providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

Helpful Web Site tells you if you have Swine Flu

I suspect the CDC has a different take, but this one was straight and to the point:

doihaveswineflu.org/

Thanks to @petermeister for the tip.

Labels: humor

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4.29.2009

Which workers spend the most time working at home?

Turns out it's arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media people. About 55% of our total weekly work hours are spent working from home (or from an office on a home-based property, one would assume). Not really a surprise, but still interesting to know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is tracking such things.

A few takeaway points from this data: It looks like there's an institutional bias against letting salaried creatives work from home, compared to other service professions whose self-employed hours-worked-from-home is above 16%. Personal care, management, and sales-related workers who are wage-earners and salaried employees all get to work from home more than their salaried brethren in the legal, business & financial, and creative professions. I know that when I was a salaried employee there was strong resistance to allowing creatives the freedom and flexibility of working ex-office. Granted, that was in the late '90s, but it appears that trend has stuck around well into this decade.

The other point is how much time self-employed workers aren't working at home. Nearly 45 percent of the time, creatives are somewhere else. Where? Client offices, off-site meetings, research, and vendor locations are likely candidates. And I am wondering how many of these self-employed workers are in-house contractors, who, while self-employed, have to show up at a client's office and work there.

Here's my take on the chart from the BLS. You can also download a CC-licensed print-quality PDF of it here as well.

Thanks to Planet Money's Laura Conaway for twittering about this data!

Labels: art, design, information graphics, productivity, work

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4.28.2009

Initial design sketches of our future studio, and musings about "home-working"

Alex over at the Shedworking blog has posted a link to some initial sketches I did when we started thinking about building a separate studio space for Notchcode. He's tracking the progress of our work, which I'll admit motivates us even more to keep things rolling forward.

I wanted to mention that for graphic designers working from your home (or in our case, from just behind it) makes a lot of sense; any creative professional needs to craft a space for working that suits their creative process and methodology. Every creative is different, and is motivated differently; it's hard to get that same vibe in any kind of a structured office, no matter how creative-friendly the organization is (although I've seen it done well at some agencies and in-house divisions). That being said, Alex's blog is a great resource for people looking to relocate their work (creative or otherwise) closer to home. I'd also recommend the Unclutterer blog as a nice companion read to Shedworking, too.

Labels: advice, architecture, creativity, process, productivity, small business

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4.21.2009

Sarah Wu: Hire Her Before Your Competition Does

Ach! I thought my friends would all escape the recession unscathed. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Sarah Wu, recently married, is also now recently laid-off. Don't let her talents go to waste!

From Sarah:

The dot com and post-911 bubble bursts didn't get me, but I couldn't outrun the recession of '09! As the most productive product strategist you'll meet with success at the fastest-growing technology companies in Colorado, I'm ready for a new Product Management or Product Marketing challenge. But are you ready for me? On Twitter, DM @sarney or find me on LinkedIn.


You better hire her before your competition does.

Labels: advice, marketing, productivity, social networking, software, work

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For those of you who think print is dead:

Did a little research on search terms over at Google Trends yesterday. Think print is still dead?

"Print" is three and a third times more searched than "interactive". I admit that "print" may be a bit more broad a category, as it isn't used as exclusively in media-lingo as "interactive" is, but it's worth a little more research. I'm sure there's lots out there. Send it to me for my edification.

"Graphic design" and "web design" were closer, as were "advertising" and "interactive".

Note that these results are limited to searches within Colorado, over the last 12 months.

Labels: printing, web design

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4.20.2009

How to use MarsEdit on a Joomla SIte

I love MarsEdit. Quote possibly one of the nicest offline blogging tools out there for the Mac. And it's always played well with most of the blogging platforms out there (I'm using it right now to write this post to my blogger-based--but notchcode-hosted--blog). A tool like MarsEdit allows me to compose blog posts without having to be online, using some blogging site's wonky WYSI(almost)WYG interface. I can even tag articles, select posting times, add media to posts, and so on.

I'm making a move to update my website, using Joomla. Figured it was time to get rid of the old-and-busted tables-based layout that I put up at notchcode.com over a weekend in 2001. Joomla is a nice, free, and extensible Content Management System (CMS) that I develop about 70% of my clients' sites in, and decided it was time to drink my own kool-aid and use it for my own site.

One of the main issues I had, however, is that there didn't seem to be any built-in support to post articles to a Joomla-based blog from MarsEdit. A slightly-longer-than-normal search of the internet returned a solution, and I'm on my way toward a new site that allows me to still use my favorite blogging tool! Oh, internet, is there anything you can't provide an answer to?

You can read the step-by-step process of how to enable Joomla and MarsEdit to talk to each other in the RedSweater forum post here.

Labels: blogs, joomla, mac, productivity, software

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4.15.2009

Baking bread and branding are the same thing

1. It's a process. You can't do it without a formula and a set of steps that can be repeated--unless, of course, you want a result that leaves a poor taste in your mouth.


2. Too many cooks can result in a loaf that's either bland, over-thought (see below), or tries to do too much. As Peter Reinhart says, sometimes only white bread will do. Other times, you need Struan. Just decide what you're making before you start, and stick to it.


3. There are elements that are common to every recipe. Bread always requires some sort of flour. Branding always requires some sort of distilled ("milled") essence in order to digest easily and pleasantly.


4. It's repeatable. You know what to expect at each step, and what variables you can modify, tweak, and change in order to make it a unique loaf.


5. Both bread and branding require some time of rest. Dough needs to rise. Research and analysis needs to be assimilated into the big picture. Concepts need time to ferment if you want them to fit better into your project.


6. You can overbake them. Knead the dough too much. Overanalyze. Over focus-group. At some point, you have to have the wisdom to know it's ready to come out of the oven.

Labels: advice, branding, bread

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4.13.2009

Twitter enables the self-assembling group

From a nice summary of how Twitter is more than a tool for inanity:

"Twitter reverses the notion of the group," said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. "Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles."

I have used Twitter recently to help me brainstorm concepts, get feedback on ideas, and see where a client's market (or competition) is heading. Before you dismiss it as just seeing what your friends had for breakfast this morning, see what it can do for you as a business.

Labels: creativity, marketing, small business, social networking, twitter

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4.07.2009

When Good Data Gets a Bad Graphic

Cool Infographics posted this chart showing the national debt over the last 33 years. The data are accurate, and the scaling is ok, which makes all of the things that are horrible about how the data are displayed even more relevant.

I can understand the relevance of noting which party was in control of the White House (although a more relevant item might be who was in charge of Congress) but the commentary (""another BUUSH in the White House!") is juvenile, at best. The typography doesn't help much either, if your point is to try and present evidence in the hopes of swaying the opinion of someone who isn't already familiar with the data.

Cool Infographics makes some of these points as well, and notes that

This is a great example of data being visualized with a specific agenda in mind. Obviously, this is a chart framed to make Republicans look bad, and Democrats look good.

...which may be true, but I would argue that information presented in a more objective visual environment would actually make a stronger case for the author's advocated point, rather than the partisan interpretation shown here.

For example: here is the total national debt load, ported into the simplest chart possible:

This is a different representation than the year-by-year increases in the National Debt; however, by showing the total debt (not just the increase for a given year) it places each year's contribution to the Debt into a broader context. Even in this simple representation, partisans could still visually show how the total debt load for the country increased more quickly under the current administration.
Even in this representation there is some unintentional bias: the "floor" of the chart starts at a not insignificant $400 Billion dollars. Granted, that's far below the $9 trillion shown at the end of the series, but it does lead the reader to the assumption that four hundred billion dollars is akin to no debt at all. A better interpretation of the data might look more like this:

Granted, that's not much of a difference. But the visual display now shows that $400 billion in context with the possible floor of Zero debt!


Note: I've had this post sitting around since last August, waiting to find time to create a better version of this. So, if anyone wants to pretty-up this chart (in other words, make it even more visually compelling via some best practices), shoot it over to me and I'll include it in a revised post here. One place to start might be to differentiate between which party had control over the congressional and executive branches during the timespan of the chart....

Labels: information graphics, visual information

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4.06.2009

The problem with incremental improvements in visual interfaces

Check out these three versions of interface styles I have running on my mac. Most notable is the panels' textures changing....

Labels: aesthetics, interface

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What's in a good design proposal

I've been writing a heck of a lot of proposals this month, and probably have written hundreds over the last ten years. Regardless of the scope of work, the type of project, or the size of the client or client's budget, there are some key things that you should look for in any design proposal, and they're all based on setting expectations--on both sides of the table.

What are you doing?

Spell out broadly, then specifically, then in excruciating detail, exactly what you're doing for the client.

How are you going to do it?

Discuss the process; how are you going to get from step one to step three?

When will it get done?

List a specific schedule for each step, including things the client is responsible for. Make sure they know they are an important part of the process by including them in the planning process for a schedule.

How much will it cost?

I'm of the opinion that the client likes to see the project fees broken down in some way, whether it's by job function (design/production/copywriting/etc.) or by project phase (research/conceptualization/layout/revisions/etc.). This helps them--and those above them who have to approve budgets, perhaps--to get a handle on where all the money (read:effort and time) is going.

Of course, this method is value-based vs. hourly-rate agnostic; you can place the full value of your concept work in the "Concept" row, or you can simply list a number based on your hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours you plan on spending on that task. I won't go nto detail here, as I've posted about it before, but design is a value-adding process, and I would advocate charging based on the value the client will get out of a certain function of your work, as opposed to merely the hourly rate you value your time at.

What will the client get?

List explicitly what the client will receive at the end of the project. In my case, it's the right to use a certain design for a certain application for a certain amount of time, for example. That, and the physical or electronic deliverables they receive comprise the total deliverable package they pay for.

Terms

Make sure you use a good, vetted set of terms. The AIGA and the Graphic Artists' Guild are good places to start; your lawyer is a good place to end.

Sign on the dotted line

Make sure you and your client sign the agreement. It is a contract, after all.


Photo via flickr by A National Acrobat

Labels: advice, b2b, graphic design, process, small business, work

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4.03.2009

If you aren't creating to communicate, what's the point?

...oh, yeah, THAT'S WHY.

Just proving that once again, artists and designers, etc. need to read Cat and Girl every time they have the chance. After all, this is the woman who brought you Future Corpses of America.

Labels: advice, art, comics, creativity, graphic design

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4.01.2009

I was born a poor Kraft Single...

My posts on Twitter today will serialize my rise as one of Denver's best graphic designers--despite my being merely a grilled-cheese sandwich.

I hope you'll join us for this exciting tale.

Labels: creativity, graphic design

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Foolin'

You know what day it is, people?

The giveaway here is that these guys would use GoDaddy ;) Hopefully they're just saving up extra content for tomorrow. Either that, or apparently it's a day off.

Labels: denver egotist

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