Posts Tagged ‘process’

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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Before I decided to become a designer, I held a whole array of jobs over the years to make my rent. I wrote for an online mag­a­zine and acted as “web­master” for a local IT com­pany during high school. I was briefly a knife salesman, before I real­ized I can’t sell any­thing. I worked at a gas sta­tion on crack alley, serving coffee from the self-serve coffee counter to very con­fused cus­tomers. I was a maid for all of an hour (before I quit). I was a crossing guard, a secu­rity guard, and the world’s fastest (and surliest) Subway employee. How­ever, by far the oddest employ­ment I’ve ever had came after my tran­si­tion to a “career”: I take my clothes off for money.

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In the interest of con­tin­uing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated projects, I’ve been taking a screen­printing class at the fan­tastic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fan­tastic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been exten­sive and it may have been more dif­fi­cult to find the moti­va­tion to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my oppor­tu­nity. With projects and to-do lists con­stantly piling up, I may oth­er­wise have aban­doned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, how­ever, meant that I needed to accept imper­fec­tions. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit per­snickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “finesse” the whole thing, and I typ­i­cally com­plain that Pho­to­shop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valu­able ten­dency in a designer (and, in fact, I sus­pect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hin­drance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Fin­ished thank you cards, each one screen­printed by hand! I’m not happy with the heart design at all–the lines are simul­ta­ne­ously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven projects are fin­ished late: while client projects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often con­tent to let my expected dead­line pass me by in favour of pro­ducing work that’s closer to “per­fect” (it’s never actu­ally per­fect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new web­site, and why my Valen­tines were barely even printed and ready to go by the four­teenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dan­gerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screen­printing class, I had no option (other than flak­i­ness, which I’m giving up as a lifestyle choice as much as pos­sible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t per­fect, telling myself that it was just a learning project, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing process is this: every­thing that looks like a fatal error to me is basi­cally invis­ible to everyone else.  (Not a major rev­e­la­tion, but some­thing I ought to con­stantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fun­da­mental flaws in the ini­tial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I pro­ceeded with the printing process, I real­ized that I hadn’t been as pre­cise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screen­printing, each colour is printed inde­pen­dently of the others, much like a tra­di­tional CMYK plate-printing process that I learned about in school, but never actu­ally had a chance to wit­ness.) Accord­ingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the reg­is­tra­tion often didn’t line up per­fectly, and there was an overlap.

Then some­thing funny hap­pened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to reg­ister and mea­sure the place­ment of every single print to ensure a per­fect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw cau­tion utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tantrums, I care­fully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actu­ally dis­cov­ered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Who­ever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the hand­made process anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mis­takes. (Are you lis­tening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mis­takes are often the most inter­esting part of a piece of work, and they so often gen­erate new ideas and con­cepts that might oth­er­wise for­ever remain undis­cov­ered (gravity, nylon, peni­cillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And espe­cially when some­thing is hand­made, part of its appeal lies in its imper­fec­tions: signs of the inher­ently flawed human touch. So often the aes­thetics of error (cracks in pave­ment, burned-out build­ings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more inter­esting, alive, and vibrant than the sterility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to every­thing else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

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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I usu­ally use Scrip­ta­l­i­cious for my AJAX needs, but I’m working on a set of AJAX-ified forms on a web­site that’s already using jQuery, so I figure hey, it can’t be that hard to change over! Twenty min­utes later, cue the loud cursing and growling. I mean, the whole thing seems far more pow­erful, but every time I’ve wanted to start imple­menting it, I’ve been turned off by how com­plex it seems to do simple things. (Like slide down a div window, which I hope to have accom­plished before I turn 30. On a side note, I’ve been feeling old because I turned 25 today, until my little sister sent me a mes­sage saying that I’m “plenty young, for a pres­i­dent!” Which I sup­pose is tech­ni­cally true, so I don’t feel quite so washed up anymore.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced headache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being dis­tracted by the gor­geous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of pro­gram­ming. I do so love pro­gram­ming tuto­rials written for designers. Thank you, pretty colourful website!

Have I men­tioned how much I love my clients? I checked the mailbox yes­terday and found a box full of deli­cious choco­late muffins (thank good­ness cus­toms didn’t open the box!), accom­pa­nied by this note:

Hi Sarah,

So sorry to hear that you lost a con­sid­er­able amount of work when water spilled on your com­puter. While choco­late zuc­chini muffins (no nuts–in case you’re allergic) won’t bring the mate­rial back (wouldn’t that be great), per­haps they can fuel the recre­ation process. Just want to let you know that we can be patient for an ulti­mately high-quality product.

Cheers!

ACT

How utterly sweet & lovely is that? I am an incred­ibly lucky girl to get to work with such fab­u­lous clients.

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m deter­mined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two min­utes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two min­utes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rear­ranging. (more…)

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a free­lance job posting. It was quite an exhaus­tive process, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the exam­ples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!) (more…)

I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guide­lines for how to make a web­site more effec­tive. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­men­ta­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the process of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guide­lines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

It’s been offi­cially a year today. A year of no pay­cheques, no health ben­e­fits, no vaca­tion time. No nine a.m. starts, no staying indoors all day staring at a com­puter screen, no mon­strous amounts of unpaid over­time. (Okay, I lied, all of those things have hap­pened, and worse.) I love that I can say that I’ve been run­ning my own busi­ness for a year and I’m still in love with it.

I’ve had the chance to work with a huge range of com­pa­nies and people over the past year, pro­ducing a range of dif­ferent projects. I’ve done news­paper ads, illus­tra­tions, resumes, and a whole slew of web­sites, logos, busi­ness cards, and brochures. I’ve learned how to use Quick­books, I’ve stream­lined my processes, I’ve learned some AJAX tech­niques, I’ve rewritten my CMS code base, I’ve read about grids and typog­raphy and golden ratios. I’ve lost out on con­tracts, and I’ve taken on projects that thrilled and chal­lenged me. I make an awful lot less money now than I used to, and I prob­ably work harder. But it’s just so much fun.

How­ever, my one-year-mark is a time for serious con­sid­er­a­tion. What’s my goal here? Where am I going? How is my little busi­ness going to grow up? And, most impor­tantly, how can I keep doing what I love, stay sane, and make enough money to keep me in choco­late and red wine for the rest of my life?

I am coming to realize that:

1. Del­e­gate, del­e­gate, del­e­gate. I am a crea­ture of many tal­ents, but I am not any of the fol­lowing: Salesman. Accoun­tant. Pro­grammer. Mechanic. Stop thinking you can do every­thing, and start spending more of your time doing what you are good at and do enjoy.
2. Nothing comes quickly. Projects will take longer than you expected to reach com­ple­tion. A two-minute fix will turn into a two-hour ses­sion of slam­ming your head against the wall. Some­times you’ll put an inor­di­nate amount of time into researching an esti­mate for a project you’re not awarded, only to be handed a bigger and better project a year down the line. A lot of what I do is investment.
3. It is great to be a worka­holic, but make sure you get at least three sec­onds of fresh air every day.
4. Stop taking things so per­son­ally. Not everyone can think you’re the next coming, and some days, you will just suck. This does not nec­es­sarily mean that you are a total failure in all areas of your life, and it is cer­tainly not cause for a mental breakdown.
5. Nancy Reagan was right, sort of. Some­times, you should “just say no”. As a small-business owner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of jumping at any­thing that dan­gles a cheque in front of you, but that’s not really why you’re in this busi­ness, anyway, and it’s cer­tainly not the most impor­tant factor to consider.

These are my mon­sters. I’m hoping that, by this time next year, I’ll have mas­sa­cred at least half of them.