PowerPoint—go figure) that was about 70 pages for an internal monthly “metrics” report (keeping a closer eye on the numbers after the higher-ups did a ‘crackdown’. The report was developed from clunky slides that didn’t match between managers, not to mention departments or even 8.5 x 11 page orientations. I had to develop the report and work with an internal person to have it proofread, and then, produced. Though the reports only were printed for 20 people, they cost nearly $1000 to print. Once I suggested “Why do this section (essentially a non-color page) in color” and the response was: “Well, they like color.”

Don’t we all? But you like it that much? This report having to be done every month cost the company seemingly an more tax to brief twenty people when there were certainly other needs that could have been met had those twenty people been briefed some other way. But hey, they like color. It’s almost as if printing in Farsi was 6 cents and printing in English was 50 cents. In that case, I’d understand sticking with English, but developing reports that could have been digested in black-and-white in this case seemed as if it would save the company a ton of money to waste on executive bonuses or something. And wouldn’t you know it was a company in health care?

A proper breakdown of the communications goals “dollar-izes” the communication costs of each form of print and other media to come up with a matrix, so that companies are not spending top-dollar for a bunch of pieces that just go nicely next to the catering. This would mean that the well-designed piece could be developed for the qualified prospect needing good information. Conversely, the committed student could get an equally professional, lower-budgeted piece that informs them without breaking the bank.

Take this to the car dealer: car manufacturers don’t hand out car brochures to people not interested in buying cars—or better yet to the people in the service department. Personally, I practically had to pretend I was “thinking” about each car on the lot to get my fix of the brochures when I went for service.

In 2006, Khoi Vinh of the New York Times and www.subtraction.com came to speak at Stevenson University. One of things he maintained that the main reason for the in-house design manager was to constantly insist on the development and upholding of a measured process of communications often overlooked for one reason or another. And according to him, this meant a lot of meetings. The other, being to manage the designers. Well, if I can badly tie up the Law & Order reference: a lot of design firms, consultants and in-house managers out there are the “Jack McCoys” of their sphere of influence and you’ve gotta call the crimes out when they happen. “Hey [client], no more operation “Dumbo-drop” of the super-expensive annual report to people who don’t read past the summary!!!”

In financial times like this, when the marketing budget is likely to be more affected, because as a friend often joked, we (designers) are just “coloring by numbers” I’m reminded of the importance of the understanding that designers often bring to the table. Media discipline and communication excellence within it—often—different media notwithstanding. But at the same time, communications teams are having to do more to educate or remind departments of the value of not rushing communication pieces or unsuccessfully planning them so that they can adequately target those pieces and not spend a fortune. Too often, people equate the value of designers in what they do, when often the value of designers as communicators, is cautioning against what not to do.

The problem isn’t always with your media. The problem could be whom it’s actually going to.

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore
Properly target your communication.

Watching the kid got me thinking: Print isn’t dead… It’s dead in the wrong hands.

People always talk about the “death of print” and here’s the deal: if we’re not designing engagning audience-specific communications AND targeting the wrong people, the effort is wasted. With today’s tools that help manage a mix of print, web, face-to-face and the like, there’s little reason why we can’t make more focused and engaged communications.

Design Your Life… Or Try At least To Deconstruct It.

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Recently, I caught up on old podcasts. Every year around the holiday, I have a whole shelf full of books articles, sometimes the occasional tax form that I wait to deal with during “down”-time (I really don’t know what that is… Is there ever “downtime” i.e. when the mac takes 5 minutes to start I have to make some tea). This year, and I suspect on into the future, my shelf was also digital. I had podcasts galore to listen to. (I heard bits of Tracy Morgan on Fresh Air and you may want to check that out…) But design-related, I got to see Baltimore’s Ellen Lupton give a talk discussing the design of everyday things.

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (Paperback) Ellen and Julia Lupton

I’ve yet to read the book published in May 2009, but it’s right up my alley, behind Back of The Napkin by Dan Roam and Moneyball by Michael Lewis borrowed from a friend. (if you’re putting two and two together and reading these posts, you’d know that if I can reference the Jersey Shore punchout, I’m not reading enough.) Anyway, “reading” the podcast available as part of the sva.edu series of lectures discusses the premise of the book—a great one.

The premise is how, we as designers are poised to question the design of things in our lives. Not that only designers can do this but designers being familiar with the process of constructing and de-constructing design (I would think are poised to really take hold in questioning our world) though the book is positioned to a general market which I think is great, because in this burgeoning world where everyone thinks they can design a fashion line, everyone could use a discussion on the design of “things”.

One curious moment in the podcast was Ellen’s observation of why so many pillows on the hotel bed? More than anything the podcast id two things: made me want to read the book and make me ask about the “everyday decisions” that people make—in this case couples.

My wife and I are a test case in this regard. I’ve been a coffee-drinker for about 15 years now. As a kid, my only reason for even looking in coffee’s direction is to assess how much like hot chocolate I could make it. Well, as an adult, realizing that the hot chocolate pushed on the store shelves is a tired hack of what is better found in premium locations, coffee became the choice du jour (good coffee nowadays seems so much more available).

Recently, we had a difference of opinion over two very mundane household products: the coffemaker and the wine opener. I don’t know what most couples do in this instance, but in ours two coffeemakers exist side-by-side and get used based on setting.

My items are the plain ones. Hers are the intricate, elaborate ones… The ones that are fixtures in catalogs that may come around this time of year. All this boiled down to a philosophy that I have about products: don’t get much more than will break and get something that even if it “breaks” it still works. For instance, here’s a photo of a coffeemaker that had been in our house. this is three coffeemakers ago!!! Why on earth do they break? And then on the morning and as much as the week afterward, I feel like the Resistance making coffee on-board that ship in the Matrix.

The wine opener is the same way. I understand because it makes it easier for my wife to open a bottle, but outside of that, I resent the plug being into the wall and I expect the wine opener to pay its share of the bill.

As for my coffee press… simple enough. No alarm clock, no filter, just me and the coffee and a little work. Same with the standard wine opener you’d expect the server at your favorite restaurant to have. (They open the bottle so quickly, I just had to learn to make it that easy on myself: kinda reveals my priorities, huh?). But to analyze this even more, it even goes to things I buy:

• Not the latest iPod or iPhone Reason: I went for a bike ride and the phone I had at the time Motorola Q got caught in a 45 minute rainstorm despite being told on television no rain was imminent. (Wife said otherwise and I’ve yet to live that down). So, I’d be out such and such dollars and as it seems a massive chunk of productivity.

• Solid state stereos with no AUX channel… Just think if you lived in the 8-track days and the stereos changed each time and it didn’t die, it just became something you could no longer use ’cause the whole world changed around you how terrible that would feel. Realistically, if the component at least has an AUX panel you’ll be able to feel it music no matter how far into the future the thing goes—even if say the CD player stopped working.

Cars with needless electronics… I heard this on Cartalk once: “After 1990, the amount of electronics that are installed into cars increased dramatically”. In some cases that’s good: enhanced fuel consumption, better engine timing and less emissions. On the other hand, it means mucho dinero when you’ve got a engine diagnostic issue. I know I must’ve bought somebody a boat after my wife had a Honda, a Honda (like the one in Pulp Fiction) of all cars that went in for service (I won’t say where) and came out with the engine light on and the radiator cap not screwed on tight.

The latter issue caused drama on the return trip from Canada, but that light ended up being on the rest of the time we had the car… They couldn’t fix it. It was like a terminal illness: Decent car whose life was “shortened”. Certainly that precipitated not only bad feelings over the cost of “fixing” it (although I’m handy, our household is in a let’s say “detente”—a la the Cosby Show where Claire wouldn’t “let” Heathcliff work on anything—where I often defer against working on her things just in case something went wrong. it’s one thing to have a “bad” mechanic work on your stuff, a whole ‘nother thing to live with’em.)

But, personally this dilemma has worked its way into my own vehicular situation. I own a ’72 Karmann Ghia, which is like an Audi TT built from the frame of Herbie The Lovebug—all good times and looks, no real speed. No electronics other than the radio and lights. it’s great, but also a car that needs to be tuned every season and difficult to manage without any handiness… Also, I have a ’99 Audi with all the comforts of the modern day. What does this mean? Sometimes going in for service, yet rebelling and fixing things on my own as my wallet dictates.

It leaves me with the question as to the complexity of things is both a good and bad thing, and that relates to the design of the relationships we have with them. The $35 coffeemaker that isn’t too ornate and works is a success. But that next day when it breaks, I’m like WTF? Similarly, I don’t need the style points when opening wine if I have to perpetually charge the thing. Nor, do I need the hassle of a $400 charge to re-code the electronic key for the door of the car… “I just need to get in the car!!!”

That said each of these options is an improvement, or so we thought, at some point. But at what point is too much, too much?

Behance Network …

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Good news if you’re into this kind of thing…

AIGA is in the process of migrating design portfolios to the Behance Network (www.behance.net). As an AIGA member, you get portfolio space for your projects and why not use it right? I spent the holidays migrating some of my stuff and sending other projects to the hopper… Below here is a photo from a shoot I did of the Harbor for a gala for which I was designing invitations (from the south side where the new condos are in front of the Visionary Art Museum).

Shouts out to all the AIGA Baltimore folks who use the portfolio site and use it well… Once the Behance engine gets settled in, it’ll be great and deliver your feedback to us if you’re interested. We’ll pass it along.

Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, Inner Harbor in Baltimore, MD

New Blog…

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

As part of our effort to increase reach, increase conversation about design and all things good in that respect, AIGA Baltimore will be developing a blog about Baltimore, AIGA, AIGA Baltimore, design and issues in the industry and if you read the legalese we wont be limited to that. (We need someone to actually write the legalese, by the way.) Anyway one guarantee for continued notes and news is to keep the conversation going back and forth. Let us know what you think (“that was  terrible”) or good thoughts and post ideas are welcome as well…

Holi-“DAZE” party coming Thursday, Jaunary 21, 2010!!!

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

With the holidays now over and thoughts of resolution fulling in mind, keep in mind the AIGA Baltimore Holi-“DAZE” party is coming up fast. And, aren’t you glad!? I mean there’s only so much holiday cake, episodes of Law & Order, Jersey Shore punchouts, tree decorating that can be had—even with the time off. So, let’s hit 2010 with a real smash!!!

This year’s AIGA Baltimore event will be held at the Waterfront Hotel in Fells Point (Thames Street)—the scene of great things past.

Holi-"DAZE" Invitation
Holi-"DAZE" Invitation