Friday Vidcast 10-2-09
In this week’s Friday Vidcast we talk about being transparent, authenticity, and talk some more about creativity and designing for yourself…
Site of the Week
The site of the week this week isn’t really a site that I visit much but there was a good article about being transparent on mashable.com. This has been something I am seeing is so important when building our personal brand. Every time we interact with someone it is a part of building our personal brand, from social conversations via (twitter,chats, etc…), or email, and phone interaction. Clients don’t just buy our services, they buy us.
Food For Thought
The Food for thought this week is an expansion on the “Design is for Grown ups” article from earlier in the week, and really expands, and touches on a couple things i didn’t hit in the article.
Wrapping Up
Thanks again to everyone who continues interact and support this blog. Next month we will hit the 1 year mark, and it is awesome to see how far we have come, and I am excited about what the future holds.
I want to send some Follow Friday love to my homie Rich Hemsley is one of my closest friends, and is an awesome guy… he used to design back in the day (when we weren’t old) but has recently struck up that old flame and is getting back in the game… he is definitely worth following. so get to it @richhemsley
You touch on the MAYA principle here which I just learned about this last semester. It stands for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Meaning the goal of design is to push it as far as you can artistically while still making it approachable. Clients want our talents, but they are also worried about pushing it too far and alienating their customers. Their goal is to communicate their message and our goal is to push them as far as their willing to go. And that is where your personal brand comes in, as you mentioned. The more they trust you, the more they’ll let you push it. We just can’t betray that trust and forget that they’re just trying to sell toilet plungers
First, a play on a famous Picasso quote:
“Good designers steal, great designers steal from children.”
So, what I’m about to say may sounds really wacky, but I feel like a lot of the time — it is the rules and guidelines that I have to work within as designer that makes me *more* creative.
In so many ways, I feel like art school killed my creativity. It was this period where it’s all about self-exploration and finding your style and that’s all well and good, but I regularly felt during those times bored with all that self-serving creativity. Creativity without rules just felt like vanity, and it really turned me off.
When I went into Art School I was strictly a fine artist. I did painting and assemblage and making web pages was more of my guilty pleasure. (A little backwards, i know.) A year into school I ended up choosing to double-major in Fine Art and Design when I finally came out of the closet as a computer nerd. It was the ability to create within boundaries that made me feel like the creativity had *more* substance to it…
Is any of this making sense?
haha… well if Kyle is following Picasso… who am I to argue
I do agree that boundaries can be very helpful in getting things moving, as well as providing guidance we need to know how and what to design for as we get projects started.
Good input from your personal experience
~ Aaron I
first off, thanks for calling me old and making me cry.
i agree with Liz in that we need to find “creativity” within the box our clients give us and sometimes that may lead us to discover something new within ourselves. i think its important that we find a way to put our personal touch on that design regardless of the confinement we work in. that design becomes a part of our portfolio and is a tool potential clients use to judge our capabilities. like you said aaron, its all about balancing the two. we have to find a way to first off, create branding for the client, and at the same time continue the promotion of our own brand. the client’s branding should always come first of course and we can’t drown out the customer’s ideas in an attempt to promote ourselves. on the flip-side, sometimes we have to hold our client’s hands and guide them toward a beautiful and functional design. sometimes the clients don’t understand good design, or functional design for that matter, and its our job to get them there. great post aaron.
Definitely design for yourself! Show off your strengths…I made my site to sort of show my growing Flash ability, while keeping a clean design.
btw….we’ll always support ya, but I’ll try to give some negative feedback sometime
lol