A few days ago, a client come to me and ask me to design a logo, this client claims that there will have “many many many work and are paid”-- later, BUT, the first project is a “trial logo design” , AND, it’s FREE/Unpaid.
He said, "just want to make sure our thoughts are aligned on approach."
Oh.. so I replied, “I understand you want to have a look how we work well / how things going ...but there have other ways to check this, something like I can quote a lower rate than my normal rates for your the "trial" logo design? But it's really no excuse. To be honest, trust me, don't make promises, we both know we should focus on present. “
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You know what, this make me feeling very depressed. And, actually, something like this has happened many times before.
It's really disgusting. many clients thought designer real want many projects so can help them in a more steady work state(especially for freelancer, just like me), so clients always give "promise": "many many work for you - paid" balabala.
But you know what, before this, the first requirement from clients is " oh you know, this is a trial project , unpaid, just see how things going". The truth is, they are totally wrong!!
What designer real need is JUST a "Fair" pay, yes, every time every project, but not only the numbers of projects！There is no direct logical connection between "fair pay / unpaid" and "many work / trial project" actually.
One fair project rate much better than lots of poor/ rate lower projects, isn't it?!
So as clients, if you really want to make a promise in order to let designer can trust you or work for/with you , please do not promise"lots of" work but instead of the "fair pay", on the other hand, this way also can bring you more good quality designers as well.
I think this also can be called"Positive thinking", yeah , for clients--- “thinking positive”, think big, Don't underestimate your business！
So, as designers, how you guys handle this situation ? Let me know your thoughts.
The Modernist Movement was sparked by a desire by artists, architects and craftsmen to break free of the perceived bonds of “looking backwards” for cultural influences. Art historians have pointed to the British Arts & Crafts Movement, which began around 1880, as the beginning of this forward-looking push for fresh and unexplored creative thinking. It lasted well into the mid-twentieth century.
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Pulling back the curtain to reveal one piece in the growth of the Modernist period, the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) began in 1903 by two men, Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser, as an offshoot of Vienna’s “Secessionist” movement. For nearly 30 years the artisans of the Werkstätte designed and produced textile designs, glasswork, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry and furniture with the unifying mantra to bring a heightened sense of design to everyday objects. The earliest years saw designs that were highly influenced by some of the more formal qualities of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). While numerous Werkstätte designers chose ornamental restraint, others pushed decorative ornamentation to excess.
Obsessed with quality and a high-level of craftsmanship, eventually the Wiener Werkstätte was unable to produce enough products to keep up with demand. Their work was expensive, and mass-production was never an option. This spelled their eventual demise, but left deep roots for the growth of modernism to come.
( Emanuel Josef Margold (1888-1962). Biscuit Box, c. 1925; painted tin with lithographed design. Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.)
( The Sitzmaschine Chair, (No. 670) by Josef Hoffmann, c. 1905, had a reclining back and pull-out footrest.)
( Commonly called the “Seven Ball Chair,” this sturdy chair (No. 371) by Josef Hoffman (1870–1956) was first exhibited at the Vienna Art Show in 1908.)
( A Wiener Werkstätte textile sample, c. 1910; Christies Auction, London; May 2000)
( Textile Sample, Designer Unknown, Wiener Werkstätte, ca. 1920)
( Textile sample; by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, Baumgarten 1862–1918 Vienna)
Wiener Werkstätte, ca. 1920)
( Die Jungfrau, (The Virgins), Oil on Canvas; by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, Baumgarten 1862–1918 Vienna)
One in a series of three mosaics created by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt for a 1905-1911 commission for the Palais Stoclet in Brussells. Stoclet Fries — Lebensbaum (rechter Teil). These panels are composed of a variety of luxury materials, including marble, ceramic, gilded tiles and enamel along with pearls and other semi-precious stones.
Textile sample; by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, Baumgarten 1862–1918 Vienna)
Wiener Werkstätte, c. 1920
Preliminary drawing for jewelry pendant; Irene (Reni) Schaschl-Schuster, c. 1932
Collection of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
Pencil drawing by Josef Hoffman (1870–1956), c. 1908
Collection of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
Josef Hoffman (1870–1956), Cigarette Case with elaborate ornamentation of gold, opals, lapis, turquoises, mother of pearl, agate and semi-precious stones, c. 1912
Ink Drawing by Mathilde Flögl, c. 1916
Textile Sample, Designer Unknown, Wiener Werkstätte, c. 1910–28
Designer Unknown, Shoes by the Wiener Werkstätte, c. 1910
Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), Five pieces from the 'Flat Model' flatware service, consisting of crab fork, sardine server, pastry serving spoon, cheese knife, and butter knife, Vienna, ca. 1904–1908. Execution: Wiener Werkstätte. Silver
Postcard by Franz Zeymer, c. 1907
Postcard by Moriz Jung, c. 1907
Black and White Mocha Cup and Saucer by Josef Hoffman, c. 1910, Austria, Vienna, Designed c. 1910; made c.1920; Ellen Palevsky Cup Collection, LACMA
（Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli).
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For a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn’t averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully devoted to histories, reassessments and eyewitness accounts. Today, there is even an academic journal exclusively devoted to the pursuit of punk and post-punk studies, which has just published its second issue. There can’t be much left to say about the music, clothing, media outrage and legendary gigs, but the graphic expression of punk has received less critical attention. Now, within weeks of each other, two thick, illustrated volumes have appeared: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, and The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press/Voyageur Press) by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. Kugelberg and Savage have also curated “Someday all the adults will die!”, an exhibition of punk posters, handbills, record covers and ’zines at the Hayward Gallery in London.
The books are nicely complementary, with fewer overlaps in what they show than one might expect. Both address British and American punk, with the Rizzoli survey leaning towards the US, and the Omnibus volume inclining towards the UK, while also showing a strong awareness of punk scenes in other countries. Anyone nursing a serious interest in this subject will need to buy or consult both titles.
(Anarchy in the U.K. fanzine, UK, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)
The editors’ approaches are different, too. Kugelberg and Savage’s book is more of an album, with the images presented in art-book style on a plain white page (no objections here — it’s good to be able to see the work clearly without punk-inspired page layouts intruding). These are smart writers and Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, is a key participant in the era; his punk archive is now stored at Liverpool John Moores University. But neither author is a historian or critic of graphic art, design or visual culture. “The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown,” claims Kugelberg, somewhat unpromisingly. Savage made punk collages with the artist Linder Sterling and he has some good observations about punk montage: “In the act of dismembering and reassembling the very images that were supposed to keep you down and ignorant, it was possible to counteract the violence of The Spectacle and to refashion the world around you.” He points to the visual influences of John Heartfield, Martin Sharp’s work at Oz magazine, the feminist artist Penny Slinger, the Beach Books 1960s pamphlets, and Dawn Ades’ Photomontage (1976). I bought Ades’ trail-blazing study when it came out and would love to hear more: which punk image-makers were looking at the book and what did they get from it?
Bestley and Ogg write with a carefulness of phrasing and appearance of academic detachment that only partially masks the same devotion to punk as listeners and fans. Punk graphics was the subject of Bestley’s PhD and he curated the earlier exhibition “Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns”; he is course director of the graphic design MA at the London College of Communication. Ogg is author of No More Heroes, a history of British punk, and an editor of the Punk & Post-Punk journal. “It is important to question the notion of a direct association between work by prominent early punk designers and the emergence of a radical new visual language of parody and agitprop,” they write. “To an extent, the techniques adopted by Jamie Reid, for instance, were already widely accepted as the natural languages of anger and protest.” Such a comment can only be addressed to readers who know nothing about the histories of graphic design and graphic protest. As Savage and Kugelberg point out in their exhibition intro, punk’s precursors and putative influences include Dadaist collage, the Situationist International, the mail art movement, the graphics of counter-culture protest, and the 1960s underground press. I say “putative” because none of these connections is explored in depth and definitively established in their book.
(Situationist pamphlet by David Jacobs, USA, 1973. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)
(Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant poster, UK, 1977. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press)
The buses appear to come from David Jacobs’ design. Reid claims he sent the Situationist group the image in 1973)
(Pretty Disobedient, screenprinted poster by Shepard Fairey, USA, 2001. Signed by Fairey)
It was valuable to revisit so many original pieces in the exhibition after looking at small reproductions in the two books because the show communicates the explosive energy and “messthetic” rawness of punk graphics with persuasive power. This was an art of expediency, making use of collage, cartoon drawings, hand-lettering, rub-down lettering, ransom-note lettering, stencils (Savage and Kugelberg include a fantastic display of used stencils made by Crass), rubber-stamping and black and white Xerox copying, as well as silkscreen and offset litho. Looking at the discordant profusion of examples in the books, I kept trying to single out less familiar pieces that were highly accomplished as “design” from the many pieces that are hugely expressive and exciting, but not original or well resolved when seen in strictly graphic design terms. In the show, savoring scores of examples packed together at full size on the walls, those distinctions seemed irrelevant. These were raucous, vitality-filled transmissions from a turbulent graphic universe totally different in intention and effect from the smooth, orderly, design history-conscious parallel universe of professional design aesthetics, purposes and training. There didn’t necessarily have to be any points of contact or interchange between the two co-existing spheres.
(Flyer promoting a gig by Adam and the Ants, UK, 1977. Design: Adam Ant. Source: The Art of Punk)
(Poster promoting a gig by Crass, UK, 1978. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic)
But the question of the relationship between punk D.I.Y. design in its most basic or amateur forms and the later development of graphic design cannot be avoided for anyone who is both sensitive to punk’s impact and legacy (“the immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots culture among the young” — Kugelberg) and committed to graphic design as a medium. Kugelberg and Savage say that the “anarchic upsurge in graphic creativity . . . revolutionised design,” a clear attempt to assert punk graphics’ significance beyond the punk subculture, yet this claim, too, can only be substantiated by a lot more detailed research. (In my book No More Rules, I connected punk’s anti-design ethos to the late 1980s/early 1990s idea of “deconstruction” in graphic design.)
In the UK, the punk-related designers that had most influence in the early 1980s were a handful of individuals such as Malcolm Garrett, who had been formally educated as graphic designers (in his case at the University of Reading and Manchester Polytechnic), though design’s mainstream was, in fact, slow to learn from and assimilate the lessons and styles of subcultural music design’s new wave. In any case, the graphic sensibility of Garrett’s work for Buzzcocks and Magazine, shown in The Art of Punk, has always seemed closer to “post-punk” graphic design than to what is commonly understood as punk — even allowing for Bestley and Ogg’s precautionary advice that “there is no one standard punk visual language” and that “a notion of a pure or authentic punk style is difficult to justify.”
(The Desperate Bicycles, “Occupied Territory” 7-inch single, Refill, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk)
(Prag Vec, “Existential” 7-inch single, Spec, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk)
(Black Flag, “Jealous Again” 12-inch EP, SST, USA, 1980. Design: Raymond Pettibon. Source: The Art of Punk)
It is no accident, too, that the stencil-based graphic identity of Crass, one of the most highly politicized punk bands, is so well coordinated and trenchant. “Both Gee [Vaucher] and myself trained as graphic artists,” Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud tells Bestley and Ogg. “Both of us prior to Crass had brought money into the house by doing book design and that sort of stuff. And part of training as a graphic artist wasn’t just learning type[setting], it was also thinking in terms of marketing; a lot of the projects at college were: ‘This is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you create a corporate idea?’ . . . It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image.”
(Crass, The Feeding of the 5000 LP, Crass, UK, 1978. Design: Gee Vaucher. Source: The Art of Punk)
(Crass, Yes Sir, I Will LP (back), Crass, UK, 1983. Design: Crass. Source: The Art of Punk)
There is an old slogan and rallying cry that insists, “Punk’s not dead.” Bestley and Ogg certainly believe that. Their book ends with examples of more recent punk design, though I find it hard to get excited by most of them in graphic terms. Punk might, as they say, have employed a fairly broad set of graphic conventions, but they remain as consistent and constrictive over time as those found in heavy metal. Kugelberg deduces from punk a more general lesson for today: “Form a band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor.” No one can argue with that, though many might see it as a stretch to claim that, in 2012, these possibilities derive from punk’s mid-1970s example — unless, perhaps, one were to view punk prophetically as a form of science fiction. Interestingly, this is just how Savage does regard punk: as a “jump cut” into the future. “[P]eople in Britain see punk in terms of social realism and rock music. It was pure science fiction and it was very informed by J.G. Ballard, and by The Man Who Fell to Earth, among a lot of other things. . . . I think what’s important about punk is the idea that it was for a brief period very futuristic.” That’s another intriguing insight that calls out for more excavation.
(Anti, I Don’t Want to Die in Your War LP, New Underground, USA, 1982
Design: Dan Phillips, Ed Colver, Gary Kail. Source: The Art of Punk)
Man Ray's career is distinctive above all for the success he achieved in both the United States and Europe. First maturing in the center of American modernism in the 1910s, he made Paris his home in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1940s he crossed the Atlantic once again, spending periods in New York and Hollywood. His art spanned painting, sculpture, film, prints and poetry, and in his long career he worked in styles influenced by Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. He also successfully navigated the worlds of commercial and fine art, and came to be a sought-after fashion photographer. He is perhaps most remembered for his photographs of the inter-war years, in particular the camera-less pictures he called 'Rayographs', but he always regarded himself first and foremost as a painter.
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"Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art."
( Le Cadeau (The Gift) (1921))
Key Ideas :
* Although he matured as an abstract painter, Man Ray eventually disregarded the traditional superiority painting held over photography and happily moved between different forms. Dada and Surrealism were important in encouraging this attitude; they also persuaded him that the idea motivating a work of art was more important than the work of art itself.
* For Man Ray, photography often operated in the gap between art and life. It was a means of documenting sculptures that never had an independent life outside the photograph, and it was a means of capturing the activities of his avant-garde friends. His work as a commercial photographer encouraged him to create fine, carefully composed prints, but he would never aspire to be a fine art photographer in the manner of his early inspiration, Alfred Stieglitz.
* André Breton once described Man Ray as a 'pre-Surrealist', something which accurately describes the artist's natural affinity for the style. Even before the movement had coalesced, in the mid 1920s, his work, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, had Surrealist undertones, and he would continue to draw on the movement's ideas throughout his life. His work has ultimately been very important in popularizing Surrealism.
( Les Larmes (Glass tears) (1932)
Childhood:
Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Philadelphia. His tailor father and seamstress mother soon relocated the family to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where Ray spent most of his childhood. His family changed their surname to Ray due to the fear of anti-Semitism. His name evolved to Man Ray after shortening his nickname, Manny, to Man. He kept his family background secret for most of his career, though the influence of his parents' occupations is evident in many of his works.
In high school, Ray learned freehand drawing, drafting and other basic techniques of architecture and engineering. He also excelled in his art class. Though he hated the special attention from his art teacher, he still frequented art museums and studied the works of the old masters on his own. Such self-motivation from the early age proved to be a solid grounding for the versatility he showed throughout his artistic career. Upon graduating from high school in 1908, he turned down a scholarship to study architecture, and began pursuing his career as an artist.
Early Training :
In his studio at his parents' house, he worked hard towards becoming a painter while taking odd jobs as a commercial artist. He familiarized himself with the world of art by frequenting art galleries and museums in New York City and became attracted to contemporary avant-garde art from Europe. In 1912, he enrolled in the Ferrer School and began developing as a serious artist. While studying at this school that was founded by libertarian ideals, he met his first influential teachers and artists like Robert Henri, Samuel Halpert, Max Weber, and Adolf Wolff and was surrounded by those with anarchist ideas, which helped shape his own ideology.
After briefly sharing a small studio in Manhattan with Adolf Wolff, Man Ray moved to an artist colony in New Jersey in the spring of 1913 just across the river from Manhattan. He shared a small shack with Samuel Halpert, who inspired Ray as a painter to develop ideas and techniques that would later become a foundation for his career. During this time, he frequented the 291 Gallery in New York City. Ray developed a close personal relationship with the gallery owner and photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who introduced Ray to photography. Ray met a Belgian poet, Adon Lacroix (aka Donna Lecoeur) in New York, and they married in 1914. In 1915, Ray met Marcel Duchamp who was visiting the colony with Walter Arensberg and they soon developed a lasting friendship. This new friendship helped define Ray's interest in the subject of movement and guided his focus to Surrealism and Dada.
Legacy:
Though often shadowed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray played a major role in Dada and Surrealist movements in America as well as in Europe. His multiple attempts to promote avant-garde art movements in New York widened the horizons of the American art scene. His serious yet quirky imagery has influenced a broad audience through different iterations of his work in pop culture. Many of his important works were donated to museums around the world through a trust set up by his wife before her death in 1991. Most importantly, his process-oriented art making and versatility have influenced a number of modern and contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol to Joseph Kosuth, who like Ray strove to continually blur the boundaries between artistic disciplines.
A basic and clean widget-style UI kit that consists of 25 ready-made components to get started with a website design. This freebie comes in PSD format and it has been designed and released by Artiom Piatrykin for EL Passion.
They have Ivy League lawyers working in the mailroom. Employees burst out in temper tantrums and no one blinks an eye. Name dropping is an acceptable form of conveying social status and garnering respect.
It’s a strange, strange place.
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I know because in the summer of 2007, I interned at one.
It wasn’t really my jam. The parties, name-dropping, celebrity — not for me. But I learned a lot about the entertainment business.
Later that year, I returned to college in Atlanta and landed my dream internship at CNN.
Finally. To be around journalists. Where they didn’t care about status and power and parties and “entertainment” — just integrity. Telling the truth.
Yea, my naivety bubble burst pretty quickly after my first day on the job 🤓
After interning in LA for a summer, it was pretty clear to me CNN was in the entertainment business.
The puzzling part was that CNN employees believed they worked in journalism.
Three hours of waiting for some unknown dignitary to get off a plane was important, they said. That’s what the people want to know, they said. We have a responsibility to the public! They said.
This is news! They said.
They believed, like we all do, in the story they told themselves.
What “story”?
The truth is that both of the companies where I was working were in entertainment. They make money because you watch movies and TV.
But they don’t view themselves as being in the same industry. One believes it’s in advertising/sales, the other believes it’s in journalism/media.
Because of the story.
“Story” and “storytelling” are a buzzwords we love to abuse in marketing.
When we say “story” today, we mean the things you tell yourself in the confines of your own mind.
The things you think are true about the world, but they’re….not…exactly?
Like this:
“Smart people get good grades.”
“You’re not really an adult unless you’re married and you have a house.”
“Professional people wear suits.”
These are stories we believe. They aren’t lies, but they’re also not “true.”
Some very smart people get very bad grades. You can be an adult without a house. Professional people can wear hoodies.
These stories exist in our minds and define our worldview.
They’re difficult to identify because we don’t recognize them as stories. We recognize them simply as, “how the world works.”
The truth is irrelevant
This man doesn’t exist.
(This was one of the first print ads to use “story appeal” to sell a product in 1951. The story is not about an eye-patch or a shirt. It’s about the type of man who buys a Hathaway shirt.)
But his story sold tens of thousands of shirts.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It matters that your customer believes the story.
No, not the story of the fictional Man in the Hathaway Shirt. The other story.
The story of who your customer becomes when he puts on a Hathaway shirt. That story.
It’s the same story with every brand. Who your customer becomes when she puts on Nike sneakers, eats Kind Bars, or uses your software.
The truth is irrelevant.
It’s the story that matters.
And to know the story you need to tell your customer, you have to identify the story she’s telling herself. You have to know how to read her mind.
How to read minds
The data on what your customer believes will never show up in your market research. It won’t show up in surveys. It won’t show up in interviews.
It exists between the lines. In the silences.
To read your customer’s mind, you have to have different ears. (Yes, ears.)
You have to listen to what she doesn’t say.
Listen to what she does. Listen to her behavior. Listen for her assumptions.
Listen for the stories she’s told herself about the way the world works.
It’s our job to connect the dots between what she says and what she does. It’s our job to listen for the story.
She says: “I try to cook 3x a week. I just don’t have time.”
Untrained ear hears: “She’s busy. She really wants to be healthier. We need to emphasize convenience and low-cal in our marketing!”
Trained ears hear: “She wants to cook because she thinks she should, but honestly she doesn’t give AF. It’s not a priority for her. She just feels guilty about how much she orders take out. She’d be happier if she allowed herself to not feel like shit about how much she orders out.”
Knowing that story leads your team to craft a brand message about “reducing the guilt” instead of “being healthier.” The difference between those two stories is millions of dollars.
What the best marketers know
The story your customer tells herself determines where she spends her time, attention, and money.
“The best marketers know that the only thing that matters is what your customer believes.”
The stories she believes about herself and about the world determine her behavior.
The best marketing works when the brand story and customer stories match up.
For example:
If your customer’s story is this: “I’m centrist, but I lean left because that’s just reasonable.”
Her brand is CNN.
CNN’s story is: We report the news. We tell people the things they need to know. We are serious journalists, but we lean left because that’s just reasonable.
If her story is, “I’m a right wing conservative and the liberal media is deceiving all of you and brainwashing you. I don’t trust anyone.” Her brand is Fox.
Fox’s story is: We are the whistleblowers on the evil leftist conspiracy. We’re doing you a service. We are the only ones you can trust.
If her story is, “I’m exhausted and it’s been a long day and right now I don’t give a rats ass what’s going on in Syria.”
Her brand is Bravo.
Bravo’s story is: “Pour yourself a glass of wine and come hang out with us. Don’t take yourself so seriously. We won’t judge you. You’re safe here. Compared to our reality stars, your life is drama free baby girl.”
The best marketers know that the brand story and the customer story must be aligned.
As I say in my book Work With Clients You Love, working with better paying clients starts with being selective and saying no to the ones who are a bad fit for working with you.
But when you are struggling to find work, holding out for the best fit can be especially hard. You’ll take anything you can get. Even those projects that you’ve got a bad feeling about from the start.
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Luckily, there is an incredibly simple way to quickly find new work that doesn’t involve having to take on whoever walks in your front door. You are probably overlooking it (even though it is sitting right under your own nose.)
The fastest way is to contact your past clients—the good ones you would love to work with again.
All you have to do is reach out and ask them if they need any help.
$1800 from one email
I recently sent a simple email to 3 past clients of mine and here were the results:
2 out of the 3 clients responded
One of the clients gave me a small ($300) production job
The other turned into a $1,500 job that later turned into a $750/month retainer
That’s $1800+ from 1 email sent to 3 past clients. All three emails I sent basically used the same script with a bit of personalization.
Here are the responses I got:
Great to hear from you! Thank you very much for thinking of us.
And,
I was planning on reaching out to you soon. I’ll need some graphic design for a decal sign…
It’s really that simple. All you have to do is ask if they need help.
That’s it.
What to say
Here’s what I sent:
Subject: Checking in
Hi [NAME],
I wanted to follow up and see how things are going. Is there anything I can do to help grow your business? Please email or give me a call if you need help with anything.
[Your phone number]
Thanks, [YOUR NAME]
Benefits of working with previous clients
Working with past clients saves you the enormous energy you expend to land a new client.
There is a client acquisition cost for any client you take on. Even if that amount isn’t quantifiable in dollars, you spend a ton of time searching, qualifying, communicating, getting to know and pitching prospects before they ever turn into clients.
“ Having the previous relationship, past clients will want to work with you.”
Bypassing all or most of that is a huge win for everyone.
Here are some additional benefits…
Jumpstart the process
You probably already have access to a shared dropbox with their assets or a have access to other tools they use.
Or, you might already have a signed Master Services Agreement in place that allows you to quickly bill them for the new work without having to work out all the details and contract negotiations.
Built-in trust and familiarity
If you’ve done a good job in the past, they will have that much more trust in you to do a good job again.
No need for them to take a leap of faith on you this time. They are familiar with you and might even be willing to be more hands-off this time because there is less risk than an unknown service provider.
Encourage you to do right
“You don’t want to be in the selling business. Instead, you want to be in the reorder business, where your product or service is so good, people want to reorder it or reuse it.” – John Paul DeJoria
Of course you always strive to do a good job, but when you value a client as a “client for life” it changes your mindset to see the relationship over a longer period of time.
This encourages you to always do what you can to help your client succeed and create less of a one-time transactional deal.
Why clients love it
Your previous clients know how you work. If you’ve done a good job in the past they will want to work with you again because it is hard to hire new people.
I don’t think most freelancers appreciate how much value there is for a client not to have to go looking for and hire a total unknown.
Hiring is a nerve-wracking ordeal and it takes time and effort on their part to get a new person into their system and integrated with their team. It’s so much easier to just hire a person they’ve worked with in the past.
Sometimes they just need a little nudge to remind them that you are there to support them.
How often to reach out
You should be reaching out and asking them if they need your help on average once every 6 months (depending on the nature of your work).
That amount of time should give your client enough time to have a need to hire you on a new project.
In between those six months, stay in touch with them to stay top of mind. You don’t have to do much.
You can send them helpful, relevant content but even connecting with them via Linkedin occasionally, or liking their Instagram images, or wishing them a happy birthday can be enough to keep them from forgetting about you.
When the time comes to reach out and ask if they need help, it won’t be so out of the blue and more likely that they respond to your email.
For Startups & Devs: Making the Transition from Development to Design
A couple months ago, a person emailed me asking for tips for transitioning to design from a development background. As someone who had loosely gone through the same path (from programming to design to programming then back to design), I wanted to share any advice I could possibly give. After writing the letter, I thought it may be useful to a few other people out there. So if you are a developer looking to get into design, this is written specifically for you. To preface, this article is not why developers can be good designers. This article does a great job of articulating those ideas. So instead of duplicating good work, I spent time on some ways a developer can get into design.
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Before I get into the meat of this response, I highly recommend you start your transition in the software design world (e.g., web apps, mobile apps, traditional software, etc.). If that is not the case, I highly recommend you reconsider, at least in the short term. I hold the belief that software design is going to be changing a lot in the next 5 years, and those changes are going to greatly benefit people with development and design skills. I think the future designer is going to look and act a lot more like a
design technologist
. So don’t look at your current position as a disadvantage, view it as a great starting point towards a complementary vocation.
I tried to put together a list of tips that would have been helpful to know when I first got started. The design technologist role was still taking shape when I entered the professional sector and a lot of my own progression was from muddling around in the dark. To be honest, I don’t think I would change that even if I had the opportunity to do so. So, while I believe these tips could be helpful, there is something to be said about just getting yourself lost with the faith that you will find your way out and learn something in the process. If there is one thing to take away from this email, it is to refrain from mentally separating design and development. When you are creating wireframes, you are implying code that needs to be written. When you are coding, you are actualizing user experiences. To mentally separate each process is the first step towards viewing the creation of software as an assembly-line process. We have a lot of horrendous software due to that line of thinking.
My List of Tips
Remember, these are tips based on my personal philosophy and things that have shaped my approach. A lot of the thoughts below are opinions that a lot of other designers may disagree with. That’s what makes this topic so interesting.
Tip #1: Don’t stop building things
It will not be long before anyone designing software will require an understanding of how to make software. I have been saying this for nearly half a decade and it is finally starting to play out. Developers interested in design do not realize their development background is their greatest asset. Designers will be desperately working to have the skills you already have.
It is important to keep your development skills honed. If your goal is to shift your emphasis towards design, your day-to-day development tasks may change but they can still be used. The most obvious area where they can be used productively is prototyping. As interaction design becomes increasingly complex, prototypes will become a greater necessity. Your coding background will allow you to make more sophisticated, accurate and (hopefully) insightful prototypes. Ultimately, the real goal is to see no difference between your development and design skills. The skills gained from each focus are connected, interdependent and equally important towards making good software.
Tip #2: Learn design in order of dependency
Trying to tackle the entire universe of design at once will set you up for failure. I highly suggest easing into the process. A great way to do this is to start at what is most vital for software (its function) to what makes it delightful to use (its form). A worthwhile read on this subject can be found here. I decided to modify the author’s hierarchy a bit for our case (if you’ve looked at the diagram from the link provided, the list below starts at the bottom and moves up):
These steps gradate from the rational to the emotional. Learning design by progressing through these steps is optimal for two reasons. The first reason is that each tier is dependent on its predecessor—for instance, learning visual design without a strong understanding of interaction design will lead to poor output. The second reason is that this transition gradually moves you from pure logical, quantitative thinking to more qualitative, aesthetic thinking.
The first two steps (design for reliability and design for performance) will probably be areas you’re familiar with. However, it is important to understand how much design can impact the reliability and performance of software. Designing for organization is all about information architecture and content hierarchy. Designing for order and structure relates to traditional interface design (which is traditionally represented with wireframes). Designing for interaction, determines the details of how a human being actually uses software (translating a static interface into a rich interactive experience). Designing for aesthetics is obviously visual/motion design. There are ample material for each of these areas which will be easy enough to find—this article is not about detailing every step, it’s about explaining the progression of learning.
There is another step which does not exist on the pyramid, and it is arguably the most important. The last step is to learn to use all the skills concurrently. The end goal is to not treat these facets of design as separate steps, but as variables in a complex equation that is accounted for throughout the entire process. While the hierarchy of design needs will continue in the order illustrated, the aggregate of all skills are used to solve each need.
Tip #3: Design everything you do
During my first internship out of college, Stella Lai gave me this tip and it has been the best professional advice I ever received. Try to practice this tip as literally as possible. The obvious areas are how you dress and how your house/apartment/room is organized. I would suggest not stopping there. Your emails should be written/composed clearly and beautifully. Your conversations with individuals should be designed through how you listen, how you maintain eye contact, how you respond (both spoken and unspoken). Everything you do should have a reason, no matter how small. Design requires constant practice, this is a great way to keep growing.
Tip #4: Care about your audience
The work you care about will likely turn out better than the work you don’t care about. So what happens in the case when you simply cannot get yourself to care? I advise you to put your focus on the people your work will affect as much if not more than the subject of your work itself. If you care about your audience, you’ll automatically care more about the subject. The opposite is not always the case. The more we put others (the audience) in front of ourselves, the better the results tend to be.
Tip #5: Talk about design and listen even more
Reading is great, but I have learned far more through discussions with experienced, knowledgable and trustworthy people. When you find yourself in such a situation, ask questions and listen. I want to emphasize the importance of truly listening. In the short term, it is important to absorb as much good information as you can while you are in the learning process to challenge your preconceptions and push your thinking. In the long term, it is important because listening will be a vital skill in your practice. The best designers I know are amazing listeners. You will be doing it a lot (with your colleagues, your audience, your clients, etc.), so you should be good at it.
Tip #6: Learn to write, then learn to speak
Early in your practice it will be important to absorb ideas to help you form your own philosophies and approaches. However, at some point (preferably earlier than it is comfortable for you), it will be important to start formulating those points of view to an audience. Thoughts kept in your head have the luxury of being biased, irrational or simply flawed. Communicating those thoughts to an audience and opening them up to scrutiny forces us to improve our thinking. Writing well is also essential to practicing design. I’ve done some of my best learning through writing on my blog. I would suggest blogging as the first step towards sharing your ideas.
In the long term, I suggest trying to speak in front of an audience at least once. Some people love it, others hate it. I have spoken only a half-dozen times or so and I find the process as rewarding as I do terrifying. The skills necessary for successful speaking (e.g., compelling storytelling, brevity, connecting with the audience, etc.) will help you in your daily practice, especially client-facing interactions. Sometimes, communicating the thinking behind your work is as important as the work itself.
Tip #7: Focus on defining and solving problems
A lot of the work you see at design showcase websites are great examples of well executed decorations that lack substance. The people that can perform this type of work are countless and the skills highly commoditized. Avoid pixel-pushing at all costs – your job is to solve problems. View your work through that lens at all times. Always know what problems you are trying to solve while in the process of designing (e.g., people are having a hard time knowing where to go next in a flow, or, the current visual design does not reflect the mood of our brand). Good designers solve problems, great ones ensure they are solving the right ones. Accurately defining the problem goes a long way towards solving it.
Tip #8: Listen to your gut, but trust your brain
Trends come and go, but elegant, rational and utilitarian products never go out of style. It’s not bad to follow your instincts, but always follow up to understand why you did it in the first place. “Because it felt right” is a fine way to start a conversation, but not a good way to end one.
Tip #9: Be your biggest critic
You will never be perfect, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. There are always areas to grow. Your work and your practice always can (and should) be improved. When in doubt lean towards being too hard on yourself rather than too easy.
Tip #10: learn from the time-tested—and emulate it
Few things prove a design’s success better than how long it remains relevant. Look to the timeless to guide your approach. This need not be limited to software, the thinking behind designing a great chair often parallels the thinking behind designing great software. Understand how others before you have solved similar problems and try to determine why it took the shape it did. Value precedence; it carries considerable weight. Blindly echoing design trends is a great way to have a dated portfolio in a couple years.
Focusing on digital influences to follow, the operating system is one of the most time-tested and finely tuned pieces of software in existence. Explore the nuances, understand the patterns and know them like the back of your hand. When do you use a drop down as opposed to radio boxes? Why? There are smart reasons behind most of these details and they are worthwhile to know.
Tip #11: Ideate romantically, create pragmatically
Our ideas should be bigger than reality, but our execution should be married to it. This allows us to see the grand future of a product while ensuring that it can exist to have any future at all. Both are important, but they can be detrimental if out of balance or practiced at the wrong times.
The design world is in a phase of rapid change. Designers who understand and can work with code are becoming the prototype. Your transition is not going to happen overnight and a lot of your thinking will need to bend. However, I think you will be surprised by how much of your thinking will not. A lot of your shift is about understanding that you have already been creatively solving problems as a developer, and that a lot of that thinking is universal.
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
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3. Good design is aesthetic.
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design makes a product understandable.
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6. Good design is honest.
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good design is long-lasting.
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly.
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.
Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.
“We are definitively against any fashion of design and any design fashion. We despise the culture of obsolescence, the culture of waste, the cult of the ephemeral. We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.
We are for a Design that lasts, that responds to people’s needs and to people’s wants. We are for a Design that is committed to a society that demands long lasting values. A society that earns the benefit of commodities and deserves respect and integrity.
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We like the use of primary shapes and primary colors because their formal values are timeless. We like a typography that transcends subjectivity and searches for objective values, a typography that is beyond times - that doesn’t follow trends, that reflects its content in an appropriate manner. We like economy of design because it avoids wasteful exercises, it respects investment and lasts longer. We strive for a Design that is centered on the message rather than visual titillation. We like Design that is clear, simple and enduring. And that is what timelessness means in Design.”
Clear, simple and enduring—the fundamental qualities of “timeless” design. There is an edge to the tone of this passage. It both challenges you and inspires you to lift your gaze a bit higher. Too often we are so deep in the caverns of our own product and process that we forget that there is a higher aim in what we are doing. There is more than the “quick win”, more than the “Google buy-out"—there is an opportunity to impact the lives of those who come in contact with our work. For better or for worse.
Producing an enduring product or service in a society filled with "instant” everything is one of the greatest challenges we face as designers. It requires us to resist the path of least resistance, choosing instead to wage war on corner-cutting, on mediocrity, on irrelevance and indifference.
Creating long lasting value does not happen by accident. It is the purposeful application of sensible design for real people.
A poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams, and mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he once said. “I think about life.” Basquiat drew his subjects from his own Caribbean heritage—his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican descent—and a convergence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories with Classical themes and contemporary heroes like athletes and musicians.
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Often associated with Neo-expressionism, Basquiat received massive acclaim in only a few short years, showing alongside artists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, andFrancesco Clemente. In 1983, he met Andy Warhol, who would come to be a mentor and idol. The two collaborated on a series of paintings before Warhol’s death in 1987, followed by Basquiat’s own untimely passing a year later.
These are faces that were lost and found again. In the Deco ’30s, prior to the outbreak of World War II, Japan was a thriving commercial and consumerist society. The Japanese type developed from classic characters was consistent with the Art Moderne trends in the Western nations, which was an advertising, poster and packaging style in Tokyo.
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Graphic design was big business too. As an offshoot of the Japanese Association for Commercial Art, the leading professional design magazine, Commercial Art (Shogyo bijutsu), was produced. Also established was a research center for the study and propagation of modern graphic design, which published a series of volumes, Gendai shogyo bijustsu zenshu, showcasing various aspects of design, including type, posters, store display, advertisements and more. The specimens here are from these sources.
Shampoo poster (1932) designed by Masanori Okuda.
Poster for new Tokyo subway (1927) designed by Hisui Sugiuro.
The importance of a 1920s cigar roller from Havana in the evolution of collage art
Felipe Jesus Consalvos was a cigar roller from Cuba, who emigrated from Havana to Miami in the 1920s, and wound up in Philadelphia. A ‘tabaquero’ (‘tobacconist’) for most of his life, Consalvos was obsessive creator, turning everything around him into collage: cigar boxes, stamps, found photographs, old family portraits, musical instruments and furniture.
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All of his surviving works on paper – over 800 pieces – were purchased from Consalvos’ great-niece at a garage sale in West Philidelphia, 1983. The artist’s first solo exhibition was fifty years after his death - in Philidelphia, 2004 - making him the sensation of American Outsider Art.
An epitaph the artist is said to have insribed on his collaged typewriter, among those items found in the garage, ‘cigarmaker, creator, healer and man’ appears to speak of the hybridised context of Consalvos’ art. On one hand, Consalvos’ work as a ‘rolero’ seems to be a key influence in his works, which stucturally take their symmetry from the design of cigar bands and boxes - artistic practices in themselves; yet they are notably sophisticated in their critique of contemporary socio-political values, using satire and elements of the absurd – values enmeshed in the aesthetics of Dadaism, happening simultaneously in Europe. (There is, though, no evidence that Consalvos’ knew of his European contemporaries, nor is there any indication that his work was anything other than private and domestic – a reason for which Consalvos’ work has served a deft blow to critical discourse on Outsider Art.) Carefully-selected text clippings, mostly in English, are ingenuously embedded alongside images of historical figures – Hitler is in the mix, George Washington’s face is pasted onto a terrier: Consalvos’ work is an early example of the political edge of collage.
Unknown in his lifetime, little is still know about this pioneering artist – so little, that suspicions of a hoax inevitably emerged over the decades. The aforementioned great-niece disappeared, and was reported dead; no further relatives or friends have ever been located. Brendan Greaves, a researcher into Consalvos’ work and curator at the time of the acquisition of the Consalvo works at the Philidelphia gallery who now exclusively represent Consalvos’ estate, brushes the conspiracies aside; but despite his extensive attempts to trace the artist, he admits being no closer to proof on paper of the artist’s identity.
Whoever Felipe Jesus Consalvos truly was, he captured the collective, D.I.Y quality at the core of collage, the most democratic and ideological art medium: Consalvos was a talisman of recycling and rehashing the changing world around him to make a revolving documentary that felt his own.
