Episode 8: Turf Wars

Have we gotten to the point now where we're blatantly and brutally stealing each other's clients, and are we accepting it as "common practice"? There's an old saying, "Take it to the mattress." which refers to when two Mafia houses were about to fight, they would go buy mattresses and move their families into empty warehouses because it was no longer safe to sleep at home.

That's just not cool, and I can't see how it would be beneficial to anybody. The client gets caught up in the middle and frustrated with both parties, everyone gets angry with each other and has to hide their client lists, constantly looking over our shoulders to see who's watching...

I have many friends in my industry. Some of my best friends are web developers, graphic designers, search engine optimizers, printers, all who are freelancers or own their own businesses. We get together and talk tactics, ways we can develop our businesses, brag about the clients we've got, and so-forth, because we all know "there's enough work to go around". It's much easier, and more beneficial to us, to work together and help each other rather than spend our days paranoid and at each other's throats.

Episode 7: Find It Online

So yes, I'm back. Long story. But while I was gone, I had a chance to catch up on some reading. To my freelance graphic designers out there, I want to highly recommend The Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business. You'll find it to be an amazing reference for planning out how you do business while avoiding all the little pitfalls the rest of us have to learn the hard way. You can pick it up from Amazon.com here:

http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Business-Running-Graphic-Design/dp/0393731499

Also: Do you know where Google.com is? I'm of course assuming you do. But do you know how to use it? I get asked a lot of strange questions, and my answer is always the same. "Look it up." I'm not trying to be a jerk - I'm just trying to save my clients an unnecessary hourly consulting fee when the answer is as easily found as just typing the exact question into the Google search bar. Is this a solution for every question? No. But for the other 98% of them - well, it's really tough to come up with a question that somebody else in the world somewhere hasn't already asked (and found an answer to).

Episode 6 - No Speculations, Please

We Don’t Make Speculative Presentations

The main product of our business is ideas — creative solutions to the communications problems and opportunities facing our many clients. And good ideas — creativity — can be tough to define, or agree upon. One person’s passion is often another’s poison. So it’s no wonder that potential clients often ask us to take a project on speculation. That is, to try out our creative product in much the same way they may try out other types of products before purchasing.

Unfortunately, we must turn down such projects, as do most design firms, marketing firms, and advertising agencies. I'll do my best to explain why doing so actually makes us a better, more stable and reliable designer for you to do business with.

Episode 5 - Back It Up

Remember when my computer was down not so long ago? And I rushed it into the "Emergency Room" at the Apple Store? ...yeah. Good times. Turns out my hard drive was toast, so they replaced it with a new one. No big deal - I had a back up. Right? ...wrong. I "thought" I had a back up, but it turns out that failed on me a few weeks before my hard drive, resulting in the loss of nearly a year's worth of designs.

The moral of this story? Back up your stuff. Not just kinda-sorta, or "I have an external drive, so that's good enough." I'm telling you it's not enough. Especially if you work with client files, or have any sort of irreplaceable data on your hard drive. You should have at least 2 fail-safe backups.

An External Hard Drive
An Off-Site Backup Service (I recommend www.mozy.com)
And Backup Software, designed specifically for backing up your data!

Backing up may seem expensive or a lot of hard work - but I'm telling you, it's worth your time and it's worth the investment. Take it from someone who's just lost several GIG worth of designs... Back up your stuff.

Episode 4 - The Magic Button

Sorry I'm a little late - my computer had a massive hard drive failure and I had to take it into the Apple Clinic. The folks at the Apple Genius Bar will have me back up and running in a few days. In the meantime, I had to use my laptop to record this episode, so my apologies for the weirdness in the video quality.

Also - I've switched over to mDialog for my video podcasting, which now puts me up on iTunes. I hope you subscribe - I'm really excited to be available as a podcast from iTunes now.

Okay, on to the topic at hand. The other day I came across a freelance graphic designer's ad that said boldly "I design it right the first time, every time." and while it's probably not what he meant, it did stir up a pet peeve of mine. So I thought I'd talk about it. Graphic Designers are artists. We're not much different from other artists. We use pens and pencils to sketch, we're picky about the paper we use - we just happen to use a mouse instead of a paintbrush to create a visual message and emotion. Our works are based on our interpretations of your instructions, and a whole lot of our creativity and imagination.

What this means is we very rarely, if ever, get it right on the first try. And this is no fault of yours or ours - it's simply the nature of the craft. We can't all see things exactly the same way, so we have to interpret, guess, and create. From there, we get our first "comp" or rough draft, and it's probably not exactly what you had in mind. But that's good! You see now, we have a foundation. Something to build from. You can point and say, "no, not this thing" or "move that over there" or "I had something else in mind for this and that." It's from that first comp that things really start to take shape - in the direction you want them to go. So don't get discouraged if your graphic designer can't nail it on the head on the first try.