We understand your apprehension. We really do. Hiring a creative services company can at first seem to be a scary process. There are many of us out there, and no one wants to make a bad decision. Both time and money are at stake. It’s totally understandable that you want to guard against every contingency of being burned. Then there’s the fact that you’ve heard all about these “artistic types.”

At August Hour, we want a productive and profitable relationship as well. That means we both have to accept a certain level of risk and not expect the other to shoulder the whole thing.

You’ve never done this before? Not a problem. You’re shopping around for producers and designers in much the same way you’d buy a car: you’re hunting for the lowest price, the highest quality, the quickest delivery time, the most benefits, the strongest guarantees.

For buying a commodity, that’s a fine strategy. For contracting a professional service, it’s not the best way to proceed, and you’re setting yourself up for some bad experiences. We’re telling you this in the hopes that you’ll be the one in a hundred who actually takes this to heart, avoiding the messy consequences of treating creative work like pork bellies.

First, expecting us to shoulder all the risk in this relationship is unrealistic. We can’t and won’t do it – like you, we have a business to run. Please don’t ask us to work for free, to be paid only once you’re satisfied (a business practice known as speculative work, also known as “on spec”). Don’t ask us to work for you without an agreement, or without an advance deposit. Don’t ask us to travel to meet with you unless you’re prepared to pay our travel time and expenses.

Don’t ask us for a money-back guarantee based on your satisfaction, or on the ultimate financial results of our project. We have no control over what you do with the materials we provide, who you send them to or how solid your follow up skills are. We guarantee that we will do what we promise, when we promise, and how we promise. We vow to keep our word and honor our agreement.

Someone willing to shoulder all the risks is someone desperate for work, and someone you shouldn’t hire. A person in that position will do and say anything to get your check.

But, then, how do you mitigate your own risk as a service buyer?

Well, you can’t get rid of the risk altogether. Life is risk. We assume risk every time we sign on a new client; short of requiring full payment up front, we have no ironclad guarantee that we’ll get paid in a timely manner – or at all. The world’s also chock full of crazies, most of whom think they’re sane. Right now, we have no idea who you are or wheather your one of the crazies or someone with whom we can have a successful creative partnership.

Of course, you don’t know that about us, either. So where do we go from here?

First of all, risk is one of the most important elements of the creative process. To make something good, you have to take risks. So, our first suggestion, value risk.

Next, let’s get to know one another. Send us whatever background material you have, a website address, your brochures, whatever, and we’ll read them. You look over our website, request our portfolio, check out our work, read our information. Let’s take the time to actually know what each other is all about.

We won’t compare you to other clients if you don’t insist on seeing a portfolio piece that is exactly the kind of thing you want for yourself. You’re a unique business, and we do custom work. We won’t insult you, so don’t insult us.

We’ll take the time to really understand your business and what it’s all about. We want to know, we really do – beyond just being good business, we’re also curious about what exactly you do. We’d love to hear your story.

Our rates are our rates, our terms are our terms – they reflect the respect we have for the work we do and the clients whose business we’ve improved with that work. Don’t expect us to do work for free or at a cut rate while you get over your jitters. You should be able to evaluate our skills from our body of work; if you can’t, then it’s unlikely that we’ll see eye-to-eye on project development anyway.

We promise we won’t hit you up for full payment up front. Likewise, you can contact us at any time and find out exactly where you’re at for work we’ve done; you can also contact us at any time for an estimate before giving us the go ahead to work. We don’t mind – in fact, we want you to.

The reason? Because we’re sharing a risk here. We can mitigate it together, or deepen it apart. We can work in respect, or spend all our time trying to get the other to take on the full load. We can work with each other, or against each other.

Personally, we prefer working with you. We hope you feel the same.

A man once criticized Picasso for creating unrealistic art. Picasso asked him: “Can you show me some realistic art?” The man showed him a photograph of his wife. Picasso observed: “So your wife is two inches tall, two-dimensional, with no arms and no legs, and no color but only shades of gray?”

Whitman
May 1st, 1993 – May 3rd, 2007

We lost a valued member of the August Hour team today. Our friend and trusted confidante, Whitman.

In the spring of 1993, I brought home this amazing Golden Retriever puppy I called Whitman. Over the last 14 years, Whit’s been my constant friend and a huge part of my life; I find it impossible to describe. He’s been with me through the best and worst time of my life.

While he loved fetch, walks, steak and grass, what really made Whitty happy was being around all of his people.

Whit has been a part of every project August Hour has turned out. He’s been a part of every design, heard every note and yawned at every sogn before anyone else had a chance to. Ten years ago, he comforted my friend Jim when he lost his dog, Keaton. Later, he comforted me when I lost my friend Jim. When I would tour, he was there when we’d pull the van into the driveway in the wee hours of the morning at the end of a long tour. And he was perfectly content to sleep in with me until late that afternoon when I needed to catch up on missed sleep.

For many of you who are reading this, Whit heard your work before anyone else did. He’d lay his head in your lap when it was good and lay his head in your lap when it wasn’t so good. As long as you petted him, you were the best band on earth.

When it all came to pass, Whit chose his own end. Over the last few weeks he basically stopped eating. I took him to the vet last week and she found nothing wrong with him. His exam and tests were all normal and except for losing almost twenty pounds he was actually very healthy — especially that heart of his. After several days of confusion and frustration, I finally shut up and listened to what he was trying to tell me; he was done eating, he was done drinking, he was ready to go.

So, this morning the girls and I took Whitman to the vet’s office. She administered the injection and as his last breaths hung, I whispered in his ear that I remember everything, thanked him, and told him that he’s beautiful. After just a few seconds, Doctor Kelly tearfully told us he was gone. Whitty left us exactly the way he wanted; in the arms of his family.

So, what do I take from all of this, from these fourteen beautiful years I’ve been honored to share with my dog? On the way to the vet’s office, Whit and I listened to Alejandro’s record in the car. During Al’s song, Died a Little Today, Whit started yelping. He was singing along to Al, just like he’d done so many times before on the floor of our living room. I listened more closely to Al’s words in this song, and I heard the line that describes what Whit has been trying for fourteen years to teach me:

Gonna learn how to give
Not to simply get by
Or to barely hang on
For the sake of goodbye
Baby maybe you’ll know
We died a little today

If there’s anything to take from the last fourteen years, anything I draw comfort from, it’s from maybe, hopefully finally learning what Whit spent his life trying to teach me: ours is not to simply get by, but to learn how to give. If you’ve ever had a dog, you know what I mean.

Thanks everyone. And thanks Whit, I remember everything.

John

Another Man’s Done Gone
by Billy Bragg

Sometimes i think i’m gonna lose my mind
But it don’t look like i ever do
I loved so many people everywhere i went
Some too much, others not enough

I don’t know, i may go down or up or anywhere
But i feel like this scribbling might stay

Maybe if i hadn’t of seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people’s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Well, another man’s done gone

Four years ago George Bush stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared an end to the combat operations in Iraq. Today, four years into the continuing war, after a pretty long creative brief for a client in Atlanta, I started thinking of that Mission Accomplished banner and the process of creating it.

I’m not just talking about the design piece itself, but the overall ideation process. As a work I supose it’s functional – but it’s certainly not elegant. There’s really no underlying metaphor, no connection to any intentional emotions, (I’m sure the intent was to evoke patriotism. In fact, maybe it continues to, but that emotion is contextual and it’s hard to say whether the resulting patriotism is in fact the intended kind of patriotism the designers wanted). Granted, it’s trite and unimaginative – it’s also one of the most notorious works of design in the 21st century. In terms of notoriety it ranks up there with the iPod.

Where the banner fails from a creative standpoint is the one area where no work of design ever should – ideation. Now, I can’t hang it’s shortcomings on the designer himself (Funny I think it’s a man who did it, but doesn’t it just look like a guy did it?).

Ideation is typically the work of more than one person. Where it get’s tricky is that it’s often an amalgam of multiple – often competing – agendas, and no one recognizes this. Failure becomes eminent when none of these agendas win out over the other and all “win” (people call this compromise) and “get to be” rendered into the final, core message.

It’s this phenomenae of distilling competing or contradictory messages into one core idea that undermines any potential for good design. Fail to get past this and you’re left with twenty feet worth of ink, paper, and regret – Mission Accomplished.

We’ve decided to change things up a bit here at August Hour. We’re getting out of the world of Flash for our site and going with a more interactive approach. So, we’re going with a blog site. Hopefully this will make it easier for us to keep the site updated and current.

We’re going to be uploading images, sketches, photos, videos, music, etc. And try to keep you all posted on our goings ahn.

If you google “DHL Sucks” this is what you get.

If you google “FedEx Sucks” this is what you get.

If you google “UPS Sucks” this is what you get.

Each of the comments and horror stories deals with different aspects of the companies suckage. In my experience, and in reading the comments, the breadth of ineptitude by DHL is astounding. Meanwhile, the FedEx site doesn’t paint the best picture of their employees. I mean come on, you come on a forum and (assumably) flog people who have a dim view of your company? Seriously?

The UPS Sucks page details one particular case and how vehement UPS was about not helping the customer, until they had to file a lawsuit.

It’s utterly mind-blowing how little it takes for a company to generate good will with their customers. Even more mind-blowing is how often they fail to do it.

Where the shipping companies are concerned, it’s clear from my own experiences that DHL and Fed-Ex really have no interest in helping their customers. And it stands to reason they wouldn’t; in a sea of millions of customers a day, how do you begin to decide to whom you throw a life preserver? I can’t answer that, and I don’t expect them to. Which is why I only use UPS. Both have demonstrated to me that they do whatever they can to satisfy their customer. I can go on and on about experiences with UPS where they went further than any other shipping company has, but you know they drill. “They walked through a rain storm, chartered an Airbus and cleared a landing strip in my hateful neighbors front yard to make sure my daughter got her wedding dress on time” blah blah blah.

But what about taking care of the customer? Where is the balance. As anyone knows, I’ve had to break the news to clients in the past that I just can’t do that for them. And honestly, while it stresses me every time, and I lose sleep over it, I have to do it. Why? Because of the other clients.

I have developed a philosophy; I call it my Two Angels philosophy.

When a client presents me with a service issue, I imagine there are two angels on my shoulders. One angel, is my highest-billing client the other, is my least. When I make my decision, I imagine they are both asking me to justify that decision in terms of how I’ve treated them in the past. I have to explain to them how the decision I’ve made is justifiable in terms of their business. For the smaller client, I say “Well, Small Client, this client represents three times the amount of business you bring us, so for that amount of work they earn a special dispensation in this case. If you’d like to bring that amount of work, we can treat you likewise. To large client I say, “See, Large Client, while we may not have given you that discount you wanted you can see that we do other things for you in recognition of the amount of business you bring us which indicate that we appreciate your business.”

It’s a delicate balancing act for sure. And I think that’s the key. We try to balance all the clients along with the needs of our business and ourselves.

The good news? I can categorically say that we do a MUCH better job than these multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of employees.

Oh, and please don’t ship us anything via DHL or Fed-Ex. Because, well . . . you know, they suck.

This site is blowing my mind right now:

It’s a skeetch blog by Jason Das. The drawing above is of Danny Gregory doing a reading from his book Every Day Matters

Danny is a very inspiring guy and an amazing talent. You might have seen some of his work (he was the CD on the Chase Credit Card ad).

Jason Das’s sketches are simple but inspiring glimpses into the real world. I like them a lot.

Check them out, then go out and draw something.

Alejandro Escovedo.com » Rolling Stone: Alejandro Escovedo Plays Zankel Hall

Our friend and inspiration, Alejandro, recently played Carnegie Hall in New York. It’s about time.

Also, we just confirmed tonight that we’ll be working on a video for Alejandro’s song “Dearhead on the Wall” in the coming months.

Al co-wrote this song with his wife, Kim. So it’s an honor to collaborate on a video for such a beautiful song.

Check out the music at the link.