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Protecting Your Work
One almost famous photographer I know put out a remarkable self-promotion piece. It was a calendar so simple and stunning, everyone wanted one. It was a series of posters with spot varnishes printed in full color on 100 pound coated cover. Being a professional (before he sucked everything up as nose candy), he stamped a copyright mark on each and every image used to produce those promotional pieces. About 6 months later, he received a phone call from a printer two thousand miles away. “Say, I’ve got these stripped up negatives here and I don’t see a copyright release. I’ll need that before I can proceed with the job.” It seems the guy who printed the job for the photographer liked the posters so much, he decided to reprint them quietly for his own promotion, without the knowledge or permission of the photographer. “Hell, no, I’m not giving you my permission.” Oh, to be a fly on the wall when those two guys came together.
Advocate For Yourself: That's Self PROMOTION
This is a group of Chindoya street performers in Okubo, Tokyo, promoting the opening of a new pachinko parlor. Pachinko is a popular arcade game in Japan and, if you know the rules, you can make big bucks by cashing in your little steel balls for the right premium. Promotions attract attention, even if it is just the chin and don sounds of a Chindoya band's instruments. Discerning between a marketing PROMOTION and designing promotional materials is frequently an issue for in-house corporate designers. “I am the marketing manager, therefore, I control everything about this product, especially the promotion, and that includes advertising design.” Whoa, Horsey. Management pays too much attention to marketing managers and too little attention to separating personal preferences from professional choices when formulating product parameters. You know that old Stan Freberg song, “Everybody wants to be an Art Director, everybody wants to call the shots.” Art Directors and Designers unite: only you’ve been adequately trained to make decisions concerning aesthetics, so don’t let your marketing manager get giddy with power when it comes to PROMOTION. You’re not doing him or your company any favor by rolling over and playing dumb while he calls the aesthetic shots. Promotion is NOT choosing typefaces, working up concepts, or designing ads. Promotion refers to the program used to stimulate demand for a product.
There’s a small town in Ohio where a lot of big advertising takes place. It's also where most of the talent booking takes place, including freelance design and art direction. I only know this because somebody I grew up with is a male actor (very vain, very fickle, very average) who occasionally appears in commercials. I learned the same thing from Barbara Bills, a seasoned professional and highly efficient production manager for more than a few big ad agencies in her time. She said to me once, “I get lots of calls from freelancers who want to show me their portfolios and I’m always glad to give them a few tips when I have time. But sometimes, I am absolutely baffled when they show up with no idea what they’re selling. They aren’t sure what their specialty is; they like doing one thing but have no samples. They want logo work, but they design silly little detailed logos that no one would be able to reproduce. Didn’t anybody tell them that a corporate identity has to work in print as well as on the web?” Before you go out marketing your services, make sure you know what you want to sell.
PRICE: Is it RIGHT or is it WRONG?
In the best of worlds, product launches are thoughtful, labor intensive risk-taking with marketing strategies firmly in place. Before investing in a new venture, four key marketing factors are carefully defined: Product, Position, Price and Promotion. Get any one of these wrong, and results will be less than stellar. Whether it’s widgets, consumer goods, or professional services, knowing the 4Ps will achieve maximum results with minimum effort. Ethics should be a part of pricing, but that is not always the case.
Here's an example; genital herpes is a painful, recurrent and debilitating disease that still has no cure. A friend of mine described it as being on fire from the inside out. When a repressive agent for the disease was discovered, a marketing team used focus groups to decide price. Questionnaires asked, “How much would you pay for relief from this condition?” Respondants answered “$100 a day” and “everything I have”. The questionnaire continued with price ranges, feeling out the market for how much is too much and what the market would bear.
“Hello. Is there anyone in particular I might show my portfolio? I’m freelance.” This was my opener when calling a large agency where chances of showing my work were slim to none. Inevitably, the person answering the phone was taken aback that I did not seek to hide my purpose or intent; plus I was asking for their help in reaching the right person. Ad agencies will frequently assign portfolio reviews to one art director who will either let you pass go or dismiss you with a handshake, so it’s not always possible to research the facts. Getting your work out in front of the hiring public is a task you will face for most of your professional life, and the cold call is a key point to master. For some folks, making a cold call is possibly the worst feeling in the world. They are, afterall, risking immediate rejection and that hurts. It shouldn’t hurt, though, because the basis for rejection is nothing personal—they don’t know enough about you to make it personal. Keep that in mind and fear will fly out the window.
Marketing Maniac TERMS
Sometimes marketing people seem more interested in doing my job than their own. They yearn for the fun stuff; what they don’t realize is it’s only fun when an expert is doing it. Like watching a professional ice skater, it looks easy until you don the skates and land flat and hard on the ice. Marketing lands flat and hard in art direction–so I’ll share a few things I’ve learned about the 4Ps to keep marketing focused on their marketing jobs. Use these examples to lead them by the nose back to what they should be doing. You can also apply what you learn about the 4Ps to marketing your skills as a professional designer.
Marketing students are educated in the four Ps: Product, Price, Positioning and Promotion. I don’t have to tell you they sometimes get confused, especially about the last one, thinking they have all the skills necessary to concept and create promotional stuff because they took a couple of graphic courses in school. Knowing the Ps will help keep your marketing co-workers focused on work within their skill set and stop trying to mess around with yours. Let’s start with POSITIONING. A clear understanding of the strategy behind Positioning is all you need to make it work for you; even if it's just to see through the mist some marketers use to fog up discerning shoppers.
One of the best things about working on a Mac has always been the ability to read PC files in spite of some pretty nasty piggy-backing malicious macros. There are all kinds of file types that can’t be read unless you have the program they were created in; or know someone who does. Unfortunately, not all equipment can read all platforms. There are so many file types being exchanged, downloaded and replayed, it would be handy if everybody could convert them quickly and easily, especially with video and music files. Well, now you can and free of charge. Convert those music files and save some money.
Kudos to Editor Chris Dickman: Here's a free font that sucks. Recently, a new alphabet was designed to assist the visually impaired with readability. That segment of the population is growing due to the surge of baby boomers. Though I applaud their initiative, little information is available about how this font was developed, and it doesn't look like many typographers were involved. Almost every consideration in their approach is contrary to what I learned in all those typography classes at art school. 
APHont, designed by The American Printing House for the Blind, was specifically created for readers with vision problems. It incorporates consistent stroke widths and large punctuation marks. Designer Paul Nini says that APHont may not be an aesthetically pleasing typeface, but he thinks it’s a starting point for accommodating the needs of aging eyes. His article focused on signage, but the APHont alphabet was designed for reading text. There's a big difference between Braille and font design, just as there is between text and signage. Here's why I don't think it is the new font for readability. Mr. Nini is more subtle than I am—swoosh . . . whack!
“Okay, well, I will come back in a couple of days. Please find out what the problem is and resolve it because by the third trip out here, well, you don't want to see me that angry.” Everyone in the pharmacy knew I was making light of a situation that another person might have handled differently—perhaps transferring their business elsewhere. Sometimes, it's better just to throw up your hands and accept it; stuff happens. One girl behind the counter said in front of her astonished coworkers, "Those sound like fighting words." She was dead serious. I laughed and said, "Honey, you've been watching too much professional wrestling on TV." God bless people with no sense of humor. There’s no escaping violence in our world, but looking for it in all the wrong places is a daunting task. So in all good humor, let's explore the jargon of our trade, which is rife with killer terms.
Professional artists, designers and illustrators eventually grow weary of the client Xfactor. The Xfactor, a predetermined intellectual quotient formulated by combining capacity, exposure and education, becomes the grease or grunge of client interface. It’s grease if they have the stuff required to communicate what they need and what they want. It’s grunge if it clogs up communication pores and impedes progress. Even sixth graders know about “constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth.” Those are the clients who prefer to play the game, “Can you guess what I’m thinking?” Eventually creatives wonder if civilians are worth the trouble.
Let’s take Joni Mitchell, a good example of an incredibly gifted, well-rounded creative. She paints, she writes, she sings; or at least she did until the bullshit of money infiltrated her dealings with those who sold her creative product. She made an interesting comment about changing her artform of choice: "I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist—not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That's why I spend my time now painting. When money meets up with art, there is a lot of pain, and it's the pain of ignorance, and I don't want to meet up with that ignorance again." (Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2004) Douglas Eby is my source for that wonderful quote--he's got a site that celebrates creativity so we shouldn't count him as a civilian.
