Since re-launching this blog last year with an emphasis on visual work, I’ve been concentrating a bulk of my energy on growing and succeeding in my design business. To that end, I’ve been thinking and learning a lot about workflows (design-specific and business-specific), processes and planning methods.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a lecture on Time Management by Randy Pausch that he gave at the University of Virginia a few years ago — I watched his Last Lecture when it became available on iTunes last year and read his book of the same name over Christmas. (Start at 7:30 in, if you want to skip the introductions.) To listen to a man who has a few months left to live talk about time management is, to say the least, inspiring.

One of the many things that hit home for me was when Pausch talked about the importance of having a systemic solution for time management. He said, “[A] solution that says, ‘I’m going to fix things for you in the next 24 hours’ is laughable, it’s like saying, ‘I’m going to cure hunger in Africa in the next year.’” He talks about needing to think long-term and to change fundamental underlying processes because, let’s face it, we just have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.

I’ve also been working through David Allen’s management method outlined in Getting Things Done. And while there’s some merit to his logic, it’s just a bit clunky and regimented for my own purposes.

At Keller Williams, everyone had weekly 411 meetings — this was where we met with our supervisor or team to discuss our goals for the week, these then rolled up into that month and for that year (four weeks, one month, one year). It’s important to distinguish that these were not to-do lists but larger ambitions.

After working with this in my work life for three years, I still don’t know how effective it was but I do recognize that it set a habit, an intention to focus on particular aspects of my job.

What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about bigger picture thinking but I also learned that it’s good but doesn’t always help in the GTD process. And in keeping sight with my own work, I always thought there should be alternate time lines — this month, a month away, two months away and someday/maybe as well as some tie-in to a to-do list. It was about a year ago that I left KW so what now?

Well, I spent some time before and after SXSW Interactive looking into different programs which tap into several arenas with which I am familiar — iPhone, 37 Signals’ Basecamp and Backpack, Remember the Milk, Things, Omnifocus, Todoist, Vitalist, Gmail tasks, even creating a private Wordpress install for project management. Keep in mind that the goal is to help simplify my life, not to tack on another system to gum up the works. And I just don’t know, everything works to some extent but it’s just not quite there.

I know that I need three systems — one, a list of to-do’s for my own time and task management; two, a project management system that my clients can look at, check in with, measure progress and provide feedback to me; and, three, a billing program.

FullClip Creative already uses Basecamp and so I’m going to start there, commit to it, using Encamp for my iPhone sync. I have a product by Market Circle called Billings that I’ve used off and on for my invoicing. And that’s where I’ll start. Let’s call this implementation phase one.

(I took the above photo of Polly Jean six years ago or so, just after rescuing her from the Town Lake shelter. Seems like a million years ago but she’s hardly aged a day. Though she’s become less destructive and a bit more bossy.)

On the company blog, Signal vs. Noise, Fried shares what he’s learned about the art of streamlined teamwork with more than 65,000 readers (link). First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees’ time. “Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity,” he says. “We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done.” Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago. cont. reading …

We tested Seven-Up. We had several versions, and what we found is that if you add fifteen percent more yellow to the green on the package—if you take this green and add more yellow—what people report is that the taste experience has a lot more lime or lemon flavor. And people were upset. ‘You are changing my Seven-Up! Don’t do a ‘New Coke’ on me.’ It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case isn’t necessarily a good thing.

It’s a color thing — which I should know in my line of work — and color’s a very powerful tool. But that powerful? Really? As is imagery, like the spring of parsely mentioned by Gladwell) on the Hormel logo (courtesy of Darrel Rhea and Davis Masten). And after reading “Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothing Like Spin” (link) in the NYTimes, I’m beginning to wonder how many items in my life are greenwashed, or anything washed. How many things that I buy at the grocery store, purchase online, stalk in the electronic aisles, how many of these things actually do the things that I think they will?

I remember when I got my first car, I thought, “This is it. This machine is going to change my life. It’ll be a snap to have a girlfriend. I can go anywhere I want.” And while it changed my life, I had insurance to pay every month, gas to pay every week and my life wasn’t all that different — it’s not like a girl just magically showed up in the passenger seat the first time I drove it. In hindsight, that would’ve been a little scary. But I suppose that’s less to do with visual marketing and more to do with my personal expectations, but I think you know what I mean.

I know I’m not the first person to ruminate after reading some from Blink, but it is sure making me think right about now.

As I got older, my tastes changed. I would read Calvin and Hobbes’ newsprint exploits every day after school at the library. (Because my elementary and middle schools didn’t take the weekend papers, I had no idea that the strips were ever printed in color until more recently.) I am not overstating facts when I say that I held back tears when Bill Watterson stopped doing Calvin & Hobbes. And if it wouldn’t have been for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, I would’ve never opened a comics page again. I didn’t read it in the same way as I’d consumed comics in the past — I mean there were more important things (read: girls) — and I didn’t always understand it, but I got it. I appreciated it and it always gave me a good chuckle. Nowadays, I don’t open the Sunday paper comics section much but I’m so glad it’s there.

Recently, the Washington Post did an in-depth feature on Trudeau that I could not stop reading (link). One of my favorite parts is where they describe one of the comic strips:

One Sunday this year, Michael Doonesbury and his old friend Bernie were discussing the Iraq war and wondering whether it keeps the president awake at night because of its enormous, heartbreaking human toll. In the final panel, Trudeau cuts to a signature exterior nighttime view of the White House. From inside come two dialogue balloons: “What’s wrong, dear?” And: “It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.” (see strip)

I am so on top of getting the newest Doonesbury compilation, Heckuva Job, Bushie. Oh yes.

My favorite quote is right at the beginning:

All the design talent, experience, and expertise in the world can’t advance your career if your client buys the wrong design… or waters down the right one.

Persuading decision makers to buy good design is essential. But it’s rarely taught in school, and not every design organization has a culture that values it. As a result, you can toil in this field for a long time without knowing how to sell your work.

Fortunately,with a good process, a few tricks, and the same skills and insights you bring to bear on your other relationships, you can learn to identify the kind of client who buys good design, and work with them both before and after the design phase to protect your work and their image.

Mister Zeldman was scheduled to speak 17 October 2006 at AIGA NY (link).

Good designers:

• Decorate
• Believe "less" is more
• Fix problems
• Are inspired within a genre
• Macrodesign
• Treat text as content
• Use good typefaces
• Code for one instance
• Redesign

Great designers:

• Communicate
• Believe "less" and "more" co-exist
• Prevent problems
• Are inspired by their total environment
• Microdesign
• Treat text as UI
• Use good typography
• Code for many instances
• Realign (link)

Today, I heard Alan Fletcher passed, one of the founding members. According to Design Observer:

Colin Forbes deserves the credit for inventing Pentagram’s unique organizational structure, which has endured now for nearly 35 years and where I’ve worked as a partner for 16. But it was Alan Fletcher who showed by example, across three decades, how one could work, and live, within that structure. For him, design was not a profession or a craft, but a life. In an interview for his 1996 book Beware Wet Paint, he told Rick Poynor, “I’d sooner do the same on Monday or Wednesday as I do on a Saturday or Sunday. I don’t divide my life between labour and pleasure.” The title of another book from Pentagram could serve as a concise statement of his philosophy: Living by Design. (link)

In describing his work at Pentagram, DesignMuseum describes it as such:

Fletcher spent the next two decades at Pentagram, a period over which the firm grew from five to eleven partners and opened offices in New York and San Francisco. In the face of this expansion, he maintained the most economic of teams, usually employing between two and five people. This allowed him to combine large-scale identity projects, such as that for the Commercial Bank of Kuwait, with small-scale commissions that offered greater scope for his graphic wit and idiosyncrasy. Fletcher’s portfolio from these years – published in the monograph Beware Wet Paint – is a combination of carefully crafted logos and spontaneous graphic epiphanies. Nothing is heavy handed, and the sketches and doodles demonstrate his ingenuity and charm. (link)

Work, non-work, large-scale work, small-scale work. Sounds like he was a master of balance.

In addition, there was always the issue of typography, not the typography engine (ugh!), the fonts themselves. When I was in school, I was lucky enough to work in student publications, where we had the Adobe Font Folio. But it wasn’t until I went out into the cruel world that I realized how indispensable was that resource. And I often wondered how Adobe could have this incredible cache of fonts and never distribute them with their products.

And so, I felt like former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk took the words out of my mouth when I read his open letter to John Warnock (link).

I can only hope that the merger of Adobe and Macromedia will result in a Creative Suite 3 that takes the best from both product lines. In May, Adobe announced that Freehand and GoLive would no longer be developed. But I know that only time will tell, only time will tell.

In a country so full of opportunity and desperate for the brave to step up to the plate and lead the way, its really easy to make a difference and become a millionaire at the same time.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. First, what comes easy to me, but harder to others?

2. The second question is, what would you do for work for years and years and never have to get paid for it?

3. And the third question is, how can you be of service and how can you give back?

At just 24 years old, Johnny Cupcakes is still as much of a prankster as he is an entrepreneur.

He made his first buck selling whoopee cushions in junior high. So it’s not surprising that, when it came time to open his own store, on Boston’s Newbury Street, Johnny set it up like a well-laid trap: He planted a giant dough machine in the window, and made sure the glass bakery cases and stainless-steel cooling racks were visible from the street. All day, hungry passers-by come in asking for cupcakes.

And, all day, Johnny tries to contain his amusement as he explains he has no cupcakes for sale.

Instead, his baker’s racks hold brightly colored T-shirts, each with the image of a cupcake where you’d least expect it: the Statue of Liberty holding a cupcake; Marilyn Monroe with a tiny cupcake-shaped mole; and the cupcake-and-crossbones motif that has become the store’s signature design. At $40 to $70 a piece, the tees are selling like, well, hotcakes. And the guy who’s most surprised is Johnny himself.

…

[Johnny] Earle [aka Johnny Cupcakes] may have pulled it off especially well, [Babson College business professor Glenn] Kaplus says. “But isn’t almost everything that way?” He observes, “Until you’ve done it, you’re really faking it until you make it.”

Very interesting story. Part-business lesson, part-hipster tale.

The NPR write-up also includes a lists of do’s and don’ts for starting your own business. From the list:

Try to limit/not mass produce anything. Everyone wants what nobody has.

(link)