Paper or Plastic

To quote a very wise reporter, “Press is what you want when you’re just starting out. Advertising is what you do to keep your name fresh in people’s heads.”

I’ve heard a lot of businesses say that advertising doesn’t work for them. But the truth is that they skipped over the first few levels. First you need to get your name out there. Not by purchasing ads, but by getting press, talking to people, telling people your story and partnering with other organizations.

Once you’ve established a presence in your community, then you can start advertising to spread the word to other people and to keep your business fresh in the minds of the people who already know about your business. For example, a new restaurant first wants to get press in as many papers, websites and magazines that they can. People will read an article by a reporter talking about how great a restaurant’s food is and then be more inclined to want to check it out. “Hey, let’s try that new place near Rittenhouse. Phila Weekly said they have great desserts.” Then, the restaurant might want to set up a table at the Spring Festival to give out samples and invite organizations to hold their event there. THEN, once a good amount of people have heard of the place or tried it out, they can continue to remind people they’re still open by advertising.

There’s just one catch, your business has to be good. Offer a bad product or lousy customer service and no one will be referring you or writing good stuff about your work.

I often hear companies saying it’s hard to find a dependable designer – someone who listens to them, who gets back to them in a reasonable amount of time and who doesn’t say “no” or complain a lot when you ask them to make changes to a design.

It seems simple, but there are a lot of designers who are not like this. I like to call these designers the diva designers. They’re concerned with making a great design, but often the purpose of the project and the client’s vision are forgotten in the process. However, I’m here to explain where this diva designer syndrome comes from. Most of them aren’t born this way. It comes from working as a full-time designer and getting frustrated with the client-designer relationship. Luckily, there are things you can do to suppress some of the symptoms.

To the client that doesn’t want a diva designer:

1- Treat the designer as an expert. They most likely went to school to learn color theory, typography, communication, marketing and composition. They know what makes a design eye catching and successful, listen to their suggestions.

2- There is a difference between hiring a designer and hiring someone who knows how to use design software. When you hire a designer, you are asking for their creativity. Therefore, offer suggestions for how you would like a design to be changed, but do not tell them exactly what to do. Being too specific often frustrates designers because sometimes your suggestion isn’t the best solution. Therefore, they spent too much time trying to force your solution to work or figuring out a better solution and having to explain to their boss and you why they disregarded your instructions.

3- Be honest with the designer. It doesn’t matter if you start a sentence with “This looks great!” if you’re going to follow that comment with a page of changes that will make the design look nothing like the original concept. The designer will figure out that you don’t really think it looks great.

4- Don’t be mean. For example, a comment I received from a client said “can you design this more?” This comment tells me that the client doesn’t like the design, but doesn’t offer any suggestions as to how to make it better or why they don’t like the design. It also implies that I didn’t design it in the first place. Avoid using words like bad, boring, or, my personal favorite “not design-y enough”. Keep the criticism to a minimum and focus on how to make the design better.

5- Know what you want and make sure it’s not what someone else has already done. One of the worst ways to start a project is by telling a designer you don’t know what you want or that you want them to copy what someone else is doing. Every design tells a story, know what you want your story to be.

Stay tuned, because the next blog will be written to the diva designer on how they can get over themselves and stop acting like a petulant 3 year old.