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Food Power by John Evans is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at augusthour.com.

The real danger of a down economy for creative folks is one they don’t talk about on the news; boredom. The problem for folks like us at August Hour is if we get bored, things really go badly.

Good thing for us, boredom isn’t a problem right now. Between scoring the documentary and portrait photography we’ve been busy these few months.

We’re amid a re-branding effort for a cycle retailer and are about to begin the re-branding process for an industrial HVAC company here in Kansas City.

Along with that work we’re in pre-production for a promotional video for our friends at Winntech. The variety is different than this time last year, and it’s certainly better than the alternative.

Okay, well maybe it’s their agency, Wieden + Kennedy out of Portland that deserves the credit. But you have to give the client, Starbucks, some credit for going with the ad.

Not that it’s a stretch – if ever there was a company who needed to be associated with arm fuzzies it’s the coffee bohemoth. But even in my home town the Starbucks that opened next door to the local coffee house is closing.

But this ad is good. It’s simple, it’s human, it’s touching and it even made this cynical guy smile and feel good.

I should also add that Starbucks gets props from us for being environmentally conscious and a good stewart for their suppliers’ future.

So, thumbs up to the agency and the client. Thes ads are a win/win.

http://www.changethemargins.com

One day last summer I was invited to one a advertising luncheon. It was for small businesses who use postcard decks and direct mail advertising. There was an advertising expert there, we’ll call him Bob. Bob asked the audience to critique a piece of a participants print advertising, no one really offered anything. So, he called on me. I told Bob that I thought the design was a little confusing and there were a lot of competing ideas. The headline wasn’t really clear and it might be more clear if there was a little less going on visually. Bob, wearing his blue gabardine blazer with gold buttons, tossled loafers, and pleated khaki pants said, “You’re one of those ‘white space guys’ aren’t you?” I said, “I guess it depends. I definitely like clean design. When it works our clients do well by white space.” He said, “Well, I’ll get to why you’re wrong in a minute.”

Bob explained that white space isn’t interesting to people. That if businesses want to succeed and generate lots of leads from direct mail they need designs with pictures and lots of visual stimulation to stand out. “Okay,” I thought. “That or maybe they just need this six-pound sack of crap stuffed into his three-pound blazer telling them how things are supposed to look.”

Today, I wonder, if maybe Bob wasn’t on to something.

Tamara Krinsky has perhaps the most elegant idea to help reduce your consumption of natural resources: set your word document’s margin settings as narrow as possible before you send it to the printer. The goal here is to save the planet we all live on.

According to Tamara’s site, the mission of Change the Margins is pretty simple: encourage adoption of wider printing margins on a grand scale. To accomplish this, the campaign currently has three goals:

1. Convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 on all sides. The more convenient it is for people to change their habits, the better chance there is that they will actually do so.

2. Persuade five corporations to officially sanction wider margins for all company documents. In this way, people will get used to seeing documents with this formatting as the standard, as opposed to the exception. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

3. Challenge five universities to adopt wider margin settings as the standard for their students and faculty, and include this information in their course guidelines.

At Penn State University’s Park campus the “Mueller Policy Paper #1: Reduce Standard Margin Settings” showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.

On a national scale, that’s estimated to be about $400,000,000 per year.

You’re probably looking at this page and wondering, “what the hell are these guys doing advocating for less white space and narrower margins?”

First, you’re not reading a printed document, these virtual margins don’t waste paper. Second, we’re huge fans of saving our clients money, and we’re even bigger fans of elegance. A designer should be able to create an effective design in the pursuit of creating he most economical and efficient outcome possible.

There are some clients who convey a sense of affluence through abundant use of whitespace. How else can you as a designer convey that idea without being wasteful? Elegance is defined as nothing missing and nothing extraneous. Can’t too much whitespace be just as extraneous as too much type?

Also, isn’t this idea that prestige is found in massive amounts of whitespace becoming trite? Can’t we as designers find inventive ways to communicate our clients’ ideology? Can’t we do it and use less paper?

Maybe I’m not such a “white space guy” where the planet is concerned. Either way, it’s time to narrow the margins . . . and definitely avoid advertising experts.

We’ve never done this before. Last week we completed designing wedding invitations for our friends Danna and Marcus.

We should say that if there is an antithesis do the bridezilla, that’s Danna (and Marcus is the antithesis to the groomzilla). The only stipulation was not to use vellum because of it’s bad for the environment. So, we tried to use as many recycled materials as possible.

While the paper is not recycled (it’s acid-free cotton, the “vellum” is Lokta and is a by-product of tree harvesting. The twine is good ol’ jute tomato twine from our garden.

We chose these textures and colors because the wedding is in October, we wanted to evoke the feel of autumn and still work with the colors of the wedding. We also wanted a mix of textures and wanted to create something that would be an adventure to unwrap to sort of include the guest in this adventure of these lives unfolding together.

At the end of the day, Danna and Marcus are happy. And when you’re talking about a bride and groom, what more is there?

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?”

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.

American Copywriter: When you get wrapped up in your own industry jargon

This is a pretty interesting blog posted on American Copywriter’s blog. I think the most important point to bear in mind from Jennifer’s post is that you have to remember the customer. It’s not about you, it’s not about your client, it’s not about their product. It’s about the customers.

Think of it like this:

“If you’re going to take up space in my living room without being invited in – even for just thirty seconds – you better be talking to me about me.”

Read it. If you do what we do, steal it – we did. But ONLY if you will live by it and plan to place it on your site, speak these words to clients, and don’t take spec work.

for prospective clients

What it says:

Dear Prospective Client

We understand your apprehension. We really do. Hiring a creative services company can at first seem to be a scary enterprise. 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.

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, you’re going about this all wrong, 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 (what you see as) common sense.

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. 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 drive halfway across the state 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. Don’t ask us to take the blame for factors outside of our control.

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, what conditions you’ve been diagnosed with, or whether your meds are up to date.

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

Tell you what. Let’s talk. 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” section, read our manifesto (below), and ask for our rate schedule. 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 we’ve come to improve 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. There’s no reason to ask us to do your work on speculation.

Likewise, we promise we won’t hit you up for full payment up front. We bill in progress, payment on term 10 basis. 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.

Sincerely,

John Evans, Owner, and the rest of the folks at August Hour

When I first learned how to play drums, all I had was a Ludwig Speed King bass drum pedal. It was squeaky and weird to play with. The first thing I did was replace the pedal. I had several different ones. After a while my bass drum pedal was always packed up with the live kit so I used the speed king to practice with. I forgot how much I really liked using it. The squeak not only made it fun to play, but it was this part of the sound of the kit. You can hear one on Led Zeppelin records.

It got me to thinking about how so many of the good musical instruments are old and about how much of the new musical instruments are crap. Why is it that they can’t manage to improve of the old instruments? And why is this the case mostly with analog instruments? Today’s digital synths sound better than the one’s of just five years ago. Newer computers work faster and more reliably than those of just a few years ago.

But, today’s Les Pauls don’t sound as good as the ones from the early 70s. Nor do the newer pianos, or drum sets, or or or.

It seems like maybe technology is better now at PRETENDING to be what the analog stuff actually was.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not some analog snob. Having lugged a Rhodes 73 and Roland CP70 and 4×12 guitar cabinet etc. around for thousands of miles with my 140-pound frame I’ll be the first guy to tell you to get a lighter keyboard and you don’t need a huge amp to sound huge. But why does the modern stuff have to be so good at imitating the old stuff, but not as good at producing the sounds?

I’ve always had this theory about analog mediums and how they are more readily apprehended by the human body. Pigments, sounds, papers, etc.; they just seem to be more human friendly. I wonder if maybe our chemicals in our brains don’t make us better able to receive information conveyed in an analog form.

If that’s the case, why are you reading this on a computer screen and not talking to me about it in person?