Articles Tagged ‘business’
Mar. 22nd, 2009
A smart use of Twitter: I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, being held this year in the beautiful Peabody Hotel in Memphis. As usual at such geek gatherings, there’s a healthy backchannel running on twitter under the hash tag #ias09. The hotel is following the stream, and answering our questions, such as: Who serves good bbq? Where can we get a real espresso? They’re even using twitter to greet guests, and deal with complaints about rooms at the hotel. And, of course, they throw in a little marketing for their famous ducks. Event venues take note!
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Jun. 4th, 2008
Haven’t heard of crowdspring yet? They call themselves a “Global marketplace for logo design, business card design, graphic design and website design”. It works like this: if you need a logo for your startup you post a brief on the site, define price and a deadline, then sit back and wait. Meanwhile, designers all over the world jump on your brief and throw something up on the site that you might like. You can give feedback as comments or star ratings before the deadline is up, and you choose the best of all the submitted designs. You get a logo, the designer you chose gets the price you defined, and you’re happy.
In the agency world we know this process well—we call it pitching. A client selects a handful of agencies, and all of them make a proposal as to how they would solve the client’s problem. An invitation to pitch from any potential client worth taking seriously includes what I call a “handshake payment”—a minimal sum which does little to offset our investment in the pitch, but proves a certain amount of seriousness and appeciation on the side of the client. The big difference between an agency pitch and crowdspring is we pitch (at most two weeks work) to get a job which will be done after the pitch and amounts to months of work and in the best cases a client relationship with follow-up work that will last for years.
The idea of crowdspring, which I’d describe as “connecting designers and clients” sounds great in theory. The designer suddenly has access to plenty of briefs and theoretically could do work for lots of clients. Which is fine is if you’re a designer keen on doing a logo for $100. Granted, that’s the lowest price they’ve got on there at the moment, but the price curve remains very flat as you look through the briefs. I can’t help but ask myself how the designers throwing their work away at these prices are earning a living. And on the client side, I can’t imagine any of them expect quality, but why would you want a crap logo? At least their price for their own site design proves that the crowdspringers have a more realistic understanding of what design costs.
In a response to my heated Tweet tonight, crowdspring responded that “we really just want to be the Threadless of everything else…”, which also sounds good but doesn’t gel—the models aren’t comparable. Threadless pays $2500 for every design that gets printed, which I consider a pretty fair price, considering what Threadless can earn from selling the shirt. If I design a shirt I accept the risk that I might not get anything for the chance of getting $2500. If I design a good logo for a crowdspring client I get $100. Thanks very much.
Crowdspring is offering designers who obviously don’t know any better a chance to bend over, and giving their potential clients the best web 2.0 tools available to screw them. A slogan that would fit better is “feeding suckers to sharks”. Of course crowdspring can’t be faulted. If designers insist on throwing their talents away for so little reward they deserve what they get.
Food for thought for designers thinking of submitting to crowdspring: if you’re not living with your parents or designing as a hobby, i.e. you are living from your good work and need the money, consider this: the clients buying your logo, web site or whatever are earning money with what you make. A logo will be their face for years, and if they’re a startup and ever earn any money, they’ll earn it through their site. Do you really want to give them so much value for so little cash? Maybe you’re just extremely big-hearted?
Rant over.
On a more positive note, how would the site and the designer/client relationship work differently if the designer set the price? Clients post briefs, and designers post designs, but they set the price they think is fair themselves? Would better designers earn more? Would clients see proof that better design does and should cost more?
What do you think? Leave a comment…
May. 29th, 2008
Mathew (with one “t”) Patterson wrote a thoughtful post called “A new mind for web designers?”. In it he poses and tries to answer these questions:
How do web designers fit into this new world? When the html and CSS can be done for a miniscule price in the Philippines, India or China, what will web designers be doing?
But I’ve got to say all of his answers get under my skin slightly. If it’s true that Indians will soon be hacking out beautiful standards compliant, accessible and semantic code, and tweaking CSS with flair, and all for 20% of the price, then yes, that should make a number of people I know nervous. But none of them are designers.
Design is problem solving. Design is visual thinking. Design is an understanding of communication, and how to use colour, form, typography, etc. to get across a message. In the web, design is also understanding usability learnings, guiding users effectively, thinking about flow from page to page and more. Design is not writing HTML or CSS, any more than operating a printing press is design.
But I can’t say Mathew’s wrong exactly. Before computers, “design” was a pretty clear term. There were industrial designers, packaging designers, furniture designers and many more categories, but they all strove to do basically the same things with different tools and materials: solve problems in beautiful and elegant ways. Even when computers made the mechanical side of design accessible to everyone, there was still a clear distinction between desktop-publishing and design. Desktop-publishing was cheap and looked crap, and design was expensive and looked great.
Not long after HTML came along, and visionary businesses realised they were going to need a web site, the word “web designer” popped up. Most people calling themselves web designers at the time were nerds who had learned something about HTML and could put a page together, but they didn’t know the first thing about design. The great thing was that HTML was super-easy and anyone could learn it. The big drawback—for the label “designer”—was that having quickly learned HTML from some tutorials gave you the title “web designer.” Although in most cases “frontend programmer” would’ve been a better fit, “web designer” stuck.
Nowadays those nerds are still hacking code and calling themselves web designers, but at the same time there are plenty of masters out there who definitely know the difference between Helvetica and Univers, and handcraft their own HTML and CSS. What’s the difference between the “web designers” and the designers? Mathew answers that himself, sort of…
You’ll need to be offering demonstrably more value for your work than the other alternatives. That might be achieved by case studies showing improvements in site sales after website changes, or a proven ability to work with complex backend systems and produce great results.
Insight. Thought. Ideas. Experience. Solutions. Quality. That’s the value of design.
So if you’re out there throwing together code, without much thought to balance, style, user experience, clarity, simplicity, and all the other things that make a good design, you might want to take Mathew’s advice, and think about what to do when the Indians put you out of business. But if you actually are a designer, keep delivering quality. It won’t go out of style.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Mar. 6th, 2008
While having a smoke this morning, colleague Gregory Jacob reminded me of the subject of design “theft”, which I wrote about back in 2006. Back then, the discussion showed that there are many varying opinions of where inspiration stops and theft starts. Greg’s example, which takes the cake in my experience, is without question way over the border.
Greg’s a Flash guy, with a pleasingly minimal personal site. He received a mail from a friend this morning, with a link to a stunningly similar site. Have a look:
After a little research it was clear that Foued, due to laziness, deficient creativity or most likely a combination of both, had simply downloaded Greg’s SWF and the XML which defines the site’s content, and after a little text editing, uploaded both on his site.
It Gets Better
Not only did he shamelessly rip off Greg’s work, but he then submitted his rip-off to numerous awards sites, and won on four of them.
It Gets Even Better
Not only did Foued win awards with stolen goods, but one of them, Dope, had already awarded Greg for the exact same site.
I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Greg. Not only a 1:1 rip-off (as we all know, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”), but four awards, and one of them twice. Well done Greg!
Too Easy to Do, But Also to Find
Things like this just leave me extremely confused. Let’s assume that Foued Azzone is not remarkably naïve, and knew full well how wrong this is. So he uses a stolen design, right down to the file itself, to promote himself and his talents. And in a medium which is so fast, and so everywhere, that the chances of this theft remaining undiscovered are zero. And in a medium where stuff like this gets publicised like wild-fire, irrevocably poisoning is own Google-juice. What could he possibly think this would do for his career? How could he ever dream of this being good for him?
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Jan. 25th, 2008
“I don’t believe you. Not only that, I believe you less than I did last year. To put it more clearly, I trust you less and less every year.” That’s what 2,565 consumers told the entire corporate world in October 2007.
A survey by Harris Interactive asked the question:
“Which of these industries do you think are generally honest and trustworthy – so that you normally believe a statement by a company in that industry?”
and the answers show that across the board — banks, supermarkets, hospitals, online retailers — consumer trust in every single sector of the corporate world has sunk in the last five years. Some of the details should make a few CEOs extremely nervous, e.g. 11% said they trust airlines, online retailers are trusted by 10%, and oil & tobacco came in with an unsurprising 3%. I’m no statistician, but thinking about 90% of people not believing what my clients (by and large, online retailers) are telling them makes me a little worried for my clients, and it should worry my clients far more than a little.
Surveys like this of course never answer the really interesting questions, like “why don’t you trust these companies?” The simple answer is surely, as Seth Godin said quite a while ago, all marketers are liars. And the people they’re lying to aren’t as stupid as the marketers like to believe.
This illustrates the bizarre symbiotic, but at the same time, adversarial relationship we all have with the companies who sell us our stuff. Symbiotic because they have stuff we want, and they only exist because we buy it. Adversarial because we’re so often disappointed by the stuff we buy and we’re so often left alone with this disappointment, as if we didn’t have a relationship at all. And from the corporate side, consumers are too often seen as a threat, dangerous creatures with complaints who could bring the whole house of cards tumbling down if the fools had a little more power (and thank God that most of them don’t).
What can companies do to get trust back? Be people, not marketers. People try to deliver what they promise. People admit failure when they can’t deliver. People make up for it when they fail. It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s the way relationships work. [An aside: Jeff Bezos seems to understand this. Amazon is wildly successful. Coincidence?] If you’re the only company in your sector who acts like a person and treats your consumers like people, you’ll be their friend, and step away from their enemies. What could be better than being your customer’s buddy?
[thanks to J. C. Hutchins for the heads up]
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Oct. 9th, 2007
Next month I’ll be in New York for the Future of Web Design, and what does a geek who’s on the wrong side of the pond (when it comes to gadgets) think when he thinks “New York”? Well, I’m a photo geek first and foremost, so I think D300 of course, but not far behind that I think “iPhone”.
The lovely little toy is going for $399 in the states. Although amazon.de somewhat hastily posted it back in January for €999, it will apparently cost €399 when it comes out over here on November 9th. This side of the pond does have it’s advantages, namely $399 = €285 and makes New York + iPhone purchase a very good deal, right? Well, an American iPhone is locked into the AT&T network. Think about that. Imagine a car that only runs if you fill it up at a Shell station. Now imagine that Shell doesn’t exist in Europe.
Which led me down the dark and narrow alley of iPhone unlocking research…
Any wall a geek can build, an army of geeks can tear apart within a day. I could buy an iPhone, unlock it, and use it over here. However I’d never be able to update the software (Apple updates “brick” unlocked iPhones, turning them into pretty junk) and you’ll violate your warranty, but you can use any provider you want. The legality of “bricking” is pretty questionable, but I’m in no position to sue Apple. It’s also not quite clear if Apple intended to brick unlocked phones, but that’s beside the point.
Not being a true über-geek, and not stupid, I probably won’t buy an iPhone (at least not in the U.S.) and unlock it, even if it’d save me more than €100. I like software updates and warranties. But it does piss me the hell off to think that Apple — a company I generally love to the point of irrationality — will blackmail a loyal fan into buying out of his exisiting mobile contract (not cheap), force me into a contract with T-Mobile although I don’t want one, and will render a device I’d pay $399 for useless if I enable it over here and update its software, which is my right if the damn thing’s mine, isn’t it?
Is anyone out there in a position to sue Apple? I reckon they’ve got it coming this time.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Apr. 14th, 2007
The agency’s doing well, which means we’ve got more than enough to do, and not quite enough talented people to do it. The talk around town is everyone needs more talent, and there isn’t enough to go around. As an art director one of my responsibilities is hiring, so I often ask myself how to spend less time sitting in interviews with people we don’t want to hire, or more positively, how to get really talented people knocking on our door. Bribes seem to be a good idea. Read on…
What do you think? Leave a comment…
