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.

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.

I’m reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Powers is arguably the greatest writer living in America today. The Echo Maker is gorgeous. Not just the plot or the characters or the arcs, etc.. But, what really sets Powers apart, as always, is his ability to convey just the right thought with just the right words.

But, this post isn’t meant to be a book review. The point is that Powers knows exactly how to make his words click. This idea of the click is expressed perfectly in the book Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik.

The point of the click is that the language perfectly reflects the thought the writer’s trying to convey. It’s not so much that there have to be few words as possible. However, the words exactly reflect the thought and the thought clicks.

There are all kinds of examples of this, from Shakespeare:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
– MacBeth

to Shandra:

When Radha returned from the grocery store where three white youths calling themselves Dot Busters, ridiculed her kumkum, Dev said, “We must simply tolerate such misunderstandings.”
from Sari of the Gods

With one sentence, or a simple turn of phrase, we know exactly what the author is thinking – and we’re thinking exactly what the author wants us to be thinking.

This click exists in music, lyrics, films, design. Any place there’s a vocabulary there exists the possibility of a click. It ties back to Thackara’s idea of lightness of design. It’s in Rand’s idea of elegance – nothing missing, nothing extraneous.

The Echo Maker is about a man who has a car accident and forgets who his sister is. He forgets how he feels about his sister. Meanwhile, his sister tends to him while he recuperates. The entire time he thinks she is an impostor playing his sister. His injury makes him unable to remember love. The book follows their progression through trying to overcome his injuries.

Throughout Powers is at the same time powerful and efficient, expressive and elegant. He inhabits the areas he writes about – the geography, the science, the culture. He shows the signs of being an anthropologist as much as a writer. Every page contains a phrase you’ll write down to remember. And you’ll learn something new about yourself and the world you’ve (hopefully) never seen.

Go get it. This is a book to own.

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?

Last week we were fortunate enough to be invited to the premier for our friends at MK12’s new short History of America. When you get a chance, please go and watch the trailer on their site. If the film is in your town go see it.

More than a great piece of work, the film is a clinic in what you can do with simple tools and a great eye.

Congrats guys, good work.

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.