Enjoy!

** You hafta subscribe to or buy the actual magazine to see the full article.

Woot.  My article in the most recent Marketing magazine (Vol. 23 No. 257) came out in Seattle this week.  The article’s called 9 tips for Awesome Blogging, and as you might have guessed: it’s about how to be a mad rad blogger.

(To subscribe to Marketing, email Larry Coffman: lcoffman@earthlink.net)

Judging by what I’ve seen around the tubes, there are two polarizing approaches to the task: You either take the entertaining, marketing-happy approach or you take conservative, technical-thorough one. Neither tack seems particularly satisfying.

Really, the case study regularly comes off like a boring “we-had-to” addition to the design showcase. But is it?

What’s the Point?

I think it’s important to consider the purpose of the case study. Its most basic function is to add depth and meaning to your portfolio, by literally describing what you did: design, copywriting, XHTML/CSS templates, project management, whatever.

Its other (and arguably more important) job is to distill out the essence and meaning of your work, in relation to the client. To illustrate, in short form, how what you’ve delivered is more unique, efficient, or profitable than what came before.

The Basics.

The tone and content of your writing will likely vary from project-to-project, and according to your business and audience. Still, I think it’s safe to say that most case studies should be:

• As brief as possible, without omitting essentials. Long case studies are a pain to read, no matter how engrossed your readers are. If you’ve got something truly unique and attractive to customers that requires more exposition, go ahead and write that gigantic case study. If not, keep it concise.
• Understandable to humans, not robots. I think this goes without saying. It’s important that your writing be sensical and accessible, perhaps conversational, even if you’re writing to techie insiders who really get the mechanics what you do.
• Low on adjectives, high on metaphor. I make this mistake all the time. There’s a big difference between jamming adjectives in your sentences and in using metaphor, which is far more productive. Adjectives add bulk and obscure meaning when overused; metaphors rely on story-telling and ingenuity to create more meaning. Metaphors help you say things better, with less words.
• Themed, but straightforward. Framing your case studies thematically (“The Sparkly Summer Day-like Project”) is fine, as long as they make sense. In the end, you still have to communicate the actual details of what you did.

They do matter.

Not everyone will dive deep enough into your site to read your case studies, but many of your potential customers will. When they do, they should get a clear and immediate sense of what each of your projects entailed, the kinds of services you offer, and—most importantly—how what you did positively impacted the client.

Use that as your bottom line, and you’re set (even if you aren’t the king of metaphors).

Today marks the most exciting and important day in my company’s little history — Tiffani Jones (my fiancée!) and I will be joining forces. My days of ‘freelancing’ are hereby put to rest, and thingsthatarebrown is reborn as a slick, two-person micro-agency. Though her role will grow and change over time, Tiff will be joining me at first to lead project management, business development, and client relations as my Director of Operations (she likes her titles as badass as possible).

De-stressed

Far and away one of the biggest challenges in running your own design company is coordinating all the communication, assets, and scheduling with your clients. Project management is roughly 30-50% of the total work on any given project, and the ‘cognitive switch’ load of going back and forth between productive creative and management is just too much to bear — both sides of my work suffers, and it’s stressful as all hell.

No more with Tiff on-board. She brings nearly two years of agency experience leading PM duties at Blue Flavor. She’s got the chops to handle one of the most difficult positions in any creative setting — making sure it all works, and everyone is happy and excited. She’s great under pressure, and definitely owns her nickname — “The Hammer” — keeping clients (and me) focused on goals and engaged in their projects.

But wait, there’s more!

Just as exciting is that Tiff is also starting her own business — content strategy and web copywriting and editing through Second & Park. She’s offering her services to other design firms, as well as bringing her talents to thingsthatarebrown. As I’ve learned the hard way over the last year, great copy is just as vital as great design, so having an exceptional copywriter on-hand will be a priceless resource.

There’s lots more in the cards, so please stay tuned.

After a few of my friends asked me for some help creating HTML resumes, I started pointing them to my old HTML resume. Then it dawned on me — this would be a great little thing to open-source, and make into a standalone template.

So I dove into the old code, cleaned things up a bit and put it all together for download. It’s nothing special — just a simple web page that you can edit to swap in your own information. The HTML and CSS are flexible enough that you can easily change colors, add a background, a photo, or use the bottom section to showcase a few portfolio pieces. It uses the YUI Grids framework, so you might want to check out the support info on Yahoo’s site if you find those elements confusing.

Please share the link with your friends looking for jobs:
http://sampleresumetemplate.net/
Download ZIP

Embraceable Change

Jared’s talk focused around designing “embraceable change” — developing an increased awareness of your audiences’ varying levels of education. It’s such a simple, elegant and important idea.

If you present problems to your users to solve (fill out this form, I’ll give you a cookie), you have to consider what knowledge they bring to the table. You must design around both ends of the problem — you need to both lower the knowledge required from the user, and assist them to increase their ability to solve the problem. Some choice screens from Windows95 helped illustrate the point (I’m a sucker for PC nostalgia).

Just like Steve Krug’s still totally awesome “Don’t Make Me Think,” Spool’s message and focus is grounded in the reality of how design is actually used, not merely how it looks or how we might hope it to be used. As designers, we make fundamental mistakes when we forget to “look, listen, and observe.”

One line is all you need

However, far and away the best nugget from the entire talk came near the end, when he was speaking to how we must ‘frame’ design projects:

“How will we know if we’ve done a good job?”

Marinate on that one for a just minute. It’s the perfect rule to follow for all design projects. It’s a comfortable motto, one that anchors everything you do — every pixel you push or line of code you write — around the idea of solving a real problem. It’s sound advice.

Slow start

The first three months of the new year, January and February especially, are fairly slow. It’s a gradual stream of leads, but it seems that many firms are still just “getting back to things” after the holidays. I didn’t do enough of it this year, but it’s great to use this downtime to really focus on internal marketing and sales. Spend time publishing more frequently to your blog, spruce up your portfolio site, and execute on new ideas.

Spring fever

Around late March an early April, things seemed to pick up. I had more solid leads in one day in early April than I had during the first three months of the year. I’m not sure if this is a real trend, or just luck. Honestly, there’s no reason to think that things will be the same next year — things could look very different (i.e. fast in the late winter, slow in the spring — or all slow/all fast)

Everyone golfs in August

While not every industry does this, many professional firms shut down in August, as many employees take their summer vacations. Lawyers, investment firms, executives, etc. all seem to run away, en-masse, at the same time.

Of course, this isn’t the whole economy, but it can be an important trend to consider, as many key stakeholders in your process may be difficult to engage or absent during this time. Plan on focusing on non-professional services clients (maybe shift to small tech firms, or the non-profit sector) or taking a short vacation of your own. Of course, you can also use any free time to focus back on your own firm’s marketing.

Ramp up to the holidays

Throughout the fall, all the way until just before the holiday season in December, many firms and organizations scramble to spend any remaining marketing budgets. This can be a great time to recover from any late summer slowdown, and really land some great projects to keep you busy until the holidays. Plus, I find working hard in the winter a great way to avoid thinking about shitty weather and focus on my projects. Work’s always the same, rain or shine.

Always be working

Really, I wouldn’t look too far into these observations as a template for discrete business cycles. Again, this is a very easily influenced sample size of one — just my firm and what I’ve been through in my first year of business. What I’ve seen this year will more than likely change next year, and the year after that, especially as my business grows and changes.

The important thing is to be prepared for very unexpected changes in your sales funnel. If you find you’re not getting enough work to be fully utilized, start putting those extra hours into marketing and generating new leads.

When you’re getting swarmed with leads and new clients, do your best to schedule as much work as you can — try to say yes to the most promising projects you’re a great fit for, and keep your days packed with work. If you’re overbooked in the short-term, try to convince the client to commit to starting later, when you’re free. This will help you keep things fully-utilized and build up some extra savings for when things inevitably slow down again.

If you’re smart about it (and a touch lucky), you can mitigate some of the common cash-flow issues freelancers face by being adaptable to the sales leads coming in.

Fast matters

What’s interesting about the switch is that I was expecting it to be just an incremental upgrade — a little faster here and there, modestly better image quality, and so on. Not so. The D90 is such a huge improvement on the D70, it feels like a different beast entirely — and it’s nearly all about speed.

The thing just feels hungry — everything is so blisteringly fast that it feels like it wants to consume images, non-stop. It’s the little things things that add up. The autofocus is about 2x as fast, and far more accurate than the D70. Buttons are placed and spaced so they’re easier to reach. The controls are ‘snappier’ and feel more positive to use. ‘Mirror-blackout’ — the time it takes for the viewfinder to clear — is so fast you’re pretty much always seeing something in the viewfinder, even when you’re taking the picture. It makes it feel like a rangefinder, nearly. The menus are easier to use and faster to page through. Hell, it even formats new cards instantaneously.

Why would I care though? I’m not in a hurry.

Well, for one, the speed and elegance just makes the tool start to disappear — I only notice the difference because I’m so used to waiting on my D70. A month from now I won’t even notice the camera. While having to work within limitations can be helpful, a slow automatic camera is really just a frustration. Modern SLRs are designed to be as fast and functional as possible, so added speed makes the camera fade away more and more, and drives all your attention to the moment.

Speed and design

This is, of course, an interesting design lesson. Speed matters even if you don’t think you care about it. Performance hasn’t always been a high priority on many of my client projects — I design primarily for low-traffic, information heavy sites. Still, I’m going to spend more effort and focus on finding ways to cut load times and package my images so that my sites load more quickly. Every little byte really does count.

Alo, it’s intersting to note that a sensation of speed is never about individual variables — it’s about the speed of the entire experience; the light, crisp feeling of using something that gets out of your way, quickly.

There’s just more there

Image quality is also a revelation. Sure, there’s a bigger image, better noise control, and blah blah… Really, it’s the intangible and immeasurable details of the image quality that really make it interesting. The camera just takes a bigger bit out of reality than anything I’ve used — shadows are deep and rich, highlights well controlled, noise is either gone or pleasant looking, and the RAW files are so malleable they’re like Silly Putty. You can use the camera to create whatever you like.

Really, there’s not too much higher praise for a tool than saying it gets out of the way, quickly. Nice job Nikon.

The big rush

Nothing can really prepare you for it. No matter how much planning you do upfront, you’ll learn about 80% of what you need to know about freelancing in your first few months. My talk “The First Four Months of Freelancing” was literally a brain dump of all the things I had to learn just to keep things moving, sane, and profitable.

Really, a freelance design shop is just a business like any other. Selling a service requires an ability to promote, sell, educate, and lead — you’re an agency of one.

I’d say, unequivocally, that if you’re not interested in the challenge of learning and juggling all the roles of a typical agency — design, project management, development, business development, resourcing, strategy, and client relations — think twice about starting out on your own. You’re going to find that you end up spending far more time managing projects, client relationships and business duties that you do with the “real work” of design and development. If you’re excited by the opportunity of working with and building relationships with great clients, growing and expanding a business, and challenging yourself, freelancing is a wonderful career.

Getting your bearings

After the headrush of learning how much you just don’t know about what you’re now doing, you’ll spend the next few months getting your bearings. You start to nail down the crufty business details (taxes, healthcare, purchasing, invoicing, etc.), and find a working rhythm that makes sense for you. For me, I realized how much I needed a consistent work day and a solid schedule.

In general, you’re still over your head, but hopefully swimming to the surface. During this time I was really lucky to work with a few other freelancers who served as really amazing mentors. I really can’t recommend it enough — be friendly and reach out to others for guidance. You learn things a lot faster, and you’ve got the confidence that others have made it work.

The Mango Sadness

For me, a strange thing happened, earlier this year. Once I had really nailed down how to run my freelance business — consistently found great projects, kept my clients happy, and made things profitable — I lost my creative energy. I still delivered solid work, but it I just wasn’t having much fun doing the work, or feeling excited about thingsthatarebrown. While it sounds like a luxury to “love your work”, for any freelancer, it’s a must. If you don’t love it you just won’t do it. Your business won’t grow and things will stagnate very quickly; even if you’re still delivering to clients.

After the newness and rush of freelancing wears thin, you realize you spend your days indoor and alone, working with people you rarely meet. That lack of social interaction and any physical collaboration on your work — well, it can be a bit crushing.

Creative Reboot

For me, SXSWi this year was the kickstart to re-setting myself. It’s an amazing experience — you get to see pretty much everyone who designs and builds the internet, in one place, in real life (IRL, FTW!). Even if you don’t go to many panels just meeting other people who do what you do can really re-start your creative drive. Passion and excitement are wildly contagious.

You’ve got to keep that feeling alive though, and that takes a bit of work. If you let it go, it will sag and you’ll slowly lose hold of that energy. So find ways of keeping your creativity alive — go to conferences, audit an art class, go to a museum, read a good book, have beers with other designers. Really, just have fun and always keep learning.

Onwards and Upwards

In short, my first year of freelancing has been wildly fun, challenging, and rewarding. It’s decidedly not easy, but noting good ever is. Here’s to another solid year of freelancing.