A new blog/e-zine debuted yesterday that is focused on providing content to the in-house design community. Appropriately named The In-HOWse Designer Blog, it is being underwritten by HOW with AIGA national participating as a partner in the venture.
http://invangelist.wordpress.com/
As a black person, I was never really bowled over by the prospect of black history month. It might be me, but I don’t need to designate a month to remember my history. I always figured it was for others to know and remember. So, I’ve always been proud, yet low-key about it, specifically trying to color outside the lines on the official designation.
Perhaps the goal with all that ws just enough to get me to think about race (I do that ll the time). But perhaps, another goal was to talk about it (something I almost never do). Except for now …
August of 2008, I heard an interview on Fresh Air (www.freshair.npr.org) perhaps the best interview show in media where the guest was David Simon one of the creators of The Wire which has been called one of the best television shows on television. In this interview, Simon talked about working with black actors and I share this because, the design industry, much like Hollywood has what may be an aversion to racial diversity. That comment is perhaps debatable—and I won’t—suffice to say, I’ve heard people, companies say “we’re committed to diversity” but to look at them or to see their actions, you’d never know.
Like Todd Henry says the founder of the Accidental Creative website and podcast (www.accidentalcreative.com) says: “Knowing something doesn’t change you, implementing it does.”
So anyway, David Simon says in the interview: “There’s a wonderful reservoir of African-american talent, there really is, and… they’re not working, there’s just not enough work. nobody’s writing the parts. What they are writing is very marginal, at best, and so there’s a natural hunger out there. I always bristle when people on shows that are supposedly ‘race-neutral’ … and they’re casting. And they come out ‘lily-white’ and you ask them about it and they say “they’re just isn’t that level of talent—you know—among black actors. I hear that [and] I get furious.”
I bring this up because how can I tie in The Wire (my favorite show), NPR, design and diversity into one post. But the takeaway I had from that is that collectively perhaps the will just isn’t there fully to embrace diversity in many facets—at least not meaningfully.
Things are changing. And not just the obvious. Attending the Robert Bringhurst lecture last fall, I heard Robert Bringhurst talk about the ever-marching loss of indigenous languages as societies become extinct and the world gets smaller. He quoted the loss of language, that happens when societies such as the Inuit become extinct as their people become less and less and often the young are no longer exposed tot he rigors of their own language—or are inclined to use it on a daily basis—making the language more of an educational pursuit than a facet of life. He showed how even myriad species of birds have instinctual and particular differences among their own species, even if the same is located as little one mile away. The difference glaring to birds in the song they are taught and learn to sing throughout their lives and how that song is reflection of the careful mixture of environment, experience, and nature.
It’s very similar with us people. Oh, how different is the Baltimore experience from the eyes of a lifelong Baltimorean as it compares to the newcomer. Same with each of our experiences on a day-to-day basis.
So when trying to connect with one another group of any type, our ability to tap into another group’s background is so valuable and not to be overlooked. That takes work and irrespective of color or background the goal of design to develop symbolism and translate experience in ways that resound and emanate and of course ultimately communicate the facts as well as the experience. Knowing all this, we needn’t be accusatory, but simply realize it’s good business to do the work of connecting with the diverse stock of cultures that our society is becoming.
With all the snow and cold, I was recently treated to about 1 hour of channel surfing. On the Sundance Channel I saw a segment in a documentary series called The Day Before. Through all the self-importance and posturing, I thought about how often and similar the process of cramming is for design practitioners of the graphic kinds as well as fashion.
I saw the end of one on Fendi and (Karl Lagerfeld) and the beginning of another (Jean Paul Gaultier). The self-importance of the Fendi documentary was about as much as I could stand with my fingers ready to turn the channel, but the Gaultier documentary was interesting in its ability to capture the craziness in front of a fashion show.
What struck me is how little was actually done ahead of the day before!!! Gaultier’s whole collection was rounded together in the last 24 hours. What is it about the zen of the deadline?
This has been on my mind for about a quarter since I’ve been working with a MICA flex class on assignments that—while modified—were an assignment that I received and was given 24 hours to complete. When I got the assignment I was happy of course to be paid, but then as soon as I got off the phone with the client, the first thing that happens is I begin hearing that ’24’ tick-down, knowing that the clock is ticking…. And how for the first five hours I dinked around testing various compositions, then eating and then thinking: “I’ve got to have something definitive going into the next day”… I didn’t. But, we’ve heard this story before: a little head-clearing and voila comps which went to the client just slightly after time.
Flashback to the present. What remains of that story is some decent work and the buzz of the deadline. When communicating all this to the students, I’ve focused on their creating the internal process of milestone completions that allow one to revisit and rebuild—making the design better and better as one goes along. All that works out on paper, but the “fog of war” happens and the process gets muddled.
For instance, the snow interfered with six-hour class that was the working time that gave the students deadlines BEFORE the deadline. For some this was a help, for others it was a hindrance. More time to ponder became more time wasted. I saw a documentary where a design firm developed thirty-five prototypes of a chair design before presenting it to the client and wanted to impart this level of preparation to the students, if only to prove to them that, everything doesn’t have to be a seat-of-the-pants design process.
On the other hand sometimes those iterations become the inspiration that comes together in the end. It’s all down to varying experiences and varying processes. The key is to know your process.
An example of that is the difference between the way Apple releases products and Google releases products.
Apple’s emphasis is built on hyper-preparation and testing, perhaps fueled by their failures of the late nineties (think Newton pad). On the other hand Google often can’t release something fast enough to get it to a beta stage that can then be reworked and made better. Apple rarely does this. And anytime Apple had to revisit something, it was under the prospect of negative reaction—think back to the switch to OS X or the switch to USB and firewire and the blowback that Apple received.
Google’s not found the same level of objection, often releasing products at beta (Gmail is a prime example) which then was slowly introduced to the masses.
In an article on innovation in Fast Company, Doug Merrill, a Google executive said, “The marvel of Google is its ability to instill creative fearlessness”… A book I have on creativity called Fearless Creating says that we should “understand the difference between working and working deeply.” The bottom line is no matter what approach we use, it ultimately has to be about our ability to tap into that stored creativity reserve, preserve and cultivate some of that and make it useful for someone to digest.
The world uses graphic designers in order to break down its contents into manageable chunks… Chunks we can use without much elaboration. And so it is that I’m thinking about one of the most ubiquitous and yet misleading of icons: the weather graphic.
Weather graphics: everybody who reports the weather has them. Yet, the weather is wrong all the time and it’s because we live in a world where every detail is so managed that the question is whether we should eliminate the weather graphic completely. Obviously, we can’t (or won’t) because even a Stalinist era approach to ban graphics wouldn’t work and we need to see how much of a chance it is that it might rain or how and when the sun might come out. It’s just become one of these things I only trust with a healthy level of skepticism (coincidentally like one would trust communist-era news).
The graphic is so imperfect in saying whether it will rain or snow, when, and exactly how hard and for what duration. Go out one day and get a harder than drizzle and the next and just short of a downpour yet, I might still see the same three drops under the same gray cloud. Or even better, the year I did daily bike rides I only needed a 1 hour and 15 minute window to stay dry even on a day where it rained for two inches, I would never have counted on a simple graphic to tell me that. …I mean that’s what we’re talking about here: how much precipitation and for how long. Let’s dispense with the niceties: I don’t care if it’s sunny (that’s my default)… unless it hasn’t been for a while.
I care exactly when the rain is coming. Exactly. Precisely!! The national television weather graphic just doesn’t do it anymore… Once, I went on vacation and the weather said a hurricane was going to hit where I was. Did I pack up? No. I spent the next 24 hours tracking the specific trajectory of the storm, where it was and was not going to land. The storm tracked far south of where I was to make a difference. Is it the fault of the weather guy? Or my own expectation that there be simplistic meaning built into a weather forecast that can be answered with a “yes” or “no” answer.
Or has life changed to the point where detailed weather is needed? Let’s say you work indoors or work outdoors and dress the part what difference does it make.
One of the biggest transitions to adulthood was not caring what the weather did because I was only spending the ten hours out of the house going to work, being at work or coming home. Not fun, no matter whether it was raining or not. Or it seems to me that if you are a farmer, unless it’s raining in sheets, you’re kinda happy it’s raining, so that simple graphic works just fine.
It just seems things have changed. 4 x 4’s crave those challenging conditions. We need specificity to plan our lives perhaps to a degree that I can’t remember. Nowadays, street by street doppler, is the way I go, but it’s not simple I have to actually think about the weather.
It’s such a complex world. I need a graphic to display that!!!
Recently, The New York Times released a bulletin announcing that they will charge frequent site users for access to stories. The announcement went on to comment that paying customers will have unfettered access to the site. This approaches the aging question of how to make the web “pay for itself” is now being taken up by perhaps the flagship newspaper.
The move to web exposes the difficulty inherent in turning impressions into interested people and interested people into paying customers. Web hits don’t necessarily translate into web dollars. Patrick Coyne, editor-in-chief of Communication Arts, resounded this viewpoint on his visit to Baltimore back in April saying that the American public has been conditioned to believe that content is free.
The view that content should be free is fairly insidious. It means that you’ll put up with the nightly news being dominated by content you either could not care about or don’t care to see. Perhaps you’d like to know a bit about India-Pakistan relations—just a bit—but instead the news will heap on more gossip with a break-in of the latest in Entertainment under the guise of news. The news, for all intents and purposes, is free and often, they’ll support that they’re delivering the news you want to know. Perhaps it’s a worthwhile event to telecast three hours of snow coverage, because we need to see that we shouldn’t be out in it trying to go places.
All this obfuscates the fact that developing real news is not free. A story about Kabul written in New York is much different than the same story written in Kabul. There’s costs of sending people, training them, keeping them secure, connecting them with sources and that’s just to get there. They’ll need to break stories, embed with troops and all that for people to get an authentic look at what could be glossed over in another story in a back page news story.
This notion that content is not free is not held in only the news business. Graphic design also suffers from the same fate very often.
This came to a head for me recently (not in thought, but in figuring I’d say something about it) in a meeting where the notion of $50 logos and a stance against it was being discussed. As far as I can tell, there is no official stance against a $50 logo and I’m sure there should be.
What I do know is that designers who take themselves seriously look long and hard at projects with that type of budget—even students. I mean, what school takes anything other than money to allow you to enroll at their institution? Does your plumber take color palette suggestions in exchange for working an eight-hour day on your main-line backup? Well, why should designers not reflect the real value of their work? Because there are a lot of them is not adequate as an answer.
Design, in its ubiquity, is perceived as a commodity. As commodities grow (land, oil, water) they have the potential to be less expensive—a law of supply and demand. Yet, the right piece of land or the purified water or the properly processed gasoline have a value in that they are (or can be) solutions developed for specific challenges. Design is the same way.
A designer hired just to be a pair of hands needs to keep her resumé fresh. Because as the need shifts, the work expectation will shift or the compensation will shift. When the design is considered a commodity, the client may decide—and perhaps rightfully so—I need this cheaper now. (If you get that call, the handwriting is on the wall). If the design firm used was not effective at distinguishing the client or highly efficient at satisfying the client challenge, that gap in value will exist. Instead of competing on the value that firm can bring to the client, they’ll be hoping that the client doesn’t question the costs or reduce the budget without reducing the expectation.
To avoid this, designers need to position themselves with projects that are not cut from cookie tins. Instead, developing projects that have a laser-accurate reflection on solving client needs in some fashion or form. Whether it’s the in-house designer showing a high-level of specialty knowledge for the product of the corporate client or the solo designer showing a high-level of verve to showcase an initiative, these clients pay for what they figure they can’t get elsewhere. These designers and writers work to understand the client’s need from the inside out.
Remember not to think that the relationship ends at what you did and what you got paid, but constantly over-reach their expectation—if not to satisfy your creative needs, but to show them what’s possible. Done consistently, they’ll think twice before don’t shop the big in-house project with outside vendors (we can so do that!) or “forget” that your firm does something special that they never ask for. All that is worth more than $50.
A $50 logo has a hard time paying for the resources put into it—project management, SWOT analysis, even the time that it might take to do an estimate. While a business’s budget is on some level a true reflection of the expected capitalization of the communication goal (a teen with a yard-cleaning business v. an internet start-up), the business has the right to set its budget. Yet, it doesn’t have the right to declare that the venture be taken seriously. Instead of outlawing stupendously low budgets, let’s stick with making sure designers aren’t taking them seriously.
In a round-up of things on my mind, I’ll talk a little about things in the world and not necessarily centered on design.
I read an engaging article in The Chronicle Review entitled Faux Friendship: Networked with everyone, we no longer know how to connect with anyone. by William Deresiewicz. This engaging article will help add to your own internal discussion of whether you should friend that neighbor with whom you barely speak or have you ready to unplug yourself from the whole Facebook experience. The article is a bit long and, get this, not really “Facebook-able.” The article’s heft is the kind of thing you have to simply sit down and read.
As the title implies, the article purports that in this disconnected world, we no longer have the friendship connections that we used to have in the past. Even the article points out that Carrie and Samantha of Sex In The City fame had come and gone before tweeting and facebooking were vogue. Well, maybe some of that stuff will make it into the Sex In The City Sequel. Anyway, the article does an etymology of what friends are now and how vastly different it is from the “old days”—and by old days, think Spartacus.
Besides reaming on the narcissistic tendencies of some of us on Facebook, the article takes readers on a journey that illustrates the mutations—for good and bad of friendship—that combined with our increasing social and geographic movement, we have developed and created almost an avatar of a life by having our Facebook pages represent some facsimile of our personalities… Our friends, representing some slice of whom we think we are.
I write about Haiti, not from a particular point-of-view or an eye to get you to take part in some action, since the situation is nowhere near settling with estimates in the range of hundreds of thousands perished and scores more injured. All I ask is that you donate at least a thought or two to Haiti. You’re creative. Leave it open-ended and you, the collective wisdom of readers and thinkers will come up with your own, self-sized, open-source solution that can help Haiti whether that be something as big as a prayer, or as little as a donation or meaningful as actually remembering the people AFTER the spotlight has left them … whatever.
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:
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.
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.”
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.
