(or when to say no)

John Ruskin once wrote, that the best work never was and never will be done for money.

The truth is most of us work to keep a paycheck coming in. Yet, a sense of accomplishing something that really matters (gasp), of excellent quality, creatively fulfilling and most of all – serving the client’s needs – seems essential to keep one’s sanity. Otherwise you risk losing your heart and gradually drifting away from your initial moorings (Presupposition: we all aim at more than little).

So you care about the output of your work, strive to keep the standards and use all your experience and knowledge to convince clients, that some of their revisions or modifications would bring conspicuously shoddy results (And I’m talking about significant alterations, not changing type from 10pt Garamond to 12pt Caslon).

The problem starts, when although you’ve clearly articulated your reasons, the client says: ok, we understand. Still, we want it our way.
At this point you can follow two paths:

The pragmatic approach would respect, well, the paycheck still coming in. There is the opportunist cost of prostituting yourself, but ultimately it’s all about the money, isn’t it?

On the other hand, some – that means not all (not even the majority of all;) reckon it’s an ethical matter. In the long run, if you don’t have integrity, you have nothing and obviously, you can’t buy it. (I guess this is the point at which the relationship between professional standards and personal values might in some cases require revision.)

In any event, Howard Gardner (whom you might have known from Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds) in his decade-long research provided quite useful Good Work criteria:

“Good work involves three considerations:
1) it is technically Excellent;
2) It is personally meaningful or Engaging;
3) it is carried out in an Ethical way.
(…) In most endeavors, “good work” involves more than making a profit. The carpenter is expected to make a table that does not collapse, the pilot should be polite and cheerful as well as sober and resourceful. When the requirements of a job get to be quite complex, traditions serve to remind practitioners of their duties, and often these are formally set down into professional codes, such as the physician’s Hippocratic Oath.”

So, personally, I’d rather say no to a proposal of making a shiny but rickety table, and it’s not only about my deeply held principles. It’s about reciprocity – I wouldn’t like to risk my favourite china next time I buy one either.

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Ogilvy’s principles of management

1. Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.
2. Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”
3. If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.
4. Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.
5. Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.
6. Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.
7. Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.
[via: Patricia Sellers]

For the Love of Culture

“For 75 percent of the eighteen million books in our libraries, the rule of the plaintiffs would have been a digital death sentence. For these works–presumptively under copyright but no longer in print–to require permission first is to guarantee invisibility. These works are, practically speaking, orphans. It is effectively impossible–at least at the wholesale level–to secure permission for any use that triggers copyright law.”
Lawrence Lessig’s, as always insightful essay on Google, copyright and our future.

Milton Glaser: Ten things I have learned

1 You can only work for people that you like.
2 If you have a choice never have a job.
3 Some people are toxic avoid them.
4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5 Less is not necessarily more.
6 Style is not to be trusted.
7 How you live changes your brain.
8 Doubt is better than certainty.
9 On aging.
10 Tell the truth.
full post here & a short documentary.

Design Imperialism

“A key point of failure in today’s global design landscape lies precisely in the jargon — we need to invent new ways of writing, talking and thinking about concepts of “humanitarian design”; we need new language that doesn’t homogenize entire cultures, new vocabulary that better reflects the intricate lace of the world’s biocultural and psychosocial diversity as a drawing board for design.” Maria Popova on The Language of Design Imperialism. Insightful.

Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency and Brand Evaluation

“Visual features that have no meaningful association with the product itself can actually make consumers like the product, provided that these features are something that the consumer can easily identify with.This means that critters on wine labels, however odd that may be, can be a good sales strategy. It allows a marketer to target a certain consumer by using images on labels that represent an important aspect of that customer’s life. Moreover, there are potentially many ways to make that label as unique as possible because a logo would be chosen based on who the target customers are and not on what that product is.” Building a Better Brand: How feelings shape product evaluation.

The Sins of St. Paul

“I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. (…) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.” M. Bierut on Paul Rand.

“Any design student could do a better job”

“I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali.
The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design” What they don’t teach you about identity design by Paula Scher.

Steven Heller on Olympic Pictograms

Briefly and to the point (& video): Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages.

Quiet logos

“Lindstrom suggests that too much messaging on a product’s packaging can actually prevent a sale. Logos and words can engage the rational mind, causing people to actually think harder about making a purchase. It’s a counter-intuitive notion, but then think about the effectiveness of the quiet logos on a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, or a Method product, or the entire Apple product line up.” The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand

Meetings, the Google way

Not exactly on the main subject of this blog, but hey, branding actually IS about meetings. Meetings, the Google way:
1. Set a firm agenda. 2. Assign a note-taker. 3. Carve out micro-meetings. 4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data. 6. Stick to the clock. [via: supervolatile]

Idiologie / branding & everything else

Good work