What did X design look like before (assuming it’s a redesign of something that already existed)?

I got to the point very quickly where I spend very little time on someone’s portfolio. Look at photographers as an analogy. A great photographer is someone who can still get a good shot when the weather is gross, the lighting is sub-par, or the models are ugly. Almost any photographer can get a decent portfolio. What counts is whether you can do it when it counts. My clients don’t have the budget for three photo shoots over a month’s time to shoot the same thing. It has to be done right, the first time, even if the day isn’t ideal. A designer has to the same way. Can they work within perimeters that are less than ideal? That’s the real question. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had complete reign over the work I’m doing. The trick is to do the best work you can with what you can.

Is this someone you’d have a beer with after work?

That’s an important question for me. I work too hard and too long to work with people I don’t like. I’d rather hire a good person than a fantastic designer who is a prima-donna. When things get tense — and they will — I need someone with a sense of humor.

Do they have real-world experience?

I don’t care if someone has been to school. If you’ve been to school and you still take that qualification seriously, then you must have gone to a far different college than me. I don’t hire anyone for their first job, so maybe that makes my needs different. I’ve had enough experience with designers fresh out of art school, I’ll let someone else deal with that.

How do they learn?

The thing about this industry that I love is that you’re always learning. If you can’t learn on your own, then you’re in trouble. The best people I know are self-taught. I’m not saying that were just magically good designers out of the box, and most of them went to school, but these are the people who drink up criticism, read every book they can find, continue to use other designers in peer review, and learn new techniques every week.

Are they smarter than you?

If not, don’t hire them. If they are, you’d better be willing to trust them. Not all the time, but enough that you’re not micro-managing them. If you have to micro-manage someone, you might as well just do it yourself. I took a contract with an agency where the founder and I didn’t always agree. But he always listened to me. And when he could, he took my advice. Sometimes he’d tell me I was living in dream world, but because he always heard me, I’d work harder for him than almost anyone, even if I was doing something I didn’t like.

Pay well.

If you don’t know what to pay, check here, then pay a little more. I don’t say this because I feel all designers are underpaid (teachers are underpaid, we’re doing pretty good), I’m just saying that if you’re hiring for a person that makes you money, respect that. Life is short, do you really want to be known as that company who paid the bare minimum? It’s expensive to live here. If you want a 20 year old who has no bills and calls into work becuase their junker broke down again, that’s fine. But if you want someone who has enough experience to really bring you to the next level, then realize they probably are old enough to have real bills and real expectations.

It’s an ongoing relationship

Are you happy? If not, why? Are they happy? What would they like to do more of? The best companies are the ones where the employee and employer grow together. Sometimes this just can’t work, but other times it’s worth thinking about.

Part One: How to write a help-wanted ad

But compare this site: http://www.ecoservice.lt/ with the equivalent from Boulder County: http://www.ecocycle.org/. Even if you’re not a designer, surely you can see that there is a huge step down in quality once you get to our local provider.

Why didn’t eco-cycle have their site professionally done? They can pay their employees, why not a designer? At the end of the day, I have to assume it’s because they don’t feel it’s worth it. They’re wrong, of course, but I don’t think they can be convinced of that.

If I could inspire people to do one thing to improve their lives, I’d encourage them to take pride in what they do. If you’re in recycling for a living, or you run a library, or you “work” for the government, take some pride in what you do — everywhere you can. Even if you don’t like Obama (although, really, what’s not to like?), you have to admit the changes to the National Website are a huge step forward. This is an example of someone taking pride in every facet of communication. Because, at the end of the day, your website is how you communicate with people.

A related post »

• Pay people what they’re worth. If you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t be hiring.
• Similarly, don’t tell people to give you their salary requirements. We all know that’s code for “How cheap will you work?”, because — like the government — this job is going to go to the lowest bidder (which explains the Boulder County website).
• Never, ever, ever hire on spec. See this cartoon for a good analogy (or this video). It’s insulting and unprofessional. Even if you don’t mind being insulting and unprofessional, it’s a great way to ensure you never get a good employee.
• Have a clue what you’re hiring for. If you list .asp and .php in your requirements you’re confused. They’re competing technologies. You’re either good at one or the other. Quark and InDesign are two I see most. A lot of people apparently want someone who knows both programs. 1) No one uses Quark anymore; 2) even 10 years ago when people did use both programs, people would either use one or the other; but most of all, 3) please, for the love of god, if you’re going to advertise that an applicant needs to know X software, know how to spell the title of that software — it’s not Qwark, Quark Express, or In Design.
• One job = one position. If you want an employee to fill the roles of developer, designer, IT, photographer, copywriter, UI expert, javascripter, ActionScripter, video editor, and illustrator, then you might as well expect the ideal employee to show up riding a flying unicorn. More specifically, someone is not going to be good at both PHP and design, let alone another long list of related (or unrelated) jobs.

I saw the best help-wanted ad today. Thought I’d pick out my favorite parts.

Location: Venice, CA or Anywhere

One more plug for Rework. To paraphrase (badly), hire the best person, not the best local person. There is no reason for people in our industry to have to be in the same room. Face time is important, but not every day.

We have one main product called Shotgun.  It is a flexible web-based “production tracking and collaboration” application…

Tell them what you do. If you are so ashamed of your ad that you have to hire anonymously, that’s a big red flag.

Our dev team understands your role is critical to making great software, and they welcome you into their process to make constant improvements (no throwing stuff over the wall here!).

Address common problems in the industry and explain how you’re dealing with it. In this case: Developers and designers typically chafe personalities because designers will tweak until you force us to sit on our hands, which makes life suck for developers, it’d be like an architect rethinking his designs halfway through a construction project. Shotgun saw the problem and explained how they work around it.

4+ years of interaction design experience, with wireframes, data flows, and other stuff to show off and talk about.

You’ll note that they didn’t list educational requirements. If I had a degree in design, it would have been a bunch of classes without computers. And I’ve audited a college that teaches design as well as worked with more than my fair share of fresh graduates, school is good for junior designers, not so much for senior designers.

This is a cool place to work.  Most of us are foodies, we love good wine, and we’re becoming obsessed with coffee.  We have a strict no-asshole rule, and are trying to build a dream team of people who inspire us every day.

This made me want to work there. Tell me about you, not your business, you. And save the fluffy marketing copy for your bank.

We’ll pay you what you are worth, give you lots of flexibility and challenges, and although we’re all passionate and work hard, we insist that you have a healthy work/life balance.

Wow. Good job guys!

Part Two: Tips on hiring a designer.

The first thing I thought of was a handful of logos. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle is a client’s logo.

I’d just like to say, for the record, you can change your logo. For that matter, you might not even need a logo. One of the most brilliant creatives of all time (David Salanitro) doesn’t have a logo. Do you really need your trademark to be recognized on the side of a semi driving at 90 miles an hour? I think people confuse consistency in design style with a logo. Nearly every major company has changed their logo at least once. Your clients will not suddenly be confused and choose a competitor if you change your logo.

Crazy Bugs mac n cheese recently redid their packaging (not just the logo, but the whole thing). It took me maybe five seconds longer to find them on the shelves at Whole Foods, but the repackaging didn’t send me in a wild-eyed panic and make me want to go across the street to Target and buy Kraft instead.

Your logo is not that big a deal. A nasty logo will hurt your design, all your design. Even if your wife likes it, even if you did it yourself (you know who you are), even if you paid good money for it — a bad logo might just be a bad logo, let it go.

Trust is essential. You hired us for our ideas. Because of that, while you don’t have to take our advice, we’d strongly encourage you to listen to it.

There are reasons for every design decision. We will rarely tell you these reasons, it takes too long and is exhausting to defend every piece of our work.

There are various reasons why we choose a certain photo (or font or anything else). These reasons include composition, clarity, quality, a certain orientation, a certain color palette, negative space, emotion, ability to crop, size, price, etc. If you’re looking for a photo of a bunny, and we know that but still don’t choose a bunny photo, it’s not because we didn’t look or that it doesn’t exist. It’s because we didn’t find the right bunny. Going to istock and downloading a dozen bunnies for us isn’t helping us, it’s just distracting and then we have to take the time to explain why your bunny photos won’t work. This is complicated even more because we know you spent far too long looking at bunnies, and by the point you sent us some, you’re emotionally attached to those photos already. So our input is going to be poorly received. And the time we spend explaining all this to you could have been spent further developing your project.

We don’t bill what large agencies bill, that said, we don’t bill net-90 either. We’d rather not spend time trying to collect on invoices you were sent three months ago. Please pay on time.

Don’t haggle about the price, it’s insulting.

Don’t design by committee. Have one person make the decisions.

Email is a very poor tool for communication, but also — by necessity — our most common method of communication. Emails have no body language, no tone of voice, and most of the time, no sense of humor. Keep that in mind when reading emails.

Trust us, but don’t trust us implicitly. Working with you is the best way for us to improve your work. If you don’t share your thoughts and concerns, your design will suffer for it.

Choose your battles. We choose ours.

At the end of the day, we care less about whether or not you like it than we care about whether your target audience likes it. Seth Godin put this bluntly:

“The first rule of great feedback is this: No one cares about your opinion.

“I don’t want to know how you feel, nor do I care if you would buy it, recommend it, or use it. You are not my market. You are not my focus group.”

However, sometimes the client is our target audience, in which case, of course we care.

If you find yourself micromanaging us, please stop. If you tell us how to design, we’ll push back — once, twice, three times even. Sooner or later it just isn’t worth it and we’ll do what you tell us. The end of that road has two options. One is that you’ll see your projects escalate in cost — essentially, this isn’t work we like and we’ll try to price our way out of it. The other is that next time you have some design work you need done, we’ll recommend you find a designer you can trust.

Disclaimer: I’ve been independent since 2003. I can count on one hand the number of clients who were really bad clients. But it’s nice for even good clients to be reminded every now and then.

Something to think about: We have a few clients where we have such a tight rapport that we no longer have to sugarcoat our communication. When there is a mutual respect between you and your designer, that’s the goal. You will get better work for less money.

I’ll admit I’m a huge fan of 37 Signals. I recently read this book and would buy it for every client if I could. It’s a bold new* way to think about business. Highly recommended.

*Actually, not entirely new, it’s how business was pre-industrial revolution, and how a lot of small business still is.

However, the point is, should we forego Flash entirely for Javascript? I’m usually in agreement with Apple on stuff like this, but in this case, I’m not sure. In the letter Steve Jobs wrote, it sounds like Flash is just games and video (he was generous and didn’t point out that a lot of Flash is just advertising). If it were just games and video, I wouldn’t care. Games have better options for a platform and video really should be done in HTML 5 if that were possible. But a lot of the Flash designers use Flash in ways that don’t fall into those categories.

You can use Flash to make great portfolios (javascript works, but Flash still seems to be a better tool here, I love slideshowpro), more interactive navigation systems, and utilities on your site where doing it in javascript may be possible, but also very cost prohibitive versus Flash.

So, while I’d love to put Flash in the trash, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet. Hopefully Adobe has patched that particular Frankenstein and it’s a little less horrid in CS5.

A note on HTML 5, it’s all well and good to talk about HTML standards, but IE is still the largest percentage of browsers used, and (surprise!) Microsoft doesn’t fully support HTML 5 yet. So, while I can’t wait for HTML 5, I’m also not going to build sites that demand it yet. I’d be more than happy to write websites that didn’t support Microsoft products, but oddly enough, nobody wants to have a site only visible by 20-30% of the market. : )

Also, Microsoft users are notoriously slow to update their software, even when it’s free. Given Microsoft’s reputation for software, that kind of makes sense, but keep in mind that even if IE 9 will support HTML 5, you’ve still got a HUGE market share using IE 6, so it doesn’t matter what IE 9 will and won’t support. Something has to happen. I suspect that very soon the design and development community will (with Microsoft’s blessing) stop supporting old versions of IE.

I like what I do. Mondays don’t suck, I never dread “going into work”, I never watch the clock, I like the work — but I have to like my work, I can’t imagine going to a job for 40-60 hours a week and hating what I do. I get to do different stuff all the time, there isn’t much BS I have to deal with very often, and I’ve been doing this for around 15 years and I still have an amazing amount of stuff to learn.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote about the difference between chronos and kairos, she said this:

“Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

“Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.”

Some other fun work related quotes:

“One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work, and how to love, to work for the person one loves, and love one’s work.” — Tolstoy

“We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.” — Madeleine L’Engle

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for — in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” — Ellen Goodman

1. If you’re used to publishing online, you typically make less mistakes. I have a lot of clients who use CMS. As of the time of writing this, every one of my clients using a CMS has errors on their site. Designers aren’t perfect, I’m not detail-oriented, I typically don’t proof-read the stuff that is given to me to be posted on my clients’ websites, but if there’s a big red underline beneath a word, I’ll typically correct the spelling. I do consider it to be part of my job to keep a site organized. So, the two events on the Whole Foods site, for instance — I would have caught that. I think another big part of this is that if clients are sending me copy, they write it Word (versus a web browser, which is how most people write original drafts for a CMS). When someone writes their web-copy in a word processing application it seems like they take it a little more seriously, so spelling and grammar mistakes have less of a chance of slipping through the cracks.
2. “Design” never stops. Presumably, you’re hiring a graphic designer because you feel that they are helping you solve a problem (navigation, branding, UI, whatever). A designer is spending a great deal of time finessing your site so that it’s easy to use, the pages are laid out well, the look fits the aesthetic of your company, etc. On this note, it’s not like you can take a page with 500 words and change that to 1500 words and assume it will look fine. If you look at the home page of hospicecareonline.org, you’ll see that there are headers for Events, Welcome, News, Thank You, and Donate. These sections are in constant flux (and should be), so the page is constantly being fine-tuned. If you just barf 1500 words onto a page without graphics or any other type style, it will look bad. What you can do for “design” via a CMS is limited, and even if it wasn’t, isn’t that why you hired a designer in the first place?
3. There’s no such thing as “fool-proof”. You can break the shell of the CMS; you can take your entire site down; you can create things that don’t work on multiple platforms; sooner or later, you will have that person updating your site that uses 6 fonts and 23 colors within three paragraphs; the same person will use stolen, copyrighted photography (not out of maliciousness, just ignorance); and inevitably the site you paid good money for will need to be thrown out and redone from scratch.
4. All CMS require training to some degree. You will forget how to use it. It will never be as easy as it can be. Now more than ever I’m running into clients who think that editing online content isn’t any different than Word. It’s a lot different, and even the simplest of CMS are still quite complex. Even if you edit your site every day, you’re going to run into constant, ongoing issues with something you don’t know how to do. Or, you think you know how to do it, but you might be doing it wrong.
5. A “good CMS” is an oxymoron. In addition to all of the above, I still don’t think the perfect CMS has been built yet. I think EE and Modx are the best two out, but I’ve a long list of complaints about both of them.

I’d still say that we can do a CMS for you. But I’ve had clients do a retainer maintenance contract and clients who manage their own site. Without exception, the clients who manage their own sites pay more in the long and short run, they have a lesser quality product, and within three years, their site is in such bad repair with typos, band-aids, major UI and navigational errors, poor choices in photography, and so on, that they would be better served by taking their site down than they are by keeping it up.

There’s been some press lately on working from home. For instance, NPR recently had a three-part series of articles on it (part 1, part 2, part 3). When Unleashed started as a business it was done a little more traditionally. I was in a couple of leased offices, but within a couple of years I ended up just moving towards a home-based business. It started out because I was buried at work and didn’t want to completely ignore my infant son, so I’d take my desktop home on the weekends. Then I started taking three-day weekends because it was so much easier to get things done. Then four day weekends, and after a while it seemed silly to keep paying a lease (not to mention $700+/month for a T1 line) when I could use my home office for free and write it off as well.

That was about 4 years ago. In that time, I’ve not only thought a lot about my own office situation, but I’ve seen colleagues and clients move to a part or full-time home office situation. I thought I’d write about some of my own experiences.

The Cons:

It is a lot harder to get motivated and stay motivated if you’re working from home. I’m fairly disciplined, but it’s hard. Some things that help me are music, tea, starting my day with very brainless tasks, and making sure that I’m always working on something billable. It seems like as soon as I start to drift off onto non-billable tasks, it’s a lot harder to bring my focus back. The problem with this is that I think a lot of companies look at letting their workers freelance, and they assume less will get done because people will screw around. And honestly, that’s exactly what happens a lot of the time. The NPR articles suggested that work should be based on the amount of work achieved, not the hours worked. I think this might work in a lot of cases, but in others it’s hard to accurately predict how long things should take.

The converse of above — sometimes it’s hard to let go. I have this problem a lot, I don’t stop working. I have months where I set hours and abide by them, but when ‘work’ is down the hall, it’s too easy to just squeeze in a few more changes or reply to a few emails. Especially considering that I work with a lot of people who are working at night; so they’re trying to IM me while I’m having dinner with the family. So, not working too much is another problem.

Face contact cannot be minimized. I think video conferencing is a huge benefit. If you’re an Apple-based business this is made considerably easier with iChat, but options exist for PC users as well. However, even with video-conferencing, there is no substitute for actual face-time. I would suggest that wherever possible, people who work together should get together for a few hours a week. My primary computer now is a laptop, that helps. I can take it with me to meet clients, and when I contract for other agencies, it’s a huge benefit for me to bring it into the ‘office’ without really missing a beat.

Accountability. This is a nice way to say employers don’t really trust their employees. I’m not blaming them, it happens, some people will take advantage of a home-based work situation and slack off. One page employers could take from a designer’s play book is to have employees track all time. I map all my time spent via iCal. It’s a pain sometimes, and I don’t do it as well as I should, but it helps me to stay focused and accountable, even if it’s just accountable to myself. But that’s not a great fix, what it really comes down to is that you’ve got to have employees you trust.

The Pros:

Time. Most people I know spend about two hours a day getting to and from work. And they do so in a car where they’re the only person in it. I know there are options, but I’m the first one to admit they are inconvenient at best. You can take the bus, but that adds more time to your commute (and away from your family). You can car-pool, but that’s still not a solution, and finding the perfect car pool isn’t something that happens everyday either. Mostly, I think commuting is a phenomenal waste of time. This is one of my biggest issues with traditional work environments. If I got paid enough to live in Boulder and I could walk to work, that’d be different, but unless I made three times what I do currently, that’s not going to happen.

Work when you want. I believe humans are creatures of habit, and we do need a pattern to our schedule, I just don’t think it has to be 9-5. For instance, I might start work at 6 a.m., take one of the dogs for a run around 9, then work until I pick up my son from school around 3, make dinner, eat, then work again until 9 or so. It allows me to work a full day, keep up with emails in a timely fashion, but still have time to spend with my wife and kids.

Control your environment. Besides controlling when you work, I think it’s important to control where you work. Personally, I always had a few issues with traditional work environments. I like fresh air — I almost always have a window or door open. I like to have my dogs around — it’s fun to take 5 minutes to go outside with them and watch them play. I don’t understand people that have dogs and they only see their pets a few hours at night. I like to move around; I have a chair and desk, but spend equal time pacing outside on the phone or sitting on the porch or a couch. I like it dimly lit, sunlight on my monitor drives me crazy. Most of all, I like my music; not headphones, but better-than-average speakers playing at a respectable volume. I contracted with a company in Loveland for a while in a blue cubicle with florescent lights. The people were great, the work was great but I couldn’t take the atmosphere. For me, atmosphere means a lot. A lot of design firms have gone to great lengths to have a great place for people to work, but you can’t make 20 people happy all the time. If all 20 people can create their own spaces, I think it works out better.

I know that this home-based office doesn’t work for everyone, I’d just encourage more clients to at least think about it with an open mind.