Random late night thought: a huge part of stewarding a brand well is defending consistency against the boredom of insiders.

It hit enough of a nerve to warrant a few favorites/retweets, so I thought I’d expound a bit. It wasn’t brought about by any one interaction or client or even brand, really, but having done this design thing for a few years now, you begin to see trends.

The nature of working closely with a brand logically means your interaction with that brand increases exponentially, typically far past the threshold of even the most ardent fans/users. I like and use Twitter on a near-daily basis, but if I worked at Twitter I’d constantly be interacting with it—like a foreign language student studying abroad, learning through immersion. The closer to the source, the more I know, see and experience.

But that presents a few problems, the most perceptible of which is that you’ve ceased to be your audience. If you’re not careful, you cease to build things for your audience and start to build things for yourself. You stop serving them and you start serving self. There’s a tricky line there—some of the best products, services and experiences are born from people building things for themselves—but rarely does anything large exist long term solely to scratch the proverbial itch of its creator(s).

Practical example: I work at a church with multiple campuses, each with multiple services (experiences, gatherings, what have you). On any given Sunday I interact with our brand, our services and our content for hours. I helped create our brand and have worked within those constraints for close to four years. So that video that runs mid-service? I’ve seen it 10 times before that Sunday. I maybe helped plan it, or write it, or set type for it, or review it. I see it run multiple times, on multiple days, maybe spanning multiple weeks. Dozens and dozens of interactions and touch points with the same content. Immersion.

So when I’m tempted to think “I don’t like it, we should try something else” or “this feels stale, let’s change up this sign or that template or that ritual” I have to remember that the average attender—the person we do all this stuff to communicate to and serve—might come to church once every four weeks. Or a handful of times a year. For the dozens of interactions I have with a solution or aspect of our brand, our primary audience probably has one or two, at best.

“I’m bored” is a horrible design strategy for implementing change. It proves you’ve lost focus on who you’re building a brand for in the first place. When you start catering to the bored whims of insiders you start confusing outsiders who are less familiar with your brand.

And when you start confusing outsiders, you stop reaching them.

At times of change, the learners are the ones who will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully prepared for a world which no longer exists.
—Alistair Smith

In 2012 I’ve dropped that 15-hour allotment to 10.

At last year’s Brooklyn Beta I had a fascinating lunch conversation with everyone’s favorite polymath Dan Rubin about the potential (and inevitability) that more of us would be engaged in longer term contracts with clients. Dan was getting ready to begin a multi-month on-site contract with a client as their creative director. I was just coming off a string of good, short term client projects (between two and four weeks) and wondering what it would look like to dedicate my client work hours to one client for a longer span.

No one can hire me away from NewSpring right now—there’s too much foundational work to be done as we grow and I love it too much. But I also enjoy working with other clients, helping them solve their unique problems and see measurable success come from appropriate design solutions. And doing what I do—translating business needs into beautiful, functional user interfaces and experiences built around stellar brands—is difficult to do in sprints. This is marathon work. And I want to run with someone for longer than a few days.

My good friend Cameron wrote an excellent article about the state of design (and particularly design on the web) and said, “Nearly every CEO and VC I’ve met in the last six months is on a wild hunt for designers.” With that in mind…

Are you a startup or small business that can’t afford a full-time hire, or needs a high level of experience for specific projects? Are you an entrepenuer in need of consistent, considered visual help to bring your ideas to life? Do you need a Designer-On-Retainer or Designer-In-Remote-Residence? If so, I’d love to talk. I love design, I love my clients and I want to serve them better, for longer, in ways that can exponentially affect their mission.

Chandler Van De Water designed and released his first typeface, Cubano, a confident, friendly sans serif display face with lots of personality. He’s working on his second one now.

Drew Delianides wrote a Cloud App raindrop to add the currently playing Rdio track to Cloud to share. You can grab it at Github.

Dave Keller shot and edited this documentary-style teaser trailer for The Explorers Club’s upcoming album, as well as a series of shorts for the Keller Film Festival.

Lindsey Hudlow made some gorgeous hand-lettered Valentine’s Day cards she screenprinted and passed out to the staff. She’s also been tracking the wardrobe habits of our whole team in a Google Doc which she then uses to impersonate one of us on the first Monday of every month. The anticipation is amazing.

*Spare time is a myth—you choose what to do with every hour of the day, and talented, curious people take that time to create awesome things. If that kind of environment sounds inspiring to you, we’re looking for another Designer and Project Manager right now.

But whether those designers and developers are a good fit in the first place is about more than just their talent. In fact, being talented is more like 25% of what makes designers successful at NewSpring. When we’re hiring (and evaluating the existing team) it’s been helpful to look at four categories as a good basic framework:

Competence

Can they do the job as defined? Do they possess the skills, good taste and judgment, curiosity and passion to excel at it? Without a baseline of competence, it’s impossible to benefit the mission.

Early on in my tenure, finding talented folks who wanted to move to South Carolina was exceptionally difficult. The majority of applicants to church roles think they’re much more skilled than their work shows. As we’ve grown, it’s become less of an issue. But on the flipside, talent can be a smokescreen as well, because good team members need more than just talent to contribute to the mission.

Don’t settle for mediocrity, but don’t get blinded by talent alone.

Chemistry

Do they fit in with the team? Are these the people I want to be on mission with, and do they want to work with me? Do we sync up well? Does the competence that got them noticed harmonize with the skills of the existing team? Do we want to hang out with them?

All big work is team work, so chemistry counts. If you sacrifice chemistry, you sacrifice momentum and derail the progress your team was making without them. It’s better to go a painful season without enough people on the team than to willfully hire people you know are a poor fit.

Trust your gut, trust your team. Never hire people you don’t like.

Character

Do they do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it? What is their reputation? Can they be counted on to use their talent alongside the team to accomplish our goals?

Some folks interview well, but interviews are typically sales pitches. What is the sum of their traits and actions up to this point? I have to fight to take my time on this one, but rushing in to hiring without careful consideration of character is disastrous longterm.

Vet early and often.

Calling

Are they supposed to be here? When a difficult decision is rolled out or a sacrifice needs to be made, can they see the mission or can they only see the decision/sacrifice? Is this just a gig? A paycheck? If so, all your investment in them won’t return exponentially.

Don’t hire people who aren’t called to be on mission with you. It’s never worth the investment.

Using the 4-Cs for Self-Inventory

I use these four categories to assess the fitness/readiness of potential hires, but I use them to evaluate myself even more. I do enough self-inventory to know I excel at competence and chemistry, and I feel called to what I do.

Unfortunately, my character is often inconsistent and lacking. I have to be vigilant in listening, receiving feedback and making strides to change. Knowing we’re holding potential hires to these standards is a constant reminder to take responsibility for my lack so that it doesn’t put my team in debt and doesn’t delay or harm the mission. I have not done a good job in this area. I have to be better so we can be better.

Being a successful designer—at least at NewSpring—is about more than a killer portfolio. Talent can only take you so far. Talent doesn’t exist in a vacuum and by itself it can’t make up for a lack of chemistry, character or calling.

P.S. We’re hiring.

And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,
‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”
—Matthew 21:16

I don’t care what everyone is discovering, I only care what people I trust are discovering. People in aggregate have bad taste.

— Joshua Blankenship (@blankenship) December 8, 2011

Dustin was likely tweeting in response to the top-level #discover tab in the recently-shipped Twitter products. Whatever you think of the new Twitter, I’m primarily concerned with how broken #discover is in its current implementation. The discovery opportunities that exist for Twitter as a product and for me as a user are vastly under-served.

For example, what in my four years of interaction on Twitter would lead any sane person to think I care about Fantasy Baseball, #CosasAburridas, or Scott Baio? I’m not just listing random stuff; I have the opportunity to “discover” each of those are stories/trends right now in the #discover tab. But I don’t want to, because none of them are relevant to me.

If relevancy isn’t a priority, #discover actually is a list of random stuff. Or more specifically, it’s a list of random stuff I’m being shown by a service who has access to years of my documented behavior (content, RTs, favorites, frequency of replies, etc.) and seemingly doesn’t care because I should care about Scott Baio because…why? Other people on Twitter do? Or it’s easier to selling advertising to advertisers around Scott Baio or [insert trend here] instead of something I actually might engage with?

The #discover results could be almost any randomized content and it would be exactly as relevant to me as the current offering. How do you sit on that much data about your users, ignore it, and serve up Chachi instead? How is that not a massive, wasted opportunity? Why do you ship a product that doesn’t address it?

I don’t want to discover anything in the #discover tab. My 6000 tweets + favs/RTs should be enough data to serve up customized content.

— Joshua Blankenship (@blankenship) December 11, 2011

I don’t care what everyone wants to discover, or even what everyone is discovering, I only care about content that’s relevant to me based on my previous and current behavior and/or the behavior and content of people I trust. The aggregate stories/trends aren’t useful to me because people in aggregate have bad taste (or at least different enough tastes that serving the same content to all of them is silly). Surely somewhere in 6000+ pieces of user-generated content there is enough information to make #discover useful to me.

If you’re going to force “discovery” on users, at least give them content they might want to find. Isn’t that in the best interests of your users and your bottomline?

This means your people are more important than your calendar. Your people are more important than your action items. Your people are more important than your bottomline.

Why aren’t you investing more time in them? Because it takes time and effort? Invest now and reap the benefit later. If you’re so busy you can’t personally acknowledge the people you’re working with, you’re too busy doing too much that doesn’t matter. Value and respect your team enough to plan and schedule time with them*.

*Managing by walking around doesn’t count. You’re just interrupting people trying to get stuff done.

See It Through
by Edgar Allen Guest

When you’re up against a trouble,
Meet it squarely, face to face;
Lift your chin and set your shoulders,
Plant your feet and take a brace.
When it’s vain to try to dodge it,
Do the best that you can do;
You may fail, but you may conquer,
See it through!

Black may be the clouds about you
And your future may seem grim,
But don’t let your nerve desert you;
Keep yourself in fighting trim.
If the worst is bound to happen,
Spite of all that you can do,
Running from it will not save you,
See it through!

Even hope may seem but futile,
When with troubles you’re beset,
But remember you are facing
Just what other men have met.
You may fail, but fall still fighting;
Don’t give up, whate’er you do;
Eyes front, head high to the finish.
See it through!