I also don’t know if this will turn into a series of posts. (At this point, committing to a series of blog posts on anything beyond the status of my big toe feels a bit daunting. The spirit is there, but the time is not.) But I thought it was worth honing in on a few topics related to the business side of creative. Yes, I am well aware of the fact that there are tons of books about this stuff, but the few bits below have proved to be indispensable ingredients to my success sustainability.

Have a Formal Proposal and Contract Process

My proposal and contract process has been honed from years of feedback and trial and error. By design, it’s not that complicated. I engage the client in some sort of discovery conversation via e-mail, phone or meatspace. This provides me with enough information to craft a proposal. The proposal is largely templated, and I only edit three or four sections between projects, but clients receive a highly detailed document that feels as if it were written just for them.

Competitively, my proposal is probably one of my strongest weapons. I constantly receive strong feedback on its thoroughness and writing, and there have been several instances where the quality directly affected me winning the job.

Bill On Time and Without Apologies

It is important to bill on time, at the specified amount, without apologies. The contract should specify when these bills can be expected, the terms for them, and the amount. Clients should never be surprised on any of these fronts, because nothing jacks a relationship faster than funny business with money; if an amount is going to be higher than what was originally agreed upon, the client should know well in advance, in writing. Be good with invoices, and your business will benefit.

On the flip side, clients are pleasantly surprised when the invoice comes in under budget. Sometimes, whether the timesheet backs me up or not, I’ll shave an hour or two off of the projected time, and the last invoice will be slightly under my original estimate. It’s a cheap shot, and arguably pandering, but it makes for some feel-good e-mail hugs, so shut up.

The Little Things, Like, You Know, Communication

Every business requires meticulous and mind-numbing number juggling and detail tracking. Stay on top of this crap, because they multiply like gremlins. There is a multitude of applications to help you with this, but the central piece is always customer communication. My gmail account is tricked out like a Bentley in a Jay Z video with hundreds of contacts, routing rules and descriptive labels, but a lot of people with European cars and corner offices like expensive CRM applications to accomplish the same thing.

Designers who succeed cannot do it on skill alone. I’ve said it 9,000 times before and I’ll say it 9,000 times before I die — more often than not, being a good designer has absolutely, quantifiably nothing to do with design. It’s about immediate follow-up, proactive lead generation, relentless headhunting, and transparent diplomacy. It’s about kissing ass and still getting your way. It’s about managing expectations, exceeding those expectations, and making it look effortless.

He and I play with the GeoTrax trains quite a bit. Call it a guilty pleasure on my part. Having accumulated a decent bit of track and a couple engines, it makes for great group play; even my little girl, who just likes fiddling with the remote control, can have her own train. And my son, who is remarkably creative with the track configurations, spends hours building and tearing down layouts until they snake all over the first floor of my house.

Picking a “system” of railroad toys is a lot like picking either Mac or PC back in the day. Once you’ve made the initial investment, switching systems means essentially starting over because the tracks and trains are 100% incompatible. So we’re a GeoTrax family, not a Thomas family gol dang it, just like my pappy was, and his pappy before him. We’re in it for the long haul.

To make things more interesting, there is a light cult following for these things. Not a full blown Kool Aid drinking cult, but more of a widespread fandom that is evident on YouTube, eBay and even custom layout software.

So my question is simple: why the hell does Fisher-Price’s main GeoTrax page suck so bad? There’s so much content out there, and all they can muster is some stupid Flash intro, a lame list of products, even lamer “games and activities”, and the uber-lame printable poster. If that is the best this multi-million dollar subsidiary can think of, their marketing team should be tarred and feathered for lazy, shallow, one-dimensional thinking.

Some Suggestions

I am going to put on my marketing director hat, my art director shoes, and my brand manager underoos for a few minutes, and take a critical look at simple improvements. The goal, simply stated, is to grow this site into a one-stop area for all things GeoTrax.

• Redesign the individual product pages (example). Make the photos bigger, and incorporate “action shots” into the pop-up gallery, so kids can see how bodacious a particular train or building will look in their current setup. The descriptions should be a bit longer, losing the boring tech specs, and be easier to read. The “e-mail a friend” link is good, but why not add a del.icio.us link? How about another tab or section for related products? (“Hey kids, this building is totally sweet, but to make the whole deal more awesome, grab this engine as well!”)
• Show older and discontinued products. Why only list current products? The product line has dozens of older products, so provide consumers with a list of all products they can reference. Who cares if they can’t buy it? Better to be the authority on all things GeoTrax than worry about only the products they can add to their shopping carts. Even the My Checklist section, which allows you to keep track of stuff you have and want, does not show discontinued items. Kind if defeats the purpose, and instead of useful tool, just comes off as lame marketing.
• Did you know GeoTrax has an official blog? Me either, until I got lucky with Google. Why the hell is this not integrated into the main site? Why the hell is it on Blogger? All this great, fresh content, and it gets about as much love as last Friday’s leftover ravioli left in the back of the fridge. This is the stuff that keeps people coming back. I can’t stand corporate blogs that feel like they were just tacked on as a last-minute “screw it, just do it, as long as it doesn’t cost anything” option. And nothing says “screw it, just do it, as long as it doesn’t cost anything” quite like a Blogger site.
• Where is the user-generated video content? People love this stuff; these homemade YouTube videos get thousands of views? Why is Fisher-Price not leveraging a fanbase with clearly too much time on its hands? I mean a photo gallery is OK, but why not step into 2002?
• The sample track layouts are so lame it hurts. About as creative as a coloring book of squares. Another opportunity for user-generated content. See next point.
• While it’s certainly interesting that someone has taken the time to develop track-layout software, the SourceForge page is lame and anything but user-friendly. Fisher-Price should invest in developing an application in Java or Flash that allows kids (or whomever) to mockup fantasy layouts that can be as crazy as they want. Even better, once they save and share (maybe with a staff-administered “best of” gallery?), the application can tell them exactly what products they have to buy in order to realize this layout.
• The company has obviously invested a lot in the videos and nice vector illustrations of many of these products. Why aren’t there more on the website? Instead there’s a lame masthead with the logo. The artwork is pretty nice, and it would be a shame to have it relegated exclusively to store shelf boxes.

It drives me crazy when companies with a billion dollars in income have websites that lack any kind of imagination. This is only magnified, of course, when you’re dealing with a company that produces toys that are almost literally powered by imagination. GeoTrax is such a bad-ass system of toys (trust me, these kids obsess over it), but the site is a let-down in terms of content and stickiness; with the huge fanbase out there, why is Fisher-Price happy to watch most of it go by?

These decisions do not weigh upon print designers, though they have their own vernacular that requires right-brain thinking — paper stock, bleeds and margins, die cuts, spot colors, and about a hundred other technical terms that make press operators sound more Klingon than human.

A lot of web designers, like me, come from a print background. Others, also like me, continue to work in both mediums. A lot of times, I make visual decisions based on my experience laying out ink on paper. Things like establishing a grid, paying attention to color, choosing typography carefully, and retaining appropriate white space.

Turn it 180 degrees, and I find myself applying some lessons learned in web design to print, like creating a deliberate hierarchy of content and style, minimizing noisy graphics, and making sure text can be read by the general populace instead of just elitist designers, that marketing manager guy who hates copy, and mutant owlbots with telescopic vision implants.

One chunk of the print side of my brain that I cannot shake, however, is the need for fixed column widths for copy. No matter what high-profile web swami advocates liquid design, or what accessibility and usability experts say, when I develop a page for online viewing, I am developing a document for reading. Frankly, I have never seen a liquid design with variable column widths that feels as good for reading as any given fixed layout.

Long story short, the blending over of the two disciplines is interesting. Multi-page brochures and multi-page websites both require information architecture, a regard for context, and appreciation for the intended audience. The distinction between “print” and “web” designer is fading; these days, my specialty is designing documents.

I wish I could extrapolate something more meaningful from this riffing, but I am sadly not nearly that clever.

The Art of Client Service is about strong client service. Which is good customer service. Which is the aggregate of strong interpersonal skills, negotiation tactics, communication, research, speed, experience, market analysis, buying drinks, offering a strong opinion based on factual evidence, and the ability to graciously accept the client’s final directive when it completely flies in the face of everything you just pitched for 90 minutes. Yes, this book is written around the ad industry. But few of the topics are relegated exclusively to advertising. Your mom could read this book and learn as much as you.

The book is broken into 58 short, chunky chapters perfect for start-and-stop bathroom reading or a New York to San Francisco non-stop. Some chapters are specific (there’s one on giving strong PowerPoint presentations), others are broad (respect your design team). Some are practical (how to write a letter of proposal), others are just common sense (remember to say “thank you”).

The book is loaded with practicality and wit. Real-life examples are abundant, and the writing is razor-sharp and controlled. The experience of Mr. Solomon is evident; he writes with authority and empathy. Plus there are also some laugh-out-loud cartoons pulled from New Yorker magazine.

Having worked in a small agency that did not have account people and meeting with clients was a regular occurrence, compounded with my current freelance state where I serve as the full-time account person, full-time creative director and full-time web developer for my “business,” I can truly appreciate Mr. Solomon’s wisdom. His points are excellent, and there is not a single chapter of fluff. Any creative working in the real world will find this book indispensable.

While reading this book is somewhat related to my post about a similar topic, the timing was more serendipity than anything else. It just reinforced everything I was thinking at the time, and confirms my belief that good customer service is a virtue applicable across all industries. Robert Solomon just spells out in style and wit far better than I ever could.

Recently, I had an out-of-management experience. It’s hard to describe, and hard to put into words, because it’s one of those things that seem deadpan obvious in hindsight. But I’ll try, because I like you.

In my conversations with peers, teammates and managers, I’ve been trying to come to terms with the kudzu-like growth of our marketing team, and how teams with fuzzy boundaries need to work together. Since I manage the “creative services” team (I hate that term; please give me a good alternative) that includes writers, designers, web developers and demo engineers, I am exposed to the river of projects that tirelessly swells and recedes inside our marketing ecosystem.

Because this flux of work streams directly to my team, it is my responsibility to manage that flow — diverting projects to the right people, making sure things are reviewed (and approved), and pushing back when we do not have capacity. I am occasionally required to push back hard, and have been known to create a fuss when things get out of hand. Not an unwarranted fuss, mind you, but a fuss nonetheless.

Many inhouse design groups operate as a self-enclosed “agency,” fully staffed and some even billing different departments for time and materials. I’ve always rejected this concept, as I wanted to be part of the marketing team, and participate as an equal in high-level strategy and planning. The stereotype, after all, mandates agencies are the bitches in the relationship. Agencies sell their children into slavery to keep the account. They create work tailored to win awards. They stay awake all weekends only to be flogged in Monday morning pitches.

But I missed the one big thing successful agencies excel at — customer service.

I am the first one to preach collaboration. But the revelation, such as it is, is that I have only been practicing collaboration when it’s on my terms — when I can ultimately dictate the agreement. When I have control. I have not been collaborative when my team is put at a disadvantage; frankly, I can come off as a despotic asshole. This not only affects how people view me, but begins to paint a darker picture for the rest of the department. My team deserves better than that.

I am contrarian by nature. Some people like to play soccer or chess; I like to sit in a conference room and pick apart arguments and ideas. Being agreeable is disagreeable. When someone pitches me a ball, I don’t aim for the back fence, I aim for the pitcher. I have the position of creative director because I’m a darned good designer, understand good copy, and would lay down my career to defend my team. I am not the creative director because I make friends easily. (Or at all, depending on who you talk to.)

I am rambling.

My out-of-management experience is simple. Practice good customer service. Stop being a contrived dick. Work with people, not through them. Like I alluded to several paragraphs back, this is not a revolutionary thought, but it was like a tiny lightbulb flickering to life above my thick skull. In an inhouse group, its too easy to get comfortable and arrogant. Agencies, if nothing else, have to practice good customer service in order to stay in business. So will I.