Posts Tagged ‘design’

Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steamship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ri­cane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­a­tively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­ur­days off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glis­tened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally fig­ured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in worka­holi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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I get asked ques­tions about my tat­toos a lot. It some­times strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I sup­pose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.

A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a busi­ness, I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade. (And actu­ally, I haven’t been tat­tooed since—I’ve run out of strategic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What hap­pens if your busi­ness tanks?” was the pop­ular question.

Of all the tat­toos I’ve had done, I’m fur­thest from regret­ting this one. Admit­tedly, my busi­ness didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much dif­fer­ence if it had. It’s impos­sible to start a busi­ness without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tat­tooing my logo to my shoulder was no cra­zier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to them­selves. (And it’s cer­tainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on them­selves. As far as I can tell, my busi­ness will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)

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Bad clients are noto­rious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror sto­ries like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad clients that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good clients. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great clients, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other fac­tors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trou­ble­some Clients receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their project. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client expe­ri­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your project as you do? Here, a few tips culled directly from my Dream Clients:

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I’ve really been focusing on trying to build my busi­ness these days, and I’m lucky in that it’s been working, for the most part. Of course, this means that I keep run­ning out of time for all those fancy things I like so much, like sleeping and drinking martinis.

It’s reached the point at which I’m so busy trying to stay on top of all my projects that I don’t have any time to do the busi­ness side of things, and I’ve totally stalled as far as growth is concerned.

So, it’s time, once again, for the con­trol freak in me to take a back­seat, and sit qui­etly by while I hire someone.

Tell your friends! Here’s what I’m looking for.
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Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent clients, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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I love type, but I find that most days, I don’t get much of a chance to really play with it like I like to. I miss the luxury of school (any­thing that costs more than a pair of Louboutins is a luxury), where we’d be given typog­raphy assign­ments that let us play around with let­ters and words, cre­ating inter­esting pat­terns with them.

Typo­graph­ical arrange­ment for the NSLC’s annual report. I made up this fact. They tell me that the number is totally insane.

I’ve been wanting to get back into doing things like this, mostly as cre­ative exer­cises to keep me inter­ested in design. Of course, cre­ative exer­cises in and of them­selves are also some­thing of a luxury; it seems like that pesky work keeps get­ting in the way.

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Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash deci­sion. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­e­bra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling set­tled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately destroyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a mas­sive change, as I’ve always been prone to iden­tify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and stereo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­i­nitely an impul­sive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bi­na­tion avail­able to me. Seri­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up destroyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see our­selves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

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Lately, I’ve found myself giving a sub­stan­tial amount of design feed­back to non-designers. While I always main­tain that you ought to leave design to pro­fes­sionals, some­times this just isn’t fea­sible for one reason or another. So, in the inter­ests of public ser­vice (pret­ti­ness making the world a better place, and whatnot), I’d like to offer up some sug­ges­tions that should improve your design across the board.

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So if you’ve been any­where within a ten-mile radius of me any­time in the last week and a half, you’re prob­ably well aware of The Big Card Project. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valen­tines, thinking it’d be a a fun little project that’d get me away from the com­puter, make me feel more cre­ative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumb­nail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketch­book because things invari­ably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basi­cally, I’m just trying to get the com­po­si­tion right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy worka­holic per­fec­tionist with an insom­niac streak a mile wide when­ever I get really pas­sionate about a project. My little lark of a project kept me up late, made an utter war­zone of my apart­ment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­men­ta­tion. I spent for­ever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stand­alone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally set­tled (grudg­ingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­ple­Viewer plugin.

Of course, after spending for­ever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth hap­pened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­ti­vated itself without my noticing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­ple­Viewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an alter­na­tive that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­lifrey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll rec­og­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gallery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­ple­viewer, you were fan­tastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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