UPDATE ** – Winner is @cshold

When Mailchimp sent me a tshirt, it quickly became one of my favorites. I’ve now got another one on the way and I’d like to give it away to one lucky winner.

It’s a male, medium shirt, grey with a cool chimp sketch drawing. Pretty soft, good quality material.

To win, all you have to do is click the “tweet” button on this post (feed readers may have to visit the actual post on my site to do so). In a few days, I’ll pick a winner at random. Thanks!

We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way.

As an active member of the “No Spec” movement, Gap’s announcement tonight is truly a wonderful one, and professional designers (other than the ones on sites like crowdspring) around the world will surely be delighted with this outcome.

Well done to everyone that spoke out against Gap’s decision to crowd source the further development of their identity. Chalk this one up as a major win for the No Spec movement.

So, I sent out this tweet, and then another one .

Instantly, I received replies, and so far a few seem to agree.

When an element of an identity is THIS subtle, does it have a purpose (other than fellow logo designers thinking it’s “genius”) ?

If the vast majority of the market doesn’t even know it’s there, doesn’t that make it useless in its purpose? Without the arrow in the FedEx logo, we would still be left with an iconic identity with the strong lettering, and the recognizable blue and red/ sometimes now green/orange etc. Without the arrow it still does the job rather well.

What are your thoughts?

Reading through the manual booklets for my new car and one of the brochures inside has a pretty cool cover design that I thought I’d share with you.

(This is also my first post testing the Android WordPress app)

I’m a big fan of car logos and the requirements that come along with an auto manufacturer identity.

What’s your favorite car manufacturer logo?

Read the post here (opens in new window)

What other examples of subtle branding have you seen lately? I’m interested to hear what your thoughts.

If you would like to be included and are under 20 years of age, whether you are a graphic designer, web designer etc.. please fill out this form and then subscribe to my rss feed so that you will be notified when you are featured!

This is a chance to gain some nice exposure and a little link juice to your portfolio, and I look forward to seeing some great work by those young designers in our online community.

Over the years, I have heard clients say a lot of things, and some of them are more clear in their message than others. For those starting out in the design industry, whether it is at a firm, or as a freelancer, this list of “5 things clients say and what they really mean” will surely help you to be educated when interacting with various types of clients.

1. “I designed it myself and just need you to ,,,”

99.9% of the time, if a client says this to you when they first inquire about your services, and ask you for a quote, they are really saying, “I know enough to have an opinion on YOUR profession, and I understand what it takes to do what you do. I don’t really think your skills are anything that hard to do, I just don’t have the time to do it, or I don’t have the little amount of time it probably takes to learn it. Knowing all this, I won’t be paying you that much to do this work as it shouldn’t take you that long at all…plus I’ve already done most of the work for you.”

2. “Can you do it for $xxx now, and when we become more successful, we will pay more?”

This is a pretty easy one. What they are really saying is “I probably have the money to pay you fully for what you quoted me, but I’m gona try and see if I can make a deal and get away with paying you less than what you want. After all, you seem like a bit of a pushover….I don’t plan on paying you more when/if we are more successful, because your work isn’t really the thing that made us successful so why would we feel obliged to pay you again months after the project is over?”

3. “I don’t agree to your contract terms. Please remove section 1a ,,,”

Red flag. This is like meeting a girl in a bar who talks about her daddy issues for 2 hours, and ends up crying in your arms while I drink as much whiskey as possible in the hope that I may secretly pass out with my eyes open, standing upright, but not able to hear her myopic whining…..wait, whoa….sorry, back to the article.

It is probably a fact that a large majority of freelancers / design firms have fair and honest contracts. There is rarely any reason for a client to question any of the terms in the average contract designers use, so when a client requests different terms and changes to the wording of the agreement, this is a serious warning sign. By rejecting some of your contract terms, depending on what they are, the client is really telling you, “I don’t really trust you or your company that much at all, so I am going to try and get this contract to be much more favorable for me before I sign it. Due to the fact that I don’t really trust you that much, this project is going to be a struggle to get completed, and while I will blame you for the delays, it will really be my fault because I continue to fight for the power in this project, and I really don’t want to give you any sort of control or power. Oh, and that 50% payment you want just to start the project…make it 25% and you’ve got a deal. I’ll pay the remainder when the project is done…in 2 years.”

4. “I’ve never hired a web designer so I’m not sure about this whole process, but you guys are the experts ,,,”

Lovely. Time to be happy and smile. What this client is really saying is “I honestly think you are the expert, and realize that I know absolutely nothing about the skills that you have. I can’t even imagine trying to do this myself. It would be like trying to build my own house, or telling the air conditioner technician how to fix the air condenser. I will be a good client to work with as I value your expertise and I will not request that many revisions during the project. I figure that you do this all day everyday and have a successful career out of it, so who am I to tell you to what to do.”

5. “We need a website built, my Husband’s cousin made one for him but he is in Detroit ,,,”

This is pretty similar to #1 above. Most likely, what this client is really saying is “My Husband’s cousin is a receptionist and she has Photoshop on her computer (or she is a granny from Tennessee), and she put the site together using Go Daddy’s “Website Tonight” service. We really like that website and want something similar.”. Unless her Husband’s cousin is an actual experienced web designer, chances are that the website she developed for her Uncle is pretty bad. If the client says she likes the site that was created, it pretty much means that she doesn’t understand the difference in quality in web design. As a result, she will probably choose the cheapest web design firm she finds. If she doesn’t understand the quality difference, why would she pay you $5,000 when someone down the road quoted her at $500? She will get a $500 website, and will be happy with it, until one day when she realizes that her site isn’t getting any leads and nobody ever compliments her on it.

Ok, how about a 6th! “Make the logo bigger”

When clients say this they actually simply, and sadly always just want their logo bigger! Perhaps you need to stock up on some “Make my logo bigger cream”

Well, that’s it! “5 things clients say and what they really mean”. Most clients are good people, and great to work with, but there will always be those that make life a little more difficult, for whatever reason. With some education, and understanding, you can turn even the most high maintenance clients into decent, profitable ones. Client management is an underestimated element of being a designer or project manager, and the successful ones are able to handle each level of communication that they have with clients.

I would love to hear about any additional experiences you’ve had with clients, things you’ve learned about the different types of clients etc. Please discuss in the comments below and let’s start the conversation!

The Brief

We discussed the client’s needs with them, and learned that they have over 25 years experience in the insurance industry, and wanted their identity to represent this experience. They said that they liked the phrase “Protecting Your World” and asked that we develop the logo design around that concept.

Concept Development

I was the lead designer on this project, and so I started sketching some ideas for this logo design. After getting to know the clients well, I had made notes that were of Irish and French decent. With the client’s last name being MacDermott, I decided that Irish Celtic symbolism or crest imagery would work well for the “protection” concept I was planning. I researched the McDermott Clan, and found the McDermott crest. I also learned that the traditional McDermott clan motto was “The Strong Hand Rules”. Perhaps I could include this somehow into the concept.

Sketching works well for me as I love to draw and wish I dedicated more time to sketching just for the fun of it. Below you can see how I got started with my ideas; working on the concept of a shield for protection.

The second I idea I had was to incorporate the McDermott clan crest into a shield along with the intials, JMR. You can see two of the concepts I presented to the client below. The first one uses a minimal drawing I made of the McDermott clan shield, with the 3 boar’s heads.

The second concept uses a general shield look. The “JMR” initials in this design would work well standing along as a mark also and is recongnizable.

The next concept I began to sketch was the idea of a lion, presenting the “strength” and “protection” feeling in this logo. I sketched the lion standing strong and powerful and then the client responded with the idea of adding a “fleur de lis” and scepter to represent the French origins of his wife and partner in JMR Insurance. I drew a “fleur de lis” and then transferred this into a digital drawing, along with a detailed drawing of the lion. The lion holding the scepter tied in perfectly with the McDermott clan’s motto of “The Strong Hand Rules”.

The final concept was ready to be developed into a full design in Illustrator, and can be seen below.

The client was very happy with the outcome of the final concept and decided to go with that. We then started designing the letterheads, business cards and envelopes. They were printed using a foil accent on the gold areas of the design, and accompanied with a standard textured stock, they came out well. You can see them in the images below:

Overall, we were all delighted with the new logo, and the stationary designs. The client now has a powerful, professional identity that represents their experience in the insurance industry and the overall look is one of strength, protection and competence. We are currently just about to start a web development project for this client also.

If you would like to see some other logo designs we have completed, please visit my company’s portfolio

It happens to even the best design firms; you send out a proposal, you have a face-to-face meeting, and then you receive the email.

Thank you for your proposal and your time to discuss our project with us, but we have decided to go with another firm”

Depending on how much time and effort you put into the proposal, this can be a tough pill to swallow. If it is for a project worth less than $1000 to you or your company, it is pretty easy to move on and not be bothered by it. Regardless of how big or small the project is, and no matter how much time you put into the proposal, it is important to always try to understand why the potential client did not choose you or your company.

There can be many reasons why you or your company were not chosen for a particular job, but if you do not find these out or even try to acquire that information, the entire proposal process becomes a complete waste of time. When you receive the “we chose someone else” email or phone call, why not turn it into something that will help you in the future? A simple “thank you” response can be coupled with “Can you please describe some of the reasons why we were not chosen for this project, and what we could have done better? This will help us to better our sales process in the future.”.

If you spent hours on a big proposal, and then you don’t get the job, your emotions naturally want to reply with “Good luck and call me when the company you chose under deliver or screw you!”, but obviously this is not the way to go. Even when you know your local competitors have nothing on you or your company, and could never provide the creativity or expertise you can, it is vital that you keep it positive and professional.

So, you send your “thanks” response, and you hope for a reply. From my experience, a lot of these people will not respond back to our request for more information, and that is fine. You just have to let it go. Others however, typically the more professional ones, will take the time to respond to you and give you some decent feedback. They are the ones that understand the purpose of your email and your request for feedback. This also shows them that you and your company are dedicated to improving all aspects of your operation and services.

If you record the responses you receive over time (hopefully you don’t have many of them because you acquire most potential clients!), you will have the knowledge to better understand what you need to improve upon. With that being said, let’s take a look at 3 of the main reasons why a client didn’t choose you for the project that got away.

1. Price

Depending on your rates, the number one reason you didn’t get chosen for that project was down to the price on your proposal. Many potential clients just don’t understand the difference in quality in services like graphic design and web design. You may have met with them in person, discussed their exact needs, prepared a proposal that contained the perfect solution for them, but they still did not choose you because of the price. It is common in most industries, a lot of people will select the less expensive option, especially if they are unable to differentiate in the quality being offered by each option. Many times a client doesn’t understand that the 5 page web design solution one company offers, is completely different from that of another. They may not understand that a CMS-based website in CSS is much better than a static table-based HTML website. In your meeting with the client, they told you that they really wanted to have control of the content on their website, but after not choosing you, you see the new website that they received from another company, and it barely resembles anything like what the client said they wanted.

This is the main reason why the web design industry has made so many enemies in the general population. So many clients get screwed by half-assed web designers, and they end up spending more time and money within a year to find someone to develop a website that they actually want and need. Clients get screwed by not doing enough research and not understanding the difference in web design quality. They end up hiring the cheapest option and 9 out of 10 times this will not work out well for them.

On the other side, a client may not choose you because your prices are too low! It may sound crazy, but it is true. My company always asks clients why they chose us after we receive their business, and sometimes they respond with the following:

Even though we received quotes from others that were way below what you quoted us, we want to work with you because your portfolio and professionalism exceeds the rest, and that is what is important to us.”

This is a great email to get. It immediately creates the perfect client / vendor relationship. It shows you that this client understands the value of your services, and is able to see the difference in quality between you and the other companies that they spoke with.

2. Professionalism

I’ve discovered that a lot of web design companies (in my area especially) are quite unprofessional. If you receive an inquiry from a potential client and respond back with an email that looks like a 12 year old typed it, this can be an instant turn off. Also, if your phone manner isn’t professional your company image will be hurt during the initial phone conversation with that client.

I personally don’t think it is that difficult to be professional, because you simply understand what clients expect from you , and you provide it. I often make a note of the things that I expect from companies when I purchase services from them, and it makes such a difference when they do their job professionally. You feel much more confident giving them your money, and you also intend to return to give them repeat business.

Every way you interact with the client is reviewed, whether they do it knowingly or subconsciously; they are forming opinions about you and your service. They attach these opinions to your overall brand and that is what they store in their mind each time they communicate with you.

3. Portfolio

Sometimes, you get inquiries from clients that are the type that really want to see that you have developed a website or designed some print advertising for a company in their industry. For example, a client needing a website for their restaurant may only work with someone that has previously designed a restaurant website. Some clients really rely on this, and others don’t. It is all part of the comfort factor. The client wants to feel completely confident that you can provide a perfect solution for their needs, and no matter how good the rest of the work in your portfolio is, if it is not industry related to their company, they may not choose to work with you.

I recently had a potential client that wanted my company to carry out a complete branding of their real estate agent services. They said that they really liked what they saw in our portfolio, and were excited to move forward with us. Before we received the contract and deposit, we spoke with one of the partners over the phone. She voiced her concerns over the lack of real estate related design work in our portfolio. I personally worked in real estate web design for about a year and half as a full-time job, and once I became self-employed I decided that I wouldn’t work with any clients in the real estate industry for a while. I needed the break from it, especially when it was all I did for 5 days a week for over a year.

So, I had to drag up my old portfolio from when I worked for this real estate web design company to try to show the potential client that I had experience in the real estate industry and that my company could provide excellent creative design services for the real estate industry. The difficult part of a process like this is the fact that you, as a designer, are confident that no matter what industry it is, you can design for it. If you are skilled and experienced, and understand different markets and different demographics, you know that you can design anything for that industry. Some clients are unable to see it this way, and it can often be an added “dance” you need to do during the sales process to acquire their business. It becomes your job to go that extra step to give them the confidence to move forward with you.

So, there you go, the 3 main reasons why clients don’t choose you! Obviously there are many other reasons why you may not get chosen for a particular project, like the fact that you smell odd, or that you wore your “Frankie Says Relax” t-shirt to the meeting, but those 3 discussed above are pretty much the main ones.

Do you have any to add from your own experiences?

So, the design in photoshop, and all of the coding was done in 2 days, and I am more than happy with the outcome. I believe this new design is right where I want it to be visually. The overall look and feel is light, yet I think there is a perfect touch of artistic flair in the graphic elements and overall aesthetics. It was important to me to have a clean design, but I still wanted to create an image that presented me, my personality and characteristics. This balance is difficult, especially with a somewhat sketchy design, but I think it came off nicely.

I first learned about WordPress around February 2008 when I was trying to increase backlinks to my company website. After finding David Airey’s website, I proceeded to add several comments to his posts, and enjoyed his articles and writing style. David quickly realized what I was doing, and told me off! So, I learned all about the blogging and online design industry by being a dirty search engine optimizer concerned with acquiring backlinks from design related sites. Thanks David! I learned the error of my ways, and understood the “blog commenting etiquette” that was in place, or was supposed to be in place.

My previous design was pretty much my first attempt at creating a custom theme for WordPress. I loved the textured website designs around the net, and wanted to do something along those lines. While I was happy with the original design for a while, my interface and graphic design skills had progressed past the image the website was giving off. Since February 2008, I have immersed myself in everything to do with developing custom WordPress themes, from reading tutorials, to mashing the code up to see what works and what doesn’t. I learn the most by simply hacking away at things using only educated guesses, and once something works, I remember how to do it forever.

Quickly I found myself understanding WordPress a great deal, and ended up working with it on almost a daily basis using it as a CMS system for client websites. For about 5 months or so, I have tried to plan the time to re-design this website, and just the other day I just decided to go for it. I went through my notes, my bookmarks and everything else that I had saved for inspiration for a new re-design, and I was ready.

The new logo came first. While I don’t see this is aspect as too vital for my reasons or goals as a design blogger, I thought it would still be fun to create a unique identity for myself and my website. I blog predominantly for the fun of it, and for networking with others, so I’m not overly concerned with my “online brand”. My company’s brand is what I put time into.

I wanted to find a way to put the “B” and the “Y” together, but had struggled with this in the past. They are not the best initials to work with. I decided to draw a custom font in Adobe Illustrator for the two letters, and after some variations on the arrangement of them, I found a format that fit well. Then, I decided I wanted the logo not to just represent my name, but I wanted it to also display what I do, what my interests are, what my personal site is about, and what readers can expect to see on my blog.

I didn’t have to go far for inspiration, as I simply thought to myself “What do I do, what do I blog about?”, and the answer was right there on the left hand side of the programs I use every day. The pen tool and the brush tool in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator were perfect little symbols to represent what my blog is about. Designers will know what the imagery means, and represents, and after all, I am not too concerned about marketing my personal site to people outside of the design industry.

After drawing the two elements onto the “BY” initials, and changing the colors of the letters, I asked my Twitter followers if they had any feedback. Martin Kulakowski came back to me with a great suggestion, and even sent an image showing his idea. He added a slight amount of separation between the stem of the letters and the design icons. I thought that was a perfect addition.

So, the logo was ready to go, and immediately I started working on the website design. I knew I wanted to create a light, watercolor/sketch look, and its color scheme would include teal / turquoise (my favorite color). I also knew that I wanted the website to be 1080 px wide. This would provide me with a nice amount of white space and room to work in some design elements.

During a quiet night staying in, I put together a header design that I was really happy with. It had a classy / artsy feel but wasn’t heavy like my previous design. I also wanted to include a personal image but didn’t want it to look out of place inside the overall design. A little saturation and play with the hue of the image, and it fit into the color scheme nicely. The before and after can be seen below.

The previous design was way too heavy, and I went a little crazy with the paper texture brush. I think I had just found that brush or something, and was a little too excited to try it out!

The new header has much more style, and helps to give the new design a light, clean feeling.

From my notes, I knew I had a lot of little touches of quality that I wanted to put on the website, whether it was some type of creative rollover or a unique way of showing information.

A look at some of the new elements and features…

Obviously the layout of the homepage is important. If it is good, your bounce rate will be low, and visitors will want to click-through to the various pages and posts on your site. I decided to get rid of the “Featured Post” spot on the homepage, as this started to have no meaning to me. In my opinion, for a site like mine, the most recent post WAS the featured post. So, I simply decided to just list the posts in order of publish date.

Comment Count

One small note I had written down somewhere was to display the “post comment count” in a speech bubble. This is a nice way to display this information, as it is simple, takes up very little room, and looks more interesting than a simple text link saying “3 comments”. It also allowed me to have fun with a rollover inspired by sites like Web Designer Wall (rollover the main navigation). You can see what I did if you rollover the little teal colored speech bubble at the top right of each post page, and on the homepage and category pages.

Navigation

I really didn’t like my navigation on the previous design, and it bugged me every time I thought about it. I had used some junky javascript and images for the rollover effect, and that was not cool to be doing in 2009. For my new website navigation, you can see similar rollover effects, but the entire navigation uses one single image, utilizing the CSS image replacement technique. I am a strong believer in this type of navigation, especially because of the fact that text links remain in the source code. The search engine bots don’t see the image file with a link, they see plain textual links. I like (insert Borat accent). High five

A little more insight…

Another small addition, is at the bottom of each post page. I thought it would be nice to have some little snippet of information about what was going on in my life or what I was thinking at the time I published a post. So, I added some custom fields and the necessary php code to pull them into the website, and on each post, it will now have a few lines of “when I published this post, I was…”. Prepare to see things like “planning world domination” or “eating a big mac and judging myself”.

One major part of this website re-design included the display of visitor comments, and the comment form area. I really wanted this to look unique and in-line with the rest of the website. I spent time working on the layout of the comments list, and finally landed upon a format that I was happy with. First, the visitor’s name, twitter ID, and the time and date the comment was made. Below that line, the avatar, and the comment text.

I’m quite happy with how the comments list turned out. A little addition to this area is the “Highlight Author Comments” plugin (by a god of WP plugins, Rob Marsh) that allows me to make it easier for visitors to read my comment responses. With a bit of padding, and my new logo, it now provides a subtle difference to make it easy to follow my responses in the comment thread.

Next up was the comments form area. This was another area that I neglected with my first custom WordPress theme design, mainly because I was too afraid to hack up the code that controlled the form. Not anymore!

With some simple CSS on the form fields, and correct positioning, I was able to use a single background image for the form, and keep the overall look consistent with the rest of the website. I still have a few additions to this area of the website, and will probably get to them in the next few days. They include: adding a “comments policy”, and creating a nicer submit button.

A before and after screenshot can be seen below:

Another major piece of the new design involves how the categories and archived posts are displayed. I didn’t want to have a giant list of categories going all the way down the right hand side of the website, so I decided the best way to keep the site clean was the hide the categories until a visitor activated that area to see them. I did the same for displaying “Popular Posts” and “Random Posts”. This keeps the sidebar nice and simple and drop down slider is a fun way of presenting information.

On the old site, I had a section I called “Today, I am reading” and this was a small list of some of the various design related blogs that I regularly visit. For this new design, I moved this to the footer where it fits much better.

I will be changing the RSS feeds that I pull into this area regularly, but for now I am happy to display Randa Clay’s, David Airey’s and Six Revision’s latest posts. There is some weird character issue with the RSS feed script in WordPress in the way that it deals with apostrophes and different characters, but this may be more of a character set UTF-8 issue. Not sure just yet, but I will try to fix this soon.

So, all in all, I am quite pleased with this re-design. My main goal of this new design is to re-ignite my energy into posting more regularly and being more active on here. The old site just didn’t encourage me to do this, and I think this new design will.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter for your feedback and comments on the design, they are much appreciated. If anyone is interested in seeing a tutorial on any aspect of the creation of this theme, please leave a comment and I will be happy to write a post about it if a few others are interested also.

What do you think of the re-design?