Brand building in a recession: Richard Murray from D&AD on Vimeo.

I don’t have it listed yet, but I also have limited edition prints available of each piece as well. The limited edition Giclee print vary in price from $50.00 to $125.00.

If you’re interested in ordering a print, or have a question about an original piece, please contact me.

Enjoy!

As designers, we would ofter rather leave the client contact to the account service team, but in today changing landscape, many medium to large business are opting to bypass the account service level all together in exchange for direct contact with knowledgeable, current and innovative creatives.

The writing has been on the wall for years now. Maybe I’m behind the times is stating it at this late time, but the pendulum has swung. No longer can the skills of the designer/art director lie exclusively in the print world. Yes, I know, HELLO! Sure I’m over stating the obvious, but it’s more important now then ever to leverage the power of the web and get it working for our clients. It’s essential that today’s creative individuals become intimate with all the creative and marketing possibilities available online.

We live in a global marketplace were social networking sites like Facebook have now reached, and surpassed the 150,000,000 member mark. If it were it’s own country, it would be 8th in the world in size after Bangladesh. An mind blowing thought, yes? A captive, online audience, all with six degrees of separation.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to me.

Check back soon. I promise I’ll expand on this.

Jason Dauphinee

What I’d like to do now is share with you a story about a very good friend of mine, also a local Art Director/Graphic Designer, about an upsetting situation he recently faced:

I very good friend of mine, I’ve known for 20 years, a designer, who works at a well paying steady job as a designer, has done free logos for a group of people, who I also know very well, recently laid off from the same big company he works for. I might add also these folks received hefty severance packages from their lost jobs.

He doesn’t understand why this would be a problem, and why I am upset with him. In his mind, he’s just doing his friends a favour to help them out. Oblivious to how it hurts my business and the trust I have in him as a friend.

Sadly I’ve seen situations like this far too often. While I’m sure the “friend” designing the free logos is trying to “help” his recently layoff friends, he has definitely stepped over the ethical line. As designers, art directors, writers, etc., we value our craft as do our clients. We’ve worked for years to finely tune our skills and built a level of confidence and expertise for our clients. When someone from our own industry moves in and starts giving away work (to a friend or not) they completely de-value everything we stand for and have worked so hard to achieve.

Secondly, this individual has also stepped over a personal line in my opinion as well. He currently works as a designer, and I’m using that term loosely to describe him now, yet somehow didn’t feel unethical about taking work away from a close, longtime friend who makes his living on freelance work.

I hope the friendship can survive.

In one of my first jobs as a production artist I remember my boss used to hang a sign in his from office that read, “I’m sorry my friends, I have to charge you, my friends don’t shop here”

Comments?

At the moment, the entire global economy is in a state of flux with the waves of financial hardship flattening even the Goliaths of old. Years of unchecked, overspending has finally caught up with both the corporate world as well as “John Q. Public”. The last few months have seen tens of thousands of layoffs across North American and the world. The US automotive and banking industries have been forced to through themselves on the steps of the US capitol building in the hopes of a bailout.

What does all this mean to business?

I can really only speak from the perspective that I’m most familiar with, and that’s the design and advertising industry. I have now worked on the agency side for well over a decade and have dealt with small business clients as well as large, multi-national, multi-million dollar corporations. With the financial landscaping changing as it is, small and large companies alike have been forced, like never before, to really analyze their internal processes and in this case, we’re talking marketing and communications.

In the past companies were happy, if not expected, to sign on for 3 – 5 year contracts with large advertising/design agencies. With the large overhead, and quite often, flawed process and work-flow business would pay and over inflated premium for their creative, branding and strategic products.

Naturally, as times get tighter, these same business have really begun to analyze the bottom line vs. the value added. In turn as the taps have started by clients, larger agencies have begun laying off talented staff which has now flooded the freelance market with more affordable and practical freelance professionals. What has resulted is a paradigm shift in how businesses approach their creative, marketing and communications needs. Businesses are now choosing to end AOR (agency of record) agreements in favour of using a list of “preferred suppliers”. To quote a friend and colleague, “get your goat, without the bloat”.

So why the hell am I writing about this? Like I stated earlier, I too worked for years on the agency side only to have been laid off over the last few weeks for the exact reasons I’ve outlined above.

We can’t stop things from changing, the key is to see them coming, adapt, and move forward with renewed passion and sense of optimism.

Jason Dauphinee

That being said we’ve all been given that brief, and sometime between the boardroom table and our drawing table we’re struck by creative genius. Unfortunately, that’s not the majority of the time. The inspiration for a new job can sometime take time, not always a lot, but more often then not, the stress of deadlines can sometimes paralyze us from our most creative work.

Here are some tips I’ve collected over the years to help me in the tough times:

1. Stop fighting. Allow yourself to BE inspired.
2. Imagine yourself floating, watching yourself from above.
3. Listen to music, or listen to complete silence.
4. Sketch and brainstorm with reckless abandon
5. Don’t afraid to be bold.
6. Think of something you’ve never tried and DO it.
7. Think of something you love and remember why you love it.
8. Think of the opposite.
9. Take a break. No really, I mean it. Take a walk, watch a movie, phone a friend…
10. Don’t be afraid to fail or to be criticized.
11. What is the benefit of the benefit (Thanks Rod)
12. Look back at your first idea. It’s probably the right one.
13. Try to get back to what you enjoy about your art.

There are thousands to choose from I’m sure, but whenever I get stuck one them is sure to do the trick.

Good luck.

Jason Dauphinee

So, how do you “have” ideas? Sit about and wait for them to pop into your head? If only most of us had the luxury to do so. No, for most of us, ideas have to be squeezed out of us every day. To stand up to this challenge, you need to arm yourself with some good tools.

As if by magic

There is great prestige attached to the word “creative.” Creative people apparently magic up ideas—wonderful solutions to the most complex problems—with the ease of a skilled magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The gathered crowd goes wild. What skill. How do they do it?

Well, I’m afraid I’m here to shatter that illusion. It’s not magic. These people are no different from you and I. They just have a different way of looking at problems and solving them. The good news is, they use tools that anyone can use.

A brief brief

At the beginning of most web development projects, there is a brief. In general, it’s not the best starting point for any project. Most briefs are not brief—they tend to run into several pages and are more akin to functional specifications or requirements documents. They are not the stuff of inspiration.

When I receive a brief, I try to get to the very heart of the problem, and rewrite it as an idea brief.

An idea brief is a sentence, or two, that sums up the project and frames it as a problem statement. A question that needs an answer. Something like:

We need to redesign our news service to appeal to a more global audience.

or

How do we engage an older audience for our social networking product?

This simple sentence is the question you are trying to answer and should be used as a springboard throughout idea generation. Once you’ve got one, and are happy with it, print it out and stick it on the wall. Constantly refer to it throughout the development of the idea or product. Does your solution answer that question? It’s so easy to get bogged down in the mire of documentation—it’s your job to pull yourself out of that, and the idea brief is the perfect tool to do it.

Structured ideas

So now you have your idea brief, where do you go from here?

We can’t rely on sparks of inspiration for ideas. How many times have you sat down in front of a blank piece of paper, or a blank computer screen and thought “I can’t do it today—nothing is happening. Right, I’ll play on the Wii instead.”

Most of the time, ideas need to be worked at. They need to be crafted: cajoled into shape by a dedicated, passionate team. We have one good tool to help us with that: ideas sessions.

Ideas sessions

We’ve probably all done these. They were called brainstorms until recently.

I used to loathe the idea of ideas sessions. Surely it’s a recipe for disaster? Get a bunch of people in a room to solve a problem. Everyone will have a difference of opinion, but you need to come to a common solution at the end of it that everyone agrees to. It hardly ever worked.

There are several things that need to be in place for a successful, productive ideas session.

The project team

Ideas sessions are a group activity that takes place with key members of the project team. This is important. In order for the ideas to be taken seriously, they need buy-in from the people who matter: the CEO or marketing director. Without that internal buy-in on the client side, an idea, no-matter how great, will almost always fail.

A good facilitator

Another important member of an ideas session is the facilitator. They should be trained in creative facilitation and are there to coax and squeeze the best ideas the team has to offer. They should remain impartial though—they’re not there to judge the ideas, but to apply the grease to the creative cogs.

Running order

I know it can be restrictive, but these sessions need a running order. People like structure—even “creative” people—no matter what they tell you! A typical running order for an ideas session might be:

1. Attendees introductions / ice-breaker
2. Reveal the brief—the aim of the day (the idea brief)
3. The rules of brainstorming
4. First burst
5. Stimulus—the Four Rs
6. Passionometer

Rules.

Following attendee introductions and revealing the idea brief, the facilitator lays down the law. The rules of brainstorming are important for keeping everything running smoothly during the session. They are:

1. All ideas are equal
2. We’re here to have lots of ideas
3. No judging
4. Analyze the ideas later
5. Everyone’s equal (no pulling rank)
6. Have fun
7. Keep to time
8. One idea at a time

First burst

Next up is the first burst. A first burst aims to get those really obvious, preconceived ideas out and on paper before moving on. Everyone will come to an ideas session with some preconceived ideas of how the project should look. Generally, they are the most obvious ideas and they will have been worked out to some detail. More often than not, they are the safest, least risky ideas.

The facilitator should record ideas and encourage attendees to speak up, but the important thing is to not get hung up on one direction or another. The aim is to have a lot of ideas. It really is about quantity, and not quality. At least, not yet.

Stimulus

Once the first burst out of the way, and all the preconceived and obvious ideas have been recorded, it’s the facilitator’s job to begin coaxing the ideas out of the attendees by using stimulus. The Four Rs are very useful tools for steering idea generation without a session becoming stuck down a certain line of thinking.

The Four Rs

I mentioned the Four Rs as tools for generating ideas. They are used by a facilitator in an ideas session to move the attendees from one idea to the next so they don’t begin to analyze or judge previous ideas, or become stale. The Four Rs are:

Revolution

Revolution is turning an idea on its head. Taking assumptions and reversing or removing them. E.g., a pub has four walls and a roof. What if it didn’t have walls, but still had a roof? Or to frame it in web development—and this is a great example of what 37signals did with Basecamp—what if our desktop software could live on the web?

Re-expression

Re-express the idea in a different way or from a different point of view. This is a fantastic vehicle for putting yourself in your user’s shoes. E.g., what if you were six years old and your parents were buying a booster seat for the car for you. What makes a cool booster seat in your eyes?

Related worlds

Think of a related world and use ideas from that world. E.g., cooking and gardening. What elements of gardening could be used to sell more recipe books?

Random links

Forcing a connection with a random object. This can lead to some of the greatest ideas. Random links often generate ideas which are off-brief, but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, the most truly innovative ideas can come with random links. I’m sure Citroën designers were using random links when they decided to make the 2CV car look like a snail.

Loads of great ideas, what now?

The facilitator will record all the ideas on a single sheet of paper. After the session is finished, the facilitator will go through all of the ideas one by one and the group will rate them by the Passionometer (a fancy name for some stickers). One sticker for “not feeling it,” and three for “wow, this is great.”

The most highly rated ideas are shortlisted and then enter the next phase of development. That next stage could involve other ideas sessions, but more focused around one idea. The aim is to focus the idea down to specific, actionable problems or statements that allow a development team to take that idea and follow it through.

A flash of inspiration

Billy Connelly once said, of the House of Lords in the UK, “It’s a place where good ideas go to die.”

I think he was referring to the notion that ideas (in his example, legislation) can be watered down far too much in a forum of debate. To discuss, or hone, an idea at length is to destroy it. True, this can, and does, happen all too regularly. But, armed with the right tools, and developed in a structured environment, ideas can be realized to their full potential.

The flash of inspiration is important, and so is the final product, but pay attention to the bit in between.

by Mark Boulton