Non-Profit Marketing guru Chas has a great list of Laws of dealing with clients posted today. Most of his laws hit so close to my own experiences with various clients that my laughter is tempered by the unpleasant memories.
@oaknd1 Indiana has flipped to light blue with us as well. Look out below, falling red states http://www.hubdub.com/election_map
This is the text of a direct an @reply message I received in Twitter yesterday from a user named Nigel Eccles who I do not know, do not follow, and as far as I can tell, does not follow me. Not being the sort who randomly clicks on links sent to me (but intrigued that I appeared to be directly targeted in the message), I checked out his user page.Â
Most of Mr. Eccles posts are targeted at other users and include links to HubDub, just like the tweet I received. Turns out, HubDub is a prediction market game site that allows users to bet play money on news events. Much like Inkling, a site that a couple of my friends and I played voraciously for a few weeks in 2006 before burning out on the lack of new investment markets on the site (a perhaps unavoidable consequence of being a recent start-up with relatively few users. But I digress).
HubDub strikes me as very very cool.
So how did Nigel Eccles, the CEO and creator of HubDub (according to Google) end up targeting @oaknd1?
It’s because, earlier in the day, I had posted this tweet:
Wow. Intrade.com has Indiana as a very light blue state. It was pink last week.
Intrade is an Irish prediction market site that allows users to buy futures contracts on current events with real money. Among other things, they are heavily involved in predicting the results of the upcoming election. It’s an interesting way to hedge against real investment risk. If you have most of your money in stocks, you could buy contracts on a recession and make some money while the rest of your investments look like Ike Brovlovski doing his impression of David Caruso’s career.
(South park…episode one…anyone…anyone…)
(Crickets)
Anyway…clearly, Nigel is following the names of his competitors with a Twitter filter and taking the opportunity to send targeted, timely direct messages to users like me who demonstrate an interest in services similar to his own.
Well…let’s say that you’re trying to increase the Q-rating of your business, or blog, or web app, or non-profit children’s summer camp: Search for your competitors on Twitter. Chances are, the people talking about your competitors are your potential customers. (Especially, if they’re complaining about your competitors).
I think I’m impressed by this because I didn’t receive a tweet from “HubDub.com.” It came from the the CEO of the company. Is it really the CEO, or just some sort of bot? I have no way of knowing, but that’s where my interest was piqued enough to check out the link.
I use twitter primarily to interact with my network, but I’m not against the idea of well crafted, targeted, permission-based marketing based on what I’m twittering from time to time. In this case, it directly resulted in the discovery of a totally new (to me) site. The only way I can think of that I would ever have found this site would be if it was mentioned in a Bloomberg podcast or an article in the Wall Street Journal, the way I first heard about Intrade.
If I ever find myself referring to wearing a Band-Aid, or going to McDonald’s in one of my tweets, do I really want to receive a flood of tweets from Burger King? Or Brand-X Adhesive Bandages?
Two of my most recent designs, the homepages for the University of Notre Dame’s Office of Business Operations and Office of Sustainability have both launched.
The Office of Business Operations. Office of Sustainability.
When text is placed in InDesign, the type is automatically situated in the text frame based on the defined edges of the frame and the justification setting of the text (left, right, center, justified, etc.). Most of the time this looks fine, but when certain characters are the first character of a line, the nice, even flow of the margin edge will be interrupted.
The result is a slight variation in the left margin. If we look at the visual weight of the lines of text it becomes more obvious:
Indentations are usually a visual cue that we’re starting a new paragraph, and even though you probably won’t confuse anyone with a slight indention like this, it could be enough to add a visual hiccup to your reader’s ability to flow effortlessly from one line to the next. Luckily, InDesign can compensate for this using the Optical Margin Alignment setting in the Story panel.
You can find the Story panel under Window>Type & Tables>Story. Turning on OMA is as easy as clicking the box next to…you guessed it: “Optical Margin Alignment.” The results look like this:
Notice how the quotation marks now overlap the text frame allowing the “i” to become the de facto first character on the line.
You can control the amount of margin alignment with the other set of controls in the Story panel. (This will be set at 12pt automatically). This setting only needs to be activated once per story, and just for the record: a “story” is a text box, or a set of linked text boxes with copy flowing between them.
OMA will help to compensate for glyphs like quotation marks (as in the example images) as well as round letterforms and letterforms such as “W” and “T” that have a lot of natural white space in the lower left quadrant of the glyph.
It’s fair to characterize my working relationship with our Client Relations Lead as generally pretty good. He advocates for the designers when clients attempt to rip out our soul, Temple of Doom style and he’s not afraid to ride herd on us when necessary. All in all, it’s a good situation with an individual that I have a lot of faith in.Â
Having said that, a conversation that he and I had for the fiftieth time a few weeks ago inspired this post. The conversation went something like this, and please bear in mind that I’m paraphrasing:
CRL: “Hey. I need you to do [design task] for [major client]. Can you get it done?”
Me: “Probably. When do they need it?”
CRL: “As soon as possible.”
(We stare at each other).
Unfortunately, “as soon as possible” tells your designer little to nothing about when the project actually has to be done. Does ASAP in this context mean “Drop what you’re doing, this has to make a deadline in twenty minutes?” Does it mean “today?” “This week?” Designers tend to view projects within the parameters of time and budget, and a few hours means one sort of solution whereas a few days can mean a totally different approach. That’s why it helps to have specifics on deadlines.
So what’s the solution? Surprisingly…it’s not up to the CRL, it’s up to the designer. The CRL, more then likely, doesn’t want to disturb me, and more over it’s not his responsibility to prioritize my tasks because he doesn’t know what I’m working on, for whom, or where his project ranks in importance with those other projects.
No…it’s up to the designer to set some time constraints on the request in order to move this interaction forward. Instead of “Probably, When do you need it?” the far more helpful thing for me to say would be “Sure…I can get it done by the end of the hour/day/week/etc.”
Instead of asking “When do you need it?” try telling your CRL or client “Here’s when I think I can reasonably get it done.”
Now you’ve got a starting point.
oAk is a web and print designer with AgencyND, the on-campus design office at the University of Notre Dame.
I'm also a freelance designer from South Bend, Indiana.