Kwame Busia

I’ve decided that I need a redesign. I’m going to give myself the task of rebranding and redesigning my whole operation. New logo, new website, new business cards everything.

The problem I have with the setup I’ve got, is that I don’t feel my site or my logo or any of my current branding give a good idea of who I am, what I do and where I’m coming from. At the moment my site, by my own admission is a mishmash of photos, logos, graphics, cgi etc.

The thing is I created everything on my page, but I don’t feel it’s clear that if someone came to my page, that I’m a multidisciplinary designer and that I work across several types of creative fields.

Similarly it’s different from working in mixed media. I don’t have finished pieces which are a mixture of say illustration and photography and graphics. Sometimes I do photography, sometimes I do graphics. They are very different fields visually and making a cohesive place to show them all off in a way that I’m happy is proving trickier than I thought.

I’ve got some ideas rattling around in my Moleskine, the only thing is that working for yourself, designing for yourself can be tougher than designing for a client, you’re your own worst enemy, especially if you’re a perfectionist.

So to tackle this I’m going to start by doing two things.
Clarifying my process and beliefs and approach to design and creation, and find the simplest most concise way of expressing this to others.

Next I’ll create a framework, a brand and identity for myself which revolves around that, perhaps even keeping some kind of easily identifiable underlying unity between all the things I create from here on in.

It’ll be tough, but I like a challenge.
I’ll see how this one plays out.

I’m off to enjoy some more Alan Wake on my new ‘Stealthbox’!

Sorry for the lack of post as of late, I’ve been so busy doing all kinds of things sometimes I find I hard to just settle down and write something. Then I figured settling down to write something, even why I haven’t been writing is better than nothing. I’ve got a lot of projects I’m trying to get completed, which can be a lot trickier than I thought it might be. There’s never as much time out there as you think, it goes so fast and seems to go even faster when you’re concentrating on something.

I’ll be back shortly when I have some more focused topics to write about!

Until then…

Isn’t it funny how sometimes when you’re under pressure, thoughts and ideas of all the cool stuff you could do come a mile a minute, then when you have all the time in the world…

(cue tumbleweed)

Nothing…?

Maybe something to do with being under pressure or percieving yourself to be under pressure stimulates a need for ideas and thoughts to synthesize in creative ways, as opposed to when you’re at rest (or have lots of time) when the brain doesn’t (or doesn’t have to) make connections that fast.

Perhaps that’s why giving yourself deadlines and sticking to them seems to work quite well, rather than leaving a project with an open ended completion date. Also giving yourself less time that than would comfortably required seems to be what is necessary to perform creative miracles.

Also with less time, making a decision becomes more important. With more time to consider something you can succomb to consideration paralysis where you end up not making much progress at all.

So in summary the equation appears to be:

less time + more pressure + important decisions made quickly and decisively = more ideas.

As for the quality of ideas, its hard to say if they are better or worse, but there are definately more, which might be useful for you.

Check out the next post ‘Becoming Mr. Scott – Why Giving Yourself Less Time Helps You Work Miracles’.

Every now and again you’ll run into one of THOSE clients. You know the type. They don’t really understand that a designer is there to just design. They’ll try to squeeze extra tasks out of you then drag their heels when you send them the bill. Time to pay up, son. Here are some of the top sly and sneaky tricks clients like to play on designers to get them to do more than has been actually agreed!

Making You Write Copy.

I can only shrug my shoulders. I’m not Jon Hamm and this isn’t the set of Madmen. I’m not trained in writing copy. Look out for this one, because it’ll creep up on you if you don’t pay attention. Some clients will come to you with nothing. No logo, no branding, no tagline. They’ll say to you, “The logo will go there and so will the tagline- in the meantime can you just put a little slogan or something there, just to see what it looks like?” Next thing you hear, they’re calling you up irate that they ‘don’t like the tagline you put there’. Well were designers, we design things, we don’t write catchy marketing copy and we don’t write jingles either. If you’re a designer, it’s not your job to come up with the marketing blurb or a snappy tagline or even the company name.

Making You Design Their Brand Identity.

When a client comes to you with no branding or logo, watch out. As a web designer, you’re kind of like an architect. You design the space or container into which whomever is going to inhabit, but primarily an architect designs the general shape and layout of a room. The interior designer is responsible for the furnishings. Designing a company’s brand and identity when they are not billed as two separate jobs is like being an architect AND interior designer, not exactly impossible, but not really your job either.

You really just want to design the site and place to content into it in a style that is consistent with their existing identity, but if you see they’re trying to change too many colours and fonts too often, beware, they might be trying to get you to do two jobs for the price of one.

Making You Proofread.

This happens when your client’s content is handed to you with incorrect punctuation, poor grammar, and bad spelling. The problem is, you can’t really ignore the issue because that undoes all the hard work of making the site nicely designed only to display shoddy looking content, similarly you don’t want to risk offending your client by pointing out his or her spelling mistakes, pretty much the same way you don’t want to be up all night looking for where to put your full stops and exclamation marks

Making You Handle their SEO.

I am not a web designer per say, really more of a designer who makes websites occasionally. Naturally through running a website you begin to understand SEO until it’s like tying shoelaces, you wonder how you ever have not known it. It must be said however, that Search Engine Optimization is something that is most efficient when done from the outset. That is, you build it into the design and the content. It’s really difficult when a client sneakily gets you to go through all the content they have given you and ask you to optimize it for keywords and keyword phrases. Unless you’ve agreed to offer such services, it’s probably in your best interest not to get bamboozled into doing it. You end up with more rewriting to do than a scriptwriter.

Making You A PR Consultant.

As a designer, sometimes we can recieve all the information and resources we require directly from the client, but on occasion we’ll have to work with and liase with other external companies to get the job done. The only problem with this is sometimes your client will leave the responsibility of co-ordinating all the different companies that THEY hire to you. They expect you to call up the web host, AND the printer AND the illustrator, only to find the client hasn’t told the illustrator they’ve changed their mind about something and now the images don’t match or something crazy like that. They also want you to contact marketers and publisher to let them know about the website and set up adverstising and listings and such.

As designers we need to be very firm about what it is that we are actually going to do, and it’s preferable if we just stick to design. That is what we do, we solve design problems. We cannot handle this AND manage an entire marketing campaign and order the hors d’oeuvres for your party too. There’s a limit, and if you know how to firmly (but nicely) draw a line in the sand with regards to the services you provide, you can focus on delivering what you do best, top notch design.

If you often find it difficult to concentrate whilst you’re at work because you’re having so many exciting ideas, creative thoughts and possibilities running through your head, then you either need to change your line of work or find a way to make it so that those ideas go somewhere.

You have to take the leap and make a change that will allow you to express yourself and make and impact.

Do what YOU want to be doing.

Imagine what it would be like spending your days making exciting things happen? Turning thoughts in your head and sketches on napkins into a reality and the whole while you’re having the best time of your life doing it.

Now stop imagining and make it happen.

The world is filled with many different types of people who all see things in different way. Additionally we have people around us who understand us and the things we do as well as people who don’t get us. We also have people who trust our judgement and support us, then there are people who don’t support us. Unfortunately there are also people you just can’t trust and who will deliberately give you bad advice, discourage you, sabotage your efforts or set you up to fail. Sadly, sometimes even the people who are on our side can inadvertently cause us problems further down the line by not being fully honest and open with their opinions or by trying to spare our feelings or by trying to be good friends.

What we have to understand is that humans are very complex in terms of relationships. Sometimes if you try and reach for the stars, you’ll alienate those people around you who are giving you support today. Sadly todays friend can be tomorrows enemy.

Similarly sometimes you’ll find yourself disliking someone or something simply because it’s in a different realm to yours. Maybe they’re in the same field but at a higher status than you so you have all these reasons why you don’t like them, but then when your status elevates to their level, you realize they were exactly the same as you all along.

The kinds of people that support you and are happy for you, whether you’re rich or poor, for better for worse, are few and far between. These are the people who might insult your work, but at the end of the day you know they know what they’re talking about, and they’re doing it for your benefit. These are people you would give your last dollar to because you know they would do the same for you.

Which brings me to my point.

When I’m about to undertake a new personal project, something that has worked for me is not telling anyone anything about what I’m doing unless it’s absolutely necessary or unavoidable.

When I have a new idea and I’m tingling with excitement about it, I find I can get a lot more mileage out of my initial motivation if I don’t tell anyone about it. I just don’t like hearing all the ways it won’t work, and I don’t like explaining an unfinished idea over and over again. I prefer it to be done, or as close to completion as possible, then I let people know about it.

The only exception is perhaps telling the kind of people I outlined above, the ones that have got your back- and even then, I’d only tell them when I’m around the 80% complete mark.

Having a support structure is great, and with many endeavours it really is necessary to know there are people looking out for you when your back is against the wall. But sometimes it can be like riding a bike with stabilizers, it’s a little too safe. You can project can quickly become about what other people think and their reaction to your endeavour rather than staying true to your original vision.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but sometimes signing a non-disclosure agreement with yourself is the best thing you can do.

I don’t know who came up with the idea that thinking doesn’t take energy and being creative is easy, because it absolutely one hundred and ten percent is the opposite.

Real hard thinking consumes alot of energy. You’ll be left with your stomach rumbling and feeling totally drained of energy. That’s how it works. Keeping yourself well rested and well fed will win you half the battle when it comes to keeping the ideas flowing.

People hear the word ‘creative’ and think it’s playing with crayons and such. We need to re-educate the world about exactly what we do and how we do it.