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Dirty Little Deadline Tricks

Here's some dirty tricks I've seen used to get solid work out of designers, and have been used on me in the past. But I don't recommend using them. You'll see why.

Go ahead, take as many hours as you want. Within a ridiculously tight timeframe.

I've worked at some agencies where you had free reign to bill as much time as you wanted to your live projects. The rub was that you only got a few days for what should take weeks. It's a dirty management trick: the shorter the project schedule, the more likely you'll take a profit on the project. So squeeze it out of the creative staff.

Hello, designer. Clear your deck so your design time doesn't get chipped away. Focus, focus, focus. We will keep you out of meetings, push off your other projects, and bring you food to eat. But you only get two days to do those three logos. With color studies. And recommendations for look and feel on two brochure concepts.

Sometimes designers forget, when you're juggling a ton of projects, that sweeping everything aside and focusing tightly on one single problem can exponentially improve your work, especially when you're working with a tight team that meets every hour or two to compare notes and inspire rapid progress.

I've seen great results come out of this approach. But also spectacular failures. And the failures would often happen when management got greedy and did this to the same designer over and over again, since they hadn't grumbled that it was unfair. They would also happen when staff got "nickeled and dimed" with small tasks from other live projects. Without enough clear space to focus, there really isn't enough time to succeed without dragging into evenings and weekends. And who wants that?

Every deadline is equally important. You can't miss any of them. Or else.

Some designers respond well to this lie. Others have it used on them so often that they start to see through it.

What's useful, when working through a project schedule, is knowing what deadlines are somewhat arbitrary and which are crucial to a project's success. Time can then be redistributed to ensure no one gets crushed.

What does a designer hate to hear? That they've lost time on their luxurious design schedule because of something they can't control. The client needs a few days to forge a new business strategy, but the publication date for the ad won't change. Your vendor needs two weeks to produce your beautiful design, and can't give you any wiggle room to assure quality. The testing plan for your Web site is forcing a few late nights, because your testing resources have a fixed schedule and if you miss your window, you'll lose days on your schedule.

Knowing when to negotiate is critical. This is a matter of quality of communication, and shared values across your company -- that you won't make a staff member or team fully pay for an internal mishap or a client's revised needs. Time is money, and this is where it can be appreciated.

Our internal project deadline is just as important as a client project. No leeway here.

Personal and internal project deadlines should always be somewhat flexible, within reason. Here's why.

There's a distinct path your design will take on a trip through your studio or agency, through their company and their partners and focus groups and testing. Sometimes your designs even make it out into the world. But the ones that really shine above all the others rarely appear without, say, a creative brief, some kind of rudimentary competitive analysis, research, and an understanding of the psychology of your audience.

The same thinking applies for internal work. Many designers and agencies think they can step around their client-facing processes to do a task because it's "for themselves." This is a fallacy. It will require just as much time, or even more, to negotiate a project through your own internal politics. This is the time that we usually sit around and wait for client feedback on our paid work. While we wait, they're working hard, reviewing the design and getting feedback from key stakeholders. In an internal project, we have to deal with that stakeholder feedback firsthand. This takes more time and energy.

There should definitely be strong general deadlines for internal work, especially when it results in something that needs to be delivered to an external vendor by a specific time. But there always needs to be more room to negotiate timing than a traditional client project.

That is, unless you only have two days to do those three logos. See above...

Plotting the Impact of Creative Ideas

The wall has twenty or thirty sketches pinned to it, and you're in a big group of designers, account managers, project managers, and other creative types trying to determine which ideas make the cut and get executed for the big client meeting. The creative director turns to the group and says, "So, which of these ideas do you like the best?"

Always a loaded question.

Does it boil down to how I feel about it -- the gut level reaction?

To me, a great concept will always inspire some sort of emotion, twanging the heartstrings, so to speak. It also has some kind of poetry or sizzle that takes it to a place that demands some form of attention.

But is that what the client wants? Is that what the creative brief demands? And is that what the audience needs to hear?

All valid questions, which lead to great concepts being spiked before they reach the light of a Web site or a billboard -- and if unasked, allow the wrong kinds of concepts to slip through to the client.

After going through a few hundred of these concept evaluation meetings, I decided to get smart about forging a process to focus my concepts before they're evaluated.

Before I concept, I look at the chart above and determine in my head where my design work should land based on the business case. Different marketing needs call for different kinds of ideas. Before I go off into dreamland, I have an idea of where I need to steer to fulfill the client's objective.

Then, after I've got a few awful sketches and well-refined umbrella concept rationales and headlines, I'll pin them up on the wall and I'll ask myself the following three questions, keeping in mind the baseline strategy I've staked for the project:

1) What kind of emotion is evoked through the communication?

If I'm creating a product brochure with dry descriptions of enterprise-level accounting software, the kinds of emotion I'm seeking to express may be quite different from a global campaign selling soap. Understand where you need to land on the scale between logic and emotion ensures that the audience receives the right effect from the communication. Ideally, you're using the right blend of the two to address an audience's need or "pain point."

We always groan when we see the mother making the Prego spaghetti sauce, but it does evoke the right emotion and I remember the ad enough to write about it here. Plus, it addresses a real pain point: do I really have the time to go spend two hours in the kitchen making slow-cooked tomato sauce?

2) How tangible are the benefits in the messaging?

How many commercials have you seen where you remember the gimmick, but not the product? Usually the gimmick is only tangentially related to the tangible product.

At some agencies I've worked at, the art directors have said, "Be sure to make the product as small as possible in the corner." That umbrella solution sure doesn't work in the long run if you need to show tangibility, which in the long run points to sales, not awareness.

Remember that Infiniti car commercial campaign where they never showed the cars, just natural forms like leaves floating on the wind? The press positively glowed about it. Quite a good idea, but the lack of tangibility proved to be the ads' Achilles heel. The ads were found to be ineffective when it came to selling cars.

3) Is it evocative or just an echo of the mundane?

If you don't create something expressive to market your product or service, you aren't going to keep audience interest -- your work will veer from the poetic to the mundane. It's hard to create poetry with a tangible expression of a product like, say, toilet-bowl cleaners.

This is where real understanding how your audience approaches your product makes such a big impact on the quality of a creative idea. If it's evocative, you've reflected the audience's mindset and tapped into their impressions and emotions. And by evocative, I mean that it ceases to function in the realm of the literal and becomes figurative, metaphorical, or expressive in a way that transcends our notions of our day-to-day lives.

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I think it's easy to play on the axes between logic/emotion and tangibility/intangibility. Where we really show our stripes as creative thinkers is where our ideas land on the axis between the mundane and the poetic. This is why many designers struggle when they can't create a communication that has a measure of poetry in it.

In my estimation, if you've come up with a really poetic idea and it creates the right emotional reaction in your target audience, and the tangibility of your product's benefits are visible in some way, you've found the "sweet spot" for your concept. From our recent bevy of Super Bowl spots, ones that caught my interest were the Monster ad with the two guys on bikes at the center of the Earth and the Tide commercial with the talking stain. Both of them expressed these three criteria in a measure that worked.

If the client just wants a rational comparison between three types of software, then you know your concepts need to speak to rational decision-makers. It's not going to veer into the poetic.

If you're selling a politician, you may veer into pure emotion and poetry and for a time, forgo all those things like, say, facts.

If your client sells security systems, you'll likely have an ad that implies that someone tried to break into your house, inspiring fear and playing on the literal risk of being hurt by a burglar, then it isn't likely you're going to shoehorn some kind of poetry into it. I can imagine it now... Security Alarms: The Musical.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this model holds up beyond advertising and also can help designers determine their best work in areas like branding, identity development, and designing compelling environmental graphics. Thanks!

The Self-Critique Checklist

I've distilled my post "Mastering the Art of Self-Critique" into this simple 11-point checklist. Enjoy!

If you have any suggestions or additions for this checklist, comment away and if they're great I'll add them. Thanks!

A Creative Brief Should Be... Brief

See the title of this post.

A brief is digested, in all senses of the word -- a condensation of thought that indicates a clear strategic direction. Killer creative thinking comes from focus. You need a bull's eye to aim at, not a dartboard.

In my experience, there is an inverse correlation between the length of a creative brief and the quality of thought that goes into it. I have fond memories, as I'm sure we all do, of reviewing a brief in abject fear, realizing that the client is requesting work that communicates three or four different ideas within one piece. Many of them can be contradictory.

This is when you need to work with your client to narrow their strategy to the right key message -- one that is easily communicated and makes sound business sense.

The creative process can be easily co-opted for the express purpose of focusing the client's marketing or branding strategy in the work itself. This is a waste of time and money for the client and the designer, and no way to run a profitable business.

Ideally, a brief should never run longer than 2 pages. Everything else is just incidental detail. Do all those facts and figures and charts need to be in the brief? Can you communicate them in another way or provide them as supporting material? When I see a thicket of details in the brief, they are often secondary to the goal of the project. Everyone needs to share the goal before the details can fit.

The real litmus test to a compelling brief is when you polish up your designs, board them, meet your clients in the conference room, and introduce your work by sharing one to two succinct sentences that summarize the entire strategic direction of the project. At this point, their heads should be nodding expectantly, as they wait for you to reveal how you've clothed their business needs in compelling artistry.

On Saying No

The only major failure you should face in the business of design? The failure to recognize that a client project is something you should decline.

Why is saying no always so difficult?

Because you aren't that busy. It's just a quick little project in an area that you don't specialize in, but you might as well take it so when the next big project arrives, you'll have an even stronger client relationship.

Often, we end up in these situations as designers because we've not properly communicated what we want out of our clients. There need to proper boundaries, and if they aren't described or enforced, then the client often doesn't understand who you are and what services you offer.

These kinds of situations often occur with our clients:

The client thinks you want it, no matter what. This is the beauty of having strong client relationships -- they trust you with their life, their brand, and every project that could benefit from your magic touch. They like working with you. They genuinely care about your success. They just don't realize that what they're throwing your way is not the best fit. This happens often in seeking new clients: right client, wrong project. It's a subtle art to decline a client and still keep the door open for future business.

The client knows you need it. Yes, the studio has been quiet. The client's been aware of your increased focus and attention their business, throwing in bells and whistles whenever possible. The risk of this type of overdelivering is that clients begin to expect more for their money. They also expect that you'll drop anything to help. Smart and savvy businesspeople know this is when they can negotiate hardest on their own behalf.

The client doesn't know that you lack competency in an area. "Yes, I designed your logo and business papers, and I'll be happy to talk with you about building a database for your website." Designers don't like to admit weakness in a specific area, but you'll actually gain respect by bringing in the right professional or agency to support you and/or wholly take on a project you don't have a competency in.

The client wants you to do work that's part of their job role. Most often, designers are hired to do things that are outside the core expertise of their clients. But sometimes jobs come along that are part of a client's everyday work responsibilities, and you don't recognize it until it's too late. The risk with these kinds of projects is that you usually don't get to follow your standard agency process and have to work through the same politics as your client to have work approved. This can be a burn on your time and resources and make your project unprofitable.

The client feels entitled to your help. If you say no, there are plenty of other agencies yearning to get started on this project. And this threat is always halfway true. But if a client threatens to take the work to another agency, they're taking this tack because they want something from you: your participation, your investment, your attention. They know you'll do it better than that other agency. It actually proves that you have more leverage than you think and should talk more deeply with them about their needs.

Often, it's not up to the client. It's a problem that you're dealing with on your end that bleeds into your working client relationships:

You really do need the money. Yes, you need to pay rent. Yes, this work is not beneath you. Yes, the work will hopefully lead to better things. Yes, the Print Regional Annual doesn't accept PowerPoint templates as a category. Sorry. You have staff you need to keep busy. It'll be over quick and then you'll be on to better things. It is a fundamental truth that projects stroll through the studio that are purely money-makers and never peek their head up in your portfolio. But if word gets around that you're really, really good at the things you don't want to specialize in, you'll risk landing those projects over and over again. Like the old adage says, "Be careful what you're good at." Can you afford to promote yourself as an expert in one area and end up spending your time working in another?

And lastly, the most dangerous reason that you don't decline work:

You don't realize what they're really asking for and plan to figure it out while you work on the project. Disaster comes in many flavors, and this is one you never want to inflict on a paying client. Example: You design their identity. They're offering you some motion graphics work to animate it for a video. You've never used AfterEffects or Flash. Now isn't the time to crack the manual and dive in. Too high a risk of failure. Bring in a specialist. Mark up their time. Get it right.

Today's designers are business partners with their clients -- real strategists -- and you're continually thrown opportunities you don't really need or have the depth of knowledge to fulfill well. Be sure to let your clients know upfront what kinds of work you really want. The work that's really going to shine.

If that's not what a client has to offer for you, then be prepared to walk away gracefully. Make a reference to someone in your network who can fulfill their needs and return the referral in the future.

Great Blog on Economics and Design

Pop on over to the Illinois Institute of Technology's (IIT) Economics of Design blog site and read the 11 things you should have learned in “Economics and Design.” It's a great overview of many things that designers learn the hard way during their careers. The blog also has an introduction to design planning, an aspect of most designer's lives that usually takes a backseat to the actual execution of design work.

A few quotes from the piece:

"We rarely, if ever, consider how to apply an incentive strategy along with our new design, or how our new design may work/not work with an existing incentive strategy. Design of incentives is a powerful new frontier for our profession, and should be integrated into our everyday work."

The design of incentives is a classy term for bringing direct response thinking into other disciplines. In plain language, it's not enough to change people's minds. Incentives make people act, and without more people acting, you won't create results. Even when you're working on an experiential project with tons of moving parts, there should be an incentive strategy in place to reward your audience for wanting to interact with your brand.

"We can’t assume that markets and products will work the same other places as the do here (in North America), we need to design these markets, interactions, and offerings to and for each market."

Some popular examples that come to mind are the Chevy Nova that wouldn't go in Mexico or the much ballyhoo'd and perhaps not true "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead."

"As designers, we should pay close attention to this convergence of psychology and economics; it can provide insight into the adoption and use of our offerings."

This is crucial in today's marketing landscape. It's especially painful to watch how purchasing psychology can destroy brand equity.

Many brands sacrifice their longevity of their product offerings in order to make a quick sale, thinking that customers will make a rational choice when confronted with a compelling incentive or campaign. This only holds true in the short term--what Marty Neumeier had termed a "disloyalty program" in the book Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. If you train your customers to focus on price, your offerings lose value.

A recent example that comes to mind of a "disloyalty program" is the ongoing marketing by Comcast. Their "It's Comcastic!" campaign has had a lot of interesting creative, but it's been dogged by inconsistent messaging across different markets and mediums, as well as "blanket the market with offers" tactics that makes me think the only reason I should switch from Qwest is because they're cheaper, not better. Television or DSL can be almost like a drug--why treat it like a commodity? Couldn't they bring something to the mix that makes them truly different?

A great market position that fulfills this promise is the recent brand launch by Credo Mobile (formerly Working Assets Wireless). At first, I completely disliked the creative for this piece, but after having it sink in over a few weeks in the Seattle market, it's totally spun my head.

The cell phone market full of intense competition. Most of this competition is over selling phones unique to your carrier and competing tit-for-tat over pricing and minutes in 2-year contracts. Credo Mobile changed the rules of the game by making it not about phones or costs, but about how by using their service, they will make donations to lefty causes from their profits. Now that's a position that runs contrary to all the big dogs, and gives Credo a chance to scissor off more progressive, NPR-loving, very well-off customers. (And it doesn't really matter that their phones aren't very good... who cares when you're providing hunger relief in Darfur?)

"...the most potentially devastating risks a company faces (changes in customer preference, market forces, and technological change) can all be managed within the scope of a design project. We need to shift our position from creating risk to managing it.... Designers should be obsessed with creating value; this frame of reference should guide everything we do."

This may be hard for some designers to swallow, but it's true: designers need to hold just as much responsibility as the client when a major design initiative doesn't take future market forces and shifting audience perceptions into account. Design communications depend too much on context to allow lack of forethought. This is most important in technology marketing, where the landscape seems to shift hourly. If you keep the client in business, the client will keep you in business.

"...in order to continue to remain in business, [design] firms have had to shift the bulk of their billings to strategy work, which requires less “horsepower”, and more knowledge and domain expertise."

The flip side of this shift in the marketing landscape: designers don't come equipped with the tools to provide strategy separate of their design education. Designers need to develop methodologies to become strategic partners in business if they want to survive.

Most designers usually gain these methods by working within larger, stable companies that have proven processes. They absorb this thinking and bring it into their own practice when the move onward. It is not actively taught unless it is sought through small programs like the one at IIT or absorbed through reading through as much popular business-thinking as possible -- something that most designers would rather not do. It's very difficult to be a competent commercial artist and a business thinker. When a project requires an even higher level of strategic insight, I know I lean hard on my artistic intuition and then work backward from it to try to find a strategic ground to stand on. It's hard to think that designers will ever find it easy to be strategic partners--but that's part of the fun of the challenge.

The thing that I do love about this shift in the design profession is that designers will, in the future, be seen as the visionaries, providing ideas that propel major change in business. These intangible ideas don't need to be couched as "design work" anymore.

Design will be increasingly viewed as a thought industry that takes ideas and uses stories across different media to create meaning for an audience. We are empowering these tribes to participate in a community with their hearts, minds, and pocketbooks towards a shared goal. Whether that goal is buying a cup of coffee or creating world peace, their actions have to have some kind of meaning. Designers will help shape the paths of people's lives, tangibly and intangibly, by helping align those actions.

The First Point of Failure

The brochure cover design and rough layout were easily approved, you've proceeded to layout and typeset beautiful copy written by a freelance writer, €”and the client hates the copy. It's all wrong.

The changes that he described to you over the phone require the writer to create a new draft. Then you'll need to replace the copy through the brochure with a new content structure that requires redesigning the inside completely. And based on the copywriter "missing the mark," which you don't quite agree with, now the client's thinking the overall concept for the cover may need to change as well. And of course, they don't want to pay for the changes outside of your current estimate...

"But I told him that he needed to read and approve the copy before I'd go to full layout. He said he was too busy / on vacation / (insert client excuse here) and that he trusted me / my staff / my freelancer to do great work..."

More often than not, there is always a first point of failure in a project where an issue like this comes to light. It could be a late approval that influences your delivery date, a round of concepts that the client dislikes, or a misjudgment of exactly how many hours you'll need to deliver that killer Flash advertisement.

These points of failure can be traced back to concerns that rest outside the traditional "design process." Failure is an important and inevitable part of the creative process, often leading to truly breakthrough design solutions. But when major failures occur during the business processes of a project, you can get knocked right out of business.

In this above scenario, the first point of failure was the desire to please a client, no matter what the cost. Wearing your account management hat at the expense of your project process can trump the controls you keep in place to ensure that you don't have to work over your time estimate. While it's tempting to mold your progress to your client's availability, there's always a point of diminishing return (and profit) for the graphic designer. This becomes even more risky in a creative agency setting, where thousands of dollars in staff time can go out the window without client approval at key milestones.

Other common points of failure occur when:

• The creative agency or designer isn't able to enforce boundaries around each phase of a design project. This usually emerges from entering into a project outside their area of expertise without having lived through what it would really take to fulfill the job profitably. In smaller projects in print and online, missteps can result in rework and added time and labor. In large-scale web design and video projects, a lack of boundaries can lead to absolute failure and huge costs amassed to start projects over again.
• The client doesn't want to work within the project boundaries. This can happen because the client didn't disclose there were multiple stakeholders within their company that had to approve each round. If the designer or agency doesn't ask the client about the need for multiple rounds of approvals and changes, they may feel uncomfortable penalizing the client by asking for more money. And like above, the client can feel like they are a hinderance if they aren't available during important approval rounds and want to keep the project moving towards an absolute deadline. There's an endless list here of reasons why the client can strain against an agency's process, and if the designer or agency doesn't stand firm, there's usually no going back.
• The client doesn't understand what they're asking for. They may have never handled a project in the discipline they've been asked to manage. The process you've been tasked to take them through baffles them (branding and web design being the usual suspects). Questions about their business strategy, business process, brand positioning, and sales methodology percolate out of your design work and open new areas they haven't grappled with fully. The design brief may become invalid partially through a project and require scrapping progress and starting over--something every client loves to hear.

While these kinds of situations often seem an inevitable part of a designer's life, they can be eased by making sure that you do the following:

• You have properly researched and digested the business problem in the creative brief. And by digested, I mean that you've thought through, validated, and proposed focused solutions for the client's business problem in advance of any design work. Without the proper context and frame around the business problem, your design won't hold as much weight in the client's mind. In advance of writing the brief, you may need the client to fill out an intake questionnaire that fully examines the kinds of things clients may not have thought through (such as brand positioning and sales process methodologies).
• You devise and keep to a workflow during your entire project--and make your client continually aware of the schedule and their ongoing responsibilities. If the client doesn't know they're on the hook and accountable through the entire creative project, you have no authority to make demands when things go sideways, both in pushing schedules out and in asking for more money. On the flip side, if you haven't properly planned your project out and uncover all the unknown variables, you're on the hook if it impacts your bottom line.
• You keep within the boundaries of the proposal. I have fond memories of developing elaborate pitches at big agencies to try and land projects ($20K time investment). Then, when the work actually came in, we'd show five concepts instead of three at the first round, and then produce an extra brochure design or two if we were feeling nice ($5K). Most smaller creative agencies and solo designers can't afford to throw this kind of money out the window, and it trains clients to have expectations of their design firms that exceed the boundaries of profitability and professionalism.

Strangely, the larger the project, the more that the actual process of designing almost seems to be a mere fraction of the work necessary to make clients happy.

What are points of failure you've had in your design projects? What did you discover in the process that made you a better designer and a better businessperson?