creative briefing

I’ve been busy. Well, that’s a little bit of an understatement. But nonetheless, I’ve been busy. Our clients must have read my post on things I like to do with my downtime, and decided to contact me – all at once. But naturally, no complaints. They do pay the bills after all.

While juggling a dozen or so active projects, I’ve also had my hands tied with some big tings (that’s “big things” for those of you who are not “wit it”). Part of this pocket of work includes cleaning up, reorganizing, and formalizing the structure of my personal business and that of my agency. It’s a fairly tedious and administrative process, and I’ve only just scratched the tip of this dirty, dirty iceberg. However, I wanted to share with all of you some of the things that have been on my to-do list lately as I think it holds a lot of value to freelancepreneurs (my corny amalgamation of freelancer + entrepreneur) that are just starting out, or have been running the show informally for some time and want to look at formalizing some of it.

The story thus far…

Let me take a step back and give you a better picture what my setup. I’m a web designer architect who owns and runs a creative agency (a corporation) that does web, print and brand services for small to medium sized businesses. While I own the agency, I’m not formally an employee of it (don’t worry about the technicalities of why). And neither are my partners who also own equal parts of the business. Up until recently, I was really just a ‘floater’ who was raking in revenue from a corporation without formally belonging to any company.

I hired an accountant at the beginning of the year to help me take care of my personal income tax filings (one of my smartest moves to date). He informed me that, to play nice with the government, there are a handful of housekeeping items I needed to do that would inevitably have me formalize a freelancing business on my own (separate from my agency/corporation). Hopefully this list will help out some of you, as it was certainly an eye-opener for me.

Note #1: The general concepts are universal, but some of the specific amounts and rules will definitely vary for places outside of Canada. So if you’re not operating in Canada, be sure reference your local set of regulations.

Note #2: I’m not an accountant and I’m not a lawyer. Please bear that in mind as I try to describe to you my accontant’s recommendations to the best of my understanding and interpretation (which hopefully isn’t far off from the truth). :)

Here we go! Grab your taskpad and follow the checklist after the jump!

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The design phase of a website is a fairly standard process for me. I design mock-ups in Photoshop, export them into gif/jpg/png, and send them to the client for approval. Once approved, I slice and dice it and HTMLarize and CSSasize it into an actual webpage. There’s nothing out of the ordinary with this process, and I think it’s what most designers do as well.

I have, however, encountered a few problems with presenting mock-ups to clients. As web-savvy individuals, it’s quite easy to grasp and understand the concept that mock-ups are simply static images that depict what a site would look like. What I’ve found though is that, for everyone else, the idea is incredibly difficult to wrap their mind around.

I always make it as clear as I can that what they are looking at is a static and flat image of their potential site design. Still, I always get questions and comments around:

• How do I edit the text on this?
• How come I can’t highlight text?
• The website is too small (occurs because the browser has shrunken the image by default)!
• I don’t like the white space that surrounds the site.
• Can we center the site?

To some extent, I can understand the confusion. They’re looking at something that looks like a website that is inside a browser. But oddly enough… it doesn’t act like a website. What’s going on?!

Today’s appeal to the wisdom of the crowds:

How do you present mock-ups to your clients?

The following thoughts on how to improve my situation have already occurred to me:

• Place the image on a webpage? People can probably better identify an image when it appears as they normally see them.
• Use some kind of web-based application to showcase mock-ups? It reinforces the idea that it’s something on ‘display’ and is not a live example.
• Export mock-ups in PDF? That way they’re not viewing it in a browser, so there’s less expectations for it to function like a website.
• Skip photoshop and design in HTML? I actually used to do this before I became more comfortable with Photoshop. There are a few debates on this one, and I think it comes down to whatever process best enables your creativity.

Your wisdom on what to do with my troublesome client proved to be so impressive that I wanted to throw this one to you as well. So, how do you manage mock-ups?

Even if you’re not a designer, I’d love to hear about how you present drafts to your clients. Go!

Last week I drove across town to meet with a potential client only to be patronized for 2 hours. Rather than embracing my youthfulness and that of my team, the client saw it as a detrimental disadvantage that could lead to the downfall of the project at hand and inevitably his business. In fact, through the few encounters we’ve had through email, phone, and in-person meetings, it’s clear he’s already labelled us a group of fresh grads simply killing time building a creative agency while we wait for the perfect corporate gig to come along. Because that’s what all fresh grads do, right?

Conversation after conversation, we’ve continued to jump through the hoops to offer reassurance that we are indeed a professional and committed creative agency. Reference lists, case studies, contracts in blood – nothing has really deterred this client from treating us like we were his nephews looking for something crafty to do between airings of Sesame Street and Full House.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable and understandable that a client needs a bit of reassurance before engaging a party for services and in most cases, I’m more than happy to provide evidence when questions of past successes arise. However, I can say for certain that it’s not common for our commitment and dedication to the business, the client, and even the craft to be questioned. It’s almost insulting.

The million dollar question of this post:

Where do you draw the line when working to gain the faith, trust and respect of your clients?

Metrics, past work, and written contracts are fair game. Beyond that, I’m inclined to say that, as the client, you must take a leap of faith. It’s the same leap of faith you take when you drop off your clothes to the dry cleaners, trusting that they will still be open for business the next day. And for the same reason you don’t question your dry cleaner on whether they’ll ditch their cleaning business tomorrow to pursue their real dream job of touring with Cirque du Soleil, you don’t question the commitment of your creative agency to delivering creative – especially when they’ve demonstrated a strong track record of happy clients that already implicitly serve as evidence of the commitment in question.

If you don’t respect the party you’re engaging enough to take that small remaining leap of faith, then you’re better off working with someone else. That’s my take on it.

What would you do?

A difficult challenge for music performers is to communicate their talents in a visual manner. While I thoroughly enjoy simple and intimate acoustic performances, most others need to have their other senses tickled a bit to get the full experience. Music videos accomplish this by pairing songs with short movies that visually relay the stories, messages, and meanings behind the song. Concerts on the other hand, typically do this with lighting effects.

Two Tuesdays ago I spent my night at the Danforth Music Hall to watch Lifehouse on their Toronto stop. The concert was amazing, but that’s besides the point. In addition to all the auditory sensations that night, what really caught my eye were the lights. Alternating palettes of vibrant colors that were tied together perfectly gave the concert a stunning light show that truly augmented the whole musical experience. The visual stimulation was like porn for artists and designers in the form of bright, bright lights.

Naturally, I had to share it with all of you. Hope it brings you some inspiration!

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Like visiting your old high school. Like looking back at your photo albums. Like cleaning out your closet. It’s always great to revisit the past and see where everything started. There’s just something about dousing yourself in memories of what used to be that suddenly makes what is make so much sense. And for a moment, you catch yourself feeling like a kid again – and enjoying every moment of it.

For me, it started with drawing. Before marketing, entrepreneurship, web design, the internet even – there was just drawing. Unfortunately I sort of fell out of it midway through highschool and traded in my 2B pencil for a mouse, keyboard, and 56k dial-up connection. It was a natural evolution for me, but still, it’s always fun to get back to the basics.

A few weeks ago, in preparation for the much-anticipated Game 4 of the Raptors vs. Magics NBA playoff game (which we scored tickets to), my girlfriend and I got the kooky idea of making a sign. Not just any sign though, a legendary sign. For me, it was a chance to dust off the old artist wings I put away so long ago and really get back into what has essentially shaped me into who I am today.

We took pictures along the way and because I’ve always been fascinated at “the making of” processes, I thought I would share them with you. And plus, we were both fairly proud of our work at the end of the day, so we thought it’d be something worth showing off a bit. :)

Enjoy! Drawings by yours truly, coloring by the lovely and talented Cheryl.

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