Kwame Busia

There are no excuses for spec work, period. I’m tired of hearing these excuses about how it’s a good way to build up work for your portfolio, it isn’t. Spec Work isn’t a good way to build experience, because it’s not a real world experience. When you deal with a client, you take in their needs and give them a result suited to them.

It’s like designing and making for them a finely tailored suit, you take their exact measurements, choose the fabrics that are appropriate and give them something that fits perfectly for them.

On most of these spec sites, you’re really working without that essential designer-client dialogue. You’re given a list of instructions which quite often is incomplete and then left to battle it out against other people who won’t hesitate to steal your ideas if they see a client show any kind of positive reaction.

What we’re left with is a mish-mash of free fonts, poor clip-art, irrelevant logos on non-sequitur branding where none of the elements tie together. And this is what hurts me.

It makes me sad that because of money, clients are willing to accept work that quite often sabotages whatever endeavour they are trying to pursue.

It saddens me that clients aren’t advised and guided and taught the process or working with a designer, what they should expect and how to develop the eye for quality work. To me, it just isn’t right that a client walks away happy with a piece of terrible work blissfully unaware that they’re making a fool of themselves.

Why does it bother me so much?

Simple. Because I CARE.

I CARE that a clients needs are taken care of fully. It’s important to me that the client understands and appreciates the thought that has gone into their branding and the reasons why it is of a BENEFIT to their activities.

I don’t mind talking with a client for hours explaining good typography vs. bad typography, helping them to see what a poor quality logo looks like in comparison to a professional logo.

It’s a real shame that for the sake of a few pennies, everybody loses out. Trained designers and designers who actually care about what they’re doing have to deal with the degradation of their artform.

This post is running on way longer than I meant it too and I’m rambling so I’ll leave it for now but guaranteed I have a lot more hot air on this subject. Watch out.

For some reason, I find it really difficult to come up with any sort of good ideas whilst I am wearing a suit. I mean, I’m really very handsome when I’m in a suit but I can’t come up with any ideas anymore, so I’d rather wear my casual stuff.

Well, I did a bit of research and the finding blew my hair back (what little of it there is). I am most creative when I am wearing my gray limited edition GAP 1969 T-Shirt, loose-fit jeans and Converse All-Stars Chuck Taylors (the low kind, not the boot kind). I found idea generation round about 85% without the Chucks and between a whopping 91 and 93% with them on!

What’s your creativity uniform? Do you wearing certain things makes you more creative?

Ideas can come at any moment. Depending on how you choose to express yourself creatively, they can come in any form also. My advice in situations like this is to have as many ways to capture your ideas as close to hand as possible. Primarily I think and create visually, but I sometimes make music also. If I have an idea for a song, I have a voice memo app close to hand that I can hum into.

If it’s a poem or song lyrics or an idea for a movie or TV show, then I have a sketchbook or a notetaking app on my iPad ready to go.

The reason I say have them close at hand is because some ideas decay fast. They longer and idea has to linger before its captured the more it gets diluted and corrupted by other thoughts after which it is not as pure and ‘Eureka’ as when you first thought of it.

If you happen to know any single ideas floating around your head, what you could do is hold an idea dinner party (in your head of course).
You know that silly idea in the corner of the room over there? Introduce it the the ultra-sensible idea you’ve been talking to for the last five minutes, she’ll have some fun and thank you for it. Maybe in a year or two you’ll be asked to be god-parent to their half-silly, half-sensible but very well adjusted offspring idea, which just might set the world alight.

Just a thought.

In a previous post I was talking about quality versus quantity in regards to coming up with ideas and stuff like that.

This time I’ll talk about something a bit weird which I do in my head which seems to work for me which maybe will work for you too.

It’s something I call, ‘Letting it bake’.

Whenever I come across an idea that I like or a find interesting, I think of all of it’s components as ingredients, and I envision it as a cake mixture in my mind. It doesn’t have to be cake, I just happen to like cake. You can envision it as a pie or soufflé if that’s more comfortable for you.

Anyway, I envision a massive oven, and I throw that cake / pie / soufflé mix in there. Then I let it bake. That means you step away from the oven, leave the idea alone. When it’s ready to come to fruition, you’ll be able to smell it, and then you can take it out of the oven and share slices with whoever wants a piece.

Never underestimate the power of the subconscious mind.

Silly things like this, really work. When I say leave the idea, I don’t mean hours or minutes (although sometimes it can be that fast) I’m talking about days, weeks, months even.

You’ll find miraculously that ideas you ‘bake’ are never forgotten, they linger until you discover that last piece of the puzzle, that tiny element that was preventing you from going all the way with the idea in the first place.

Try it.

P.s, the reason I don’t usually recommend envisioning a soufflé is because soufflés tend to be notoriously difficult to get right, they are full of air and also because cake is sweet.

Thankyou for listening.

As I’m writing this I’m looking for a nice theme for this blog, but I’m getting really irritated that almost all the designs have practically the same layout and that annoying glossy button look to it. In my honest opinion, I think we did that, we enjoyed it, now it’s time to wipe the shine off things, no more glossy edges.

Also relax with the font replacement. Unless you’re really going to push typography on the web forward and use a font that’ll actually make way more of an impact than a standard web font, let’s calm down with the sIFR and the Cufon.

Another thing winding me up is how designers all have stuff like “Hello My Name Is Such and Such, I make cool stuff.” or “Hello My Name is Josh, I am a designer.” I don’t really know why I find it so annoying, it just feels so cliche, try-hard and hipster-ish, a,most like when you go to one of those trendy organic coffee stores and they write about how great your coffee is in a patronisingly conversational way like “Hello. We make coffee. Fresh. In fat we get up every morning to pick every bean indvidually and…”

Ah, shut up.

If Ffffound, NOTCOT, DesignYouTrust, SwissMiss, Designboom and Behance are the design blog ‘A-List’, the main streets, then Tumblr blogs are the backstreets. Actually sometimes I call it Jumblr rather than Tumblr because its like a jumble sale in there. Also the smaller designblogs that are hosted on Blogger and WordPress.com – those are like the underground, the streets. They seem a bit seedier because they’re not as polished, not as slick, but the content can be purer, more raw. You find all kinds of little things that get buried by the bigger boys.

This is something I reverse engineered from my boss at a job I worked at once.
You don’t necsessarily need to know how to do whatever it is you are trying to do.

There is ALWAYS someone out there who knows how to do it for you.

All you have to do is be clear enough about what it is you are trying to do,
and connect yourself with those that know how to do it well.
Oh and sometimes, give them money.

Simplicity is simply asking, how simple can I make simple?

Let your mind chew on that.

There’s a reason I don’t trust people who want stuff for free. It’s best not to place alot of faith in people that want stuff for free. These are people who don’t understand how life works, they aways want something for nothing, like they are entitled to it. These people were the kids at school who had three lollipops and will still come after yours. They don’t understand that something doesn’t come from nothing, that if someone else puts their time and energy in, it’s necessary to be thankful for it. No, these people act like you putting your time in for them is what you should have done all along like some kind of doormat or base slave.

How can you sit there and not pay for your fonts and then be critical of the guy who made the free font you have used in all of your low-grade work? Where is your pride?