Not Forgotten

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Art, Career, Design, Designer, Interweb, Life Path

So I’ve been neglecting this site recently. I have not forgotten about this site and plan to start posting often again real soon. I have some things in the works and when the time is right I will make it known publicly. Long story short I’ve moved on from my previous employer and opportunity is knocking. Good times people.

A.A. Boos Website Launch

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Career, Design, Interweb, Portfolio, Web Devlopment

We recently launched a new site for a local contractor. To quote the actual website

“A. A. Boos & Sons, Inc. is a full service Union General Contractor with our own combined skilled labor force, 150 field employees, consisting of bricklayers, cement finishers, ironworkers, operating engineers, laborers; servicing our clients in Ohio, Michigan and other states.”

Its a great site with a smooth vibe. I am happy with the direction this project was lucky to go in.

Dallas Clayton – Endless

Posted by ryan as Art, Career, Humor, Illustration, Inspiring, Skateboarding

The Skateboard Mag #62

I don’t know how many of my readers subscribe to The Skateboard Mag and skateboard for that matter, but if you don’t perhaps you should. At the very least you are going to get that message from this website. I always dig into The Mag right away when I receive it. I like to read all of the small articles first and then really dig into the interviews. The latest issue came in the mail two days ago, #62. The Guest Ed in the magazine this time is Dallas Clayton. He wrote a small page worth called Endless.

Dallas Clayton is a talented writer and his illustration style compliments his writings. I love what Endless is about. Its really good. Read that below. Also don’t miss Dallas’s great writings over at The Berrics. More Popular Than You is a great series he provides for their website www.theberrics.com.

ENDLESS
You should learn to skateboard.
It is cheap and fun.
It is something you can do when you are alone
or with friends.
Once you learn, you can hang out late at night in parking lots for hours and hours
(and you don’t even have to be high).
Also you can talk to others about skateboarding
and it will make them think you are cool
and they will give you things
like free stickers, or invitations to parties
with lots of guys at them.

If you get good
you can jump over all sorts of things
like cars, and European streets, and statues, and off small buildings.
and people will take pictures of you
which is nice (for later, to show your kids)

If you get really good,
maybe someone will pay you
to take pictures, and make videos of you jumping off all sorts of crap
and they will put you on billboards
and benches where homeless people sleep
and your name will be on thousands of pairs of shoes.
Maybe you will have a video game with you in it
or a TV show where you shoot your friends with weapons.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you will just keep doing it and no one will really care how good you are
and you will just use your skateboard to ride down the street
to buy some beer
when your “old lady” takes off with the car.

It’s up to you I guess.
Like anything else.
But you should definitely learn.
It will be worth it
in the long run.

I promise.

Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Bummer, Career, Design, Designer, Interweb, Web Devlopment

Smashing Magazine is a great website. Anyone who is a frequent reader knows that. They recently wrote a great article “10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites”. It is spot on for so many points.

#7 especially hits home for me as I feel this one often. (7. You’re Not Getting Value From Your Web Team)

Whether they have an in-house Web team or use an external agency, many organizations fail to get the most from their Web designers. Web designers are much more than pixel pushers. They have a wealth of knowledge about the Web and how users interact with it. They also understand design techniques, including grid systems, white space, color theory and much more.

Treating designers as pixel pushers wastes their design experience: post from Twitter complaining about being a pixel pusher

It is therefore wasteful to micro-manage by asking them to “make the logo bigger” or to “move that 3 pixels to the left.” By doing so, you are reducing their role to that of a software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they bring.

If you want to get the maximum return on your Web team, present it with problems, not solutions. For example, if you’re targeting your website at teenage girls, and the designer goes for corporate blue, suggest that your audience might not respond well to that color. Do not tell him or her to change it to pink. This way, the designer has the freedom to find a solution that may even be better than your choice. You allow your designer to solve the problem you have presented.

> Continue reading 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

Protected: What’s In A Name?

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Career

Social Networking For The Out Of Work

Posted by ryan as Career, Design, Designer, Inspiring, Interweb, News

For all of us fortunate enough to have a job right now, there is still a great deal of quality advice in the article written by Robert Scoble, If You Are Laid Off Heres How To Socially Network.

If you are laid off, here’s how to socially network
I’m getting a LOT of chats from people who have been laid off. Most of the time I find that they just aren’t presenting a good face to me for me to help them find a new job.
If you are laid off, here’s what you need to do:
1. Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for.
2. Remove all LOLCats from your blog.
3. Remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look. If we see photos of people getting drunk with you that is a bad sign. Get rid of them. They will NOT help you get a job. > continue reading

I for one do not have this blog up to par. I need to make that happen sooner than later. As far as the other social network related stuff, being online since I was in college in the late 90s I’ve always been very aware that what I post online is online for good. If you don’t approach it like that, step back, clean house, and never forget that fact of the medium. This article is motivational in the sense, are you prepared enough?

The Value Of Our Passion

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Bummer, Career, Design, Designer, Illustration, Interweb

I recently came across a tweet about people posting requests for free design / illustrative services. While its no new thing for my profession to be under valued, its still a very frustrating thing to deal with. Via the quality blog and website Method To The Mayhem.

Every day, there are more and more CragsList posts seeking “artists” for everything from auto graphics to comic books to corporate logo designs. More people are finding themselves in need of some form of illustrative service.

But what they’re NOT doing, unfortunately, is realizing how rare someone with these particular talents can be.

To those who are “seeking artists”, let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? …none?

More than likely, you don’t know any. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting on craigslist to find them.

And this is not really a surprise.

In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?

If you answered “yes” to ANY of the above, you’re obviously insane. If you answered “no”, then kudos to you for living in the real world.

But then tell me… why would you think it is okay to live out the same, delusional, ridiculous fantasy when seeking someone whose abilities are even less in supply than these folks?

Graphic artists, illustrators, painters, etc., are skilled tradesmen. As such, to consider them as, or deal with them as, anything less than professionals fully deserving of your respect is both insulting and a bad reflection on you as a sane, reasonable person. In short, it makes you look like a twit.

A few things you need to know;

1. It is not a “great opportunity” for an artist to have his work seen on your car/’zine/website/bedroom wall, etc. It IS a “great opportunity” for YOU to have their work there.

2. It is not clever to seek a “student” or “beginner” in an attempt to get work for free. It’s ignorant and insulting. They may be “students”, but that does not mean they don’t deserve to be paid for their hard work. You were a “student” once, too. Would you have taken that job at McDonalds with no pay, because you were learning essential job skills for the real world? Yes, your proposition it JUST as stupid.

3. The chance to have their name on something that is going to be seen by other people, whether it’s one or one million, is NOT a valid enticement. Neither is the right to add that work to their “portfolio”. They get to do those things ANYWAY, after being paid as they should. It’s not compensation. It’s their right, and it’s a given.

4. Stop thinking that you’re giving them some great chance to work. Once they skip over your silly ad, as they should, the next ad is usually for someone who lives in the real world, and as such, will pay them. There are far more jobs needing these skills than there are people who possess these skills.

5. Students DO need “experience”. But they do NOT need to get it by giving their work away. In fact, this does not even offer them the experience they need. Anyone who will not/can not pay them is obviously the type of person or business they should be ashamed to have on their resume anyway. Do you think professional contractors list the “experience” they got while nailing down a loose step at their grandmother’s house when they were seventeen?

If you your company or gig was worth listing as desired experience, it would be able to pay for the services it received. The only experience they will get doing free work for you is a lesson learned in what kinds of scrubs they should not lower themselves to deal with.

6. (This one is FOR the artists out there, please pay attention.) Some will ask you to “submit work for consideration”. They may even be posing as some sort of “contest”. These are almost always scams. They will take the work submitted by many artists seeking to win the “contest”, or be “chosen” for the gig, and find what they like most. They will then usually have someone who works for them, or someone who works incredibly cheap because they have no originality or talent of their own, reproduce that same work, or even just make slight modifications to it, and claim it as their own. You will NOT be paid, you will NOT win the contest. The only people who win, here, are the underhanded folks who run these ads. This is speculative, or “spec”, work. It’s risky at best, and a complete scam at worst. I urge you to avoid it, completely. For more information on this subject, please visit www.no-spec.com

So to artists/designers/illustrators looking for work, do everyone a favor, ESPECIALLY yourselves, and avoid people who do not intend to pay you. Whether they are “spec” gigs, or just some guy who wants a free mural on his living room walls. They need you. You do NOT need them.

And for those who are looking for someone to do work for free… please wake up and join the real world. The only thing you’re accomplishing is to insult those with the skills you need. Get a clue.

Fast, Good & Cheap

Posted by ryan as Bummer, Ca$h, Career, Design

I’ve been creating spoiled clients. Its my own fault really. I do things for free. I spend a great deal more time on a project than I should, and I never settle for work that I’m not really proud of. While that may be a great thing to offer a client, what I am realizing is that I’m making my job harder. For one, all the free little things become an expected service. They don’t think, wow he really hooked that up for me. Instead what I do is create a situation where they don’t want to pay for any little thing. “Oh, you did that free last time”. The other thing I’ve been doing is offering prices that are far too low. I also deliver on a very timely basis.

Recently I gave an insanely low quote on a logo redesign. There were a couple reasons I did this. One was that the client has in the past been easy to work with. We never went round for round on changes and it seemed like they knew what they wanted, which allowed me to get the end results in a reasonable amount of time. Oh but things have caught up with me this time. I spent about 3 times the amount of time I quoted for the project. Which brings my profit for time about -200 percent for time spent and stress created. The last thing I need to do is stress out about 5 on going concurrent projects at work and then come home to work on another 10 logos. This one really felt like I was shooting in the dark for what they wanted. I think for them, they wanted to look like the scene they were trying to foster while at the same time have a look that visually conflicted with that very scene. Ah you live and learn.

Which brings me to what this post is about. The Fast, Good, & Cheap pricing method.

Have you ever heard of the Fast, Good, Cheap pricing method?

The idea is that clients should only be able to choose 2 of these 3 words, and you have to keep this in mind when pricing your next job. If you don’t, your work / income / career could be suffering.
Fast, Good or Cheap — Choose Two

If you allow your clients to have fast, good, cheap work designed by yourself then most likely you are working your butt off for very little return which is why you must allow them to choose a combination of two only — either good & fast, good & cheap, fast & cheap.

Read the rest of this article here.

The State Of The Internet

Posted by ryan as Bummer, Ca$h, Career, Interweb

Over at Dark Motion there is an article called “What an Informative Web!“.

Our Internet is still very new, but has come a long way since its humble beginnings ‘74. We’ve seen a lot happen over the past few decades, but perhaps our most important boom has been in the last 4 years. Yep, that stupid buzzword labeled ”web 2.0’.

In the early stages, we saw level 2 & 3 services (as O’Reilly called them) that spawned useful tools en masse. Flickr, eBay, digg, del.icio.us – a haven for geeks and a wealth of valuable resources. Functionality and logical, ergonomic design worked in unison to deliver widely accessible media. It became a point of transition. Designers started gearing layout toward typographic readability; allowing the new wealth of information to be presented in improved, pleasant and meaningful formats.

This is a great read on the state of web. He mentions vision, and what the web has become. Its true, the web is becoming a focus less jumble of trivial pursuits. It has been growing in this direction for quite some time now. Of course if the only goal is money, then results will be a lot like another media we know so well. TV’s focus on the green has shown us that the largest common denominator can supply us with plenty of time wasting meaningless moving pictures. So blah. There is still hope. This medium is young. We can do and offer substance. Its not going to be one way or the other though, its going to get worse with the overload of crap. We are not even to the stage were we are bombarded with crap the second we step out of our house. That time is coming. It will get annoyingly ugly, and then, only when its gets too bad will we all decide to take it back. Lets not loose hope, and do what we can to make the online experience a rewarding and rich experience. We owe it to ourselves, and to others out there, like Pasquale D’Silva, who is not alone in feeling that we may be getting caught up in the hype, and only receiving the short end of the information highway’s offerings.

I should add that Pasquale D’Silva is a talented illustrator animator and you should check his blog for great examples of his work and more.

Helping Press & Getting Press

Posted by ryan as Advertising, Career, Design, Interweb, News, Portfolio, Web Devlopment

So like I posted earlier I recently launched a new version of local media The Toledo Free Press’s website. A few days ago I had an interview with Stephanie Zarecki from the TFP about the site. You can read the story here.

Its not a bad little write up. The only thing I wish was different was the lack of mention of those who helped me make it happen. Bill Klatt was the account executive and alway a great help with most of my projects. Jesse Schmidt put in plenty of quality work and he got an opportunity to create custom Wordpress plugins on this project. Of course, only the admin of the site gets to utilize that portion of the project.

Overall I’m pleased with the site and we will continue to enhance it as we go. You have got to love this web development stuff, which each new site there is so much new knowledge that gets applied to the next. The snowball is still fun.

UPDATE: Here is an updated version of what the site looks like before new changes take place. I am really happy with this version of the site, but when it comes to media, change is a constant element.