Posted by: Catherine Morley
Category: Designers Working With
Bookmark on: del.icio.us

Some designers have writing skills, others have photography skills, each with varying strengths. For some, it’s not knowing how to attain the perfect shot that’s important, it’s how to describe to clients and photographers what types of shots are needed for a set project. If it’s lacking, one way to gain this ability is to improve photography skills, so I asked the question, “How can a designer improve their skills in your industry?”

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Bill

Hmmm, I’m not sure, but looking at lots of photography books is always good — and I think it’s also useful to look at the trade magazine Photo District News to get an idea of the business side of the advertising and editorial photography industry as some photographer perceive it.

Bill Wisser | Advertising and Editorial Photographer
Bill Wisser Photo.com | The Naked Eye

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Bruce

Improve your skills by hiring more photographers; there is no replacement for experience. You’ve no doubt learned something since you were first “on press” supervising a job – the same goes for working productively with a photographer. Find the most talented individual you can afford (price and talent aren’t always mutually exclusive but you know what I mean) and trust. If you run into difficulty you should be able to trust in their experience to get you the best possible photographic solution. However, knowing the basics doesn’t hurt just like with lithography.

Bruce DeBoer | Photographer
DeBoerWorks Photographic Productions

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Jeffrey

With all the digital cameras out there, everybody is a photographer these days… or thinks they are but I’ll share a few pointers. Look before you shoot, think about what’s in the frame, be thoughtful about the lighting and PLEASE leave the “good enough” and “I’ll fix it later” attitudes at home, you’ll be amazed at how you photographs will improve. Take your time, compose your image, be aware of how the light (natural or artificial) strikes your subject, make adjustments based on the light and capture your image. Oh and most important, have FUN! Good luck.

Jeffrey Jacobs | President
Jeffrey Jacobs Photography Inc.

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Jon

1. Most importantly, adopt a colour managed workflow. If the image tags and profiles aren’t talking the same numbers the colour goes out of the window. On critical shoots involving product lines this can mean many many rounds of proofing which can be avoided by a good solid end-to-end colour management regime.
2. Understand unsharp mask as it applies to images and output, so a large hi-res file that gets reduced in size gets the right sharpening to restore the acuteness lost in the downsampling.

Both the above are REALLY important!!!!

Colour management of images:

Photographers work primarily in RGB. Designers work in CMYK. The middle point can be easy or painful! Any professional photographer worth their salt has a colour managed workflow. Meaning we work in colourspaces and our files are colour managed so the next computer in the chain knows how to display those images properly. Any machine running a colour-aware software package like Photoshop MUST have the colour management dialogues working and set up correctly else its a throw of the dice whether the colours and saturation are on or off. Lots of good web resources for this subject though hard to get your head round initially.

CMYK conversions

Some photographers convert to CMYK before supply and some don’t. Those that do will normally be working to a designer/printer with specs of the actual press the images will be printed by. You can’t hope to get a decent CMYK print from just converting in Photoshop by the way, you must have an icc profile from the press you are printing to or a colour standard to convert to.

In the digital world colour management is king. Ignore at your peril!

Sharpening of files

On quite a few occasions I have supplied large files that are downsized quite a bit by a designer and then sent to print. No sharpening was applied and the acutance/contrast of the image suffers and it looks mushy. I include a readme file on CDs to ask designers to sharpen at the OUTPUT size required. All images unsharpened as a digital image must be sharpened as the last step in the chain, at the required output size and dpi and after the CMYK conversion. This is becoming much more important as native file sizes supplied by photographers are getting larger due to larger captures from the newer generations of cameras and digital backs.

Jon Boyes | Advertising and Editorial Photographer
Jon Boyes

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Patrick

I think the best thing a designer can do to improve their skills is work closely with their photographer. Over the past few months I’ve learnt a lot by working closely with my designer at my new place of employment.

Patrick Chuprina | Photographer
Chuprina Studios

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Rochelle

Many might say it’s all about keeping up with the constantly changing technology, but I believe it’s most important to keep your mind fresh and creative. What a photographer is really selling is his or her ability to see what others don’t see, and to capture it. I would recommend that photographers immerse themselves in a variety of hobbies, clubs, traveling etc., for sources of inspiration and new perspectives.

Rochelle Dahl | Photographer & Designer
Rochelle Dahl Designs

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Tom

If you want to improve in photography, there is no other way than being behind the lens. Shoot and shoot often! Also, lighting is extremely important - so understanding good metering techniques is vital to photography. The good thing about photography is that the fundamentals haven’t changed since it started, so books about photography don’t date nearly as quickly as computer books. There are several sites on the Internet where you can submit your photos and members will critique them. Photo.net is a good site for inspiration, and there are several others that are specific to different photography disciplines. Finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions because everyone had to learn at some point.

Tom Smalling | Photographer
Tom Smalling Photography & Design | Tom Smalling’s Photography Blog

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Will

Improving communications, verbally and if possible visually.

Will Williams | Photographer and Designer
Perspective-Images.com

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And now we are almost at the end of the photographers section of the series. Next week will be the summary of the points made over the past several weeks.

until the next
Designers WW,
cat

Posted by: Catherine Morley
Category: Been BoDo’d
Bookmark on: del.icio.us

Have you Been BoDo’d?

Welcome to our first Been BoDo’d. So, what’s this ‘Been BoDo’d? In a nutshell, it’s where we select a noted veteran or up-and-coming designer to share thoughts, insights and experiences about the business side of design. You can see more of an explanation in our sidebar under Being BoDo’d.

For our first You’ve Been BoDo’d, we went in search of someone experienced in design, business and more. With Andy Budd (popular author, blogger, web guy), we got the ‘and more’.

A bit about Andy

Andy Budd is the Creative Director at Clearleft, a noted team of web design and interaction consultants. He’s also an internationally known user experience designer, web standards expert, frequent speaker at major design conferences and beer drinker extraordinaire.

Tapping into Andy’s design experience and knowledge, he is often requested to judge various web design awards. He also sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine, the UK’s leading web development periodical.

Andy is also the author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, where he shares his years of experience in creating attractive, standards compliant websites. I have a copy, and even though my CSS skill are cacca (not the books fault as I cheat by yelling for Jay), as a fan of CSS Mastery, I highly recommend it for your CSS library.

I’m also a long time fan of Blogography, Andy’s blog. Years before I knew anything about blogs, Blogography was one of the first I kept going back to. And still do.

A bit about the Designers Working With Series

Last month we started the Designers Working With Series (DWW) to get real people advice about running a design company. Starting with designers, the DWW series focuses on how designers work, and how other professionals (writers, photographers, marketeers, printers and pre press specialists, etc) work with designers.

Andy participated in the first round, the designers round. It’s where we asked seven questions with a design industry bend. Below are Andy’s answers, all in a row.

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As a professional designer, what are the main points that you’d expect / want clients to know before contacting you about a project?

Ideally the client will have done some preparatory work and have a rough idea of the project goals, budget and the type of design services they are looking for. However as a professional consultancy, it is our job to guide clients through the process no matter how prepared or experienced they are.

When working with clients, what do you see as the top problem areas?

The two main client issues I see occurring on a regular basis are unrealistic or inflated expectations, and the tendency to offer solutions rather than outline problems.

The majority of clients have little or no experience in building a website which is why they come to design professionals for help. There is a popular misconception that web design is easy, and this is something that has been propagated by tools manufacturers and educators over the years. Because of this, many clients have unrealistic expectations when it comes to budget, timeframe and features.

As web professionals, it is our job to manage our clients’ expectations and make sure they understand exactly what they will be getting as a result of the design process. Unfortunately in the rush to sell services and win pitches, agencies often over promise and under deliver. This may win clients in the short term, but in the long term they will be left feeling short changed. I think it is much wiser to under promise and over deliver. That way clients will always be delighted with the work you produce.

Good communication at the start of the project is vital as it allows you to manage client expectations. It is also an opportunity to set some ground rules and explain to clients exactly how the design process will work.

Design is all about creative problem solving. In an ideal world your clients will define the problems they are facing, and then you will come up with the best solution to solve those problems. However people are naturally helpful and clients really enjoy getting involved with design projects. As such, rather than coming to you with a problem to fix, clients will often come to you with one of several possible solutions and ask you to implement them. Examples of this could be anything from a client suggesting that a button needs to be made bigger, through to recommending functionality like a blog or a forum. In these situations, it is important to understand that the client recommendation is just one possible solution to a much deeper problem, and it is your job to examine what that problem is, look at all of the available solutions, and then suggest the best one for the job.

To avoid these situations, it is important to explain the design process up front and make sure your client is explaining what the problems are rather than simply offering one of several solutions. That way your client will get the most out of your design knowledge and the project has a much higher chance of success.

How do you work?

At Clearleft we employ a relatively flexible process that can be scaled up or down depending on the needs of the project. This flexibility is vital as every client and every project is different, so what works for one may not necessarily work for another.

Where time and budget allow we like to start our projects with some initial stakeholder research. This could be anything from a few quick user interviews through to a more structured program of contextual inquiry. This information is then used to create a series of personas, scenarios and user tasks that guide the rest of the process. If we were dealing with an existing site we would normally perform a content inventory, whereas with a new site we ‘would run a competitive analysis so see what the marketplace was doing.

Using this information we would normally arrange a series of planning workshops with the key project stakeholders. We would use these workshops to uncover the required site functionality and content, and then create a content plan, features list and site map. Once the client approves the proposed functionality, we create a series of wireframes that are tested on real users. Once everybody is happy with the overall user experience, the user interface is designed and page templates are developed. These are then integrated into the back-end system, tested and deployed.

We don’t have dedicated project managers so each team member is responsible for their own part of the project. This means that our clients have direct access to the people working on their projects and requirements don’t get lost in translation. We use Basecamp to manage our written communications and make liberal use of Skype and IM throughout the process. We like to build relationships with our clients so face-to-face meetings are good. However with around half of our clients coming from overseas, it’s not always possible or practical. An average project will take around 4 months and we usually have several on at any one time. We are in fairly high demand at the moment as there aren’t many agencies offering the range or depth of service that we do. As such, we usually need a couple of months notice before scheduling new projects.

How should a company or individual in your profession be chosen?

If you are looking to commission a design partner, you should spend a reasonable amount of time researching possible candidates. Look at the problems you are trying to solve and the skills you require, and then try to find a good match. For instance, if your main concern is branding, then you probably need to find an agency that specializes in visual design, whereas if you have a lot of information you need organizing, you’ll want an agency that that focuses on information architecture. If you are building a content oriented site, your partners will need a good understanding of content management. However if you are building a web application, interaction design and user experience will be key.

With so many agencies out there specializing in different ways, it often makes sense to commission different companies for different parts of the project. So you may want to hire a design and interaction specialist to design the user experience, and then a development company to program the application.

The best way to select an agency is to ask for recommendations from your colleagues or other web developers. If somebody you know has worked with an agency before or has heard good things about them, they are already pre-qualified. Look at sites in a similar field to yours. If any are particularly good, find out who designed them and add them to your list of possible partners. I also recommend looking at design galleries and noting any sites that are a similar size, quality and style to the one you are trying to produce. Create a shortlist of 3-5 agencies, send them a detailed brief and then base your decision on the result. Remember that you’ll have to work with this agency for several months, so choose a company that’s a good fit and you get on with.

At what point should your profession be brought into a project?

The sooner you can get a professional consultancy involved the better. A good way to start is to commission an initial discovery phase. This gives the designer an opportunity to learn about your company and the problems you’re facing, and come up with some initial recommendations. It also gives the client an opportunity to work with the designer on a smaller project to see how they get on. If both parties are happy with the outcome, you can then move forward with the main project confident that it will be a success.

How do you charge?

Like most professional services, we charge based on the time spent on a project. We will estimate how long each stage of the project will take in order to calculate the headline figure. We’ve been doing this for a while now, so our estimates are generally very accurate. However all projects are different and have their own unique set of influences. As such we always recommend building in a refundable contingency to cover unexpected expenses or additional functionality.

As the project progresses, we’ll track how much time we spend on the various components and keep our clients up to date with how the budget is being allocated. For fixed cost projects we will normally break functionality down into core, desired and deferred components. We promise to deliver all of the core functionality and as much of the desired functionality as the remaining time will allow. This lets clients to see exactly where their budget is being spent and allows them to make much better financial decisions.

How can a designer improve their skills?

You can continuously improve your skills by reading books, going to conferences and learning from your peers. Every project you take on should be an opportunity to face new challenges and learn new skills. If you are not getting this challenge at work, I highly recommend taking on a personal project to stretch your creative muscles.

Andy Budd | Managing Director | Web Designer | Author
Andy Budd::Blogography | CSS Mastery

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Thanks Andy!

until the next
You’ve Been BoDo’d
cat