Too much caffeine to sleep, too tired to work. I present to you… ‘Stuff that was never used (and not really finished): Part 1′. I was going to upload ‘Stuff I have recently completed’ but none of the interesting stuff/stuff I can get away with posting on here has been absolutely finalised and I just can’t bring myself to post something that may change again before it’s signed off. I suspect I am mentally ill.

Artifact 1: Everything Starts website (work in progress). I’m sad that we never really got off the ground, but then given it was a project combining two people neither of whom had any spare time to start with it’s not a massive surprise. We may resurrect in the future but I would imagine with a new website. As you can see by the trailing off of the design this was dumped mid-design. I quite like it but can see that I was being influenced by Web 2.0 and Bioshock fairly deeply at the time. I am aware the whitespace is a bit fucked.

Artifact 2: Marquee Website. This was abandoned as it was one of two designs submitted to the client for a job. They went for the other option. I can’t argue, this was a bit more ‘out there’ than they were after (the final chosen design was a much more conservative, photo-centric option). The background colour is a poor choice and I obviously spent all the time available on the header and ran out of time for the rest of the layout (please note: this is not my usual working method, this design was done as a free-bonus-extra, proper design submissions to clients are finished properly).

I love the header, I have since re-used most of the bits of it elsewhere, apart from the marquee, which is a shame, I put effort into that damn marquee

More soon…

Often in the past I’ve discussed the possibility, in a tongue in cheek manner, of writing a manual that prospective clients must read and be tested on before I/we will start working for them. I’ve had a few experiences lately which have reminded me of this concept, and although I will certainly not be sending these notes to actual clients I feel I should get them down here, if only for my sanity, and possibly your entertainment. I’ve created a category ‘Client Manual’ which I’ll post them in. This is the first one.

Copyright, it’s a difficult concept (apparently)

One of the problems with being so heavily ingrained in an industry or culture is that you sometimes forget that those outside it may have trouble dealing with concepts you take for granted, and explaining them can be, putting it politely, a challenge. I spend a fair amount of time reading Not Always Right which seems to mainly focus on retail customers. It amazes me, the utter lack of logic people can display on a day-to-day basis, but then I compare it to my own industry, where people are spending ten times as much dealing with long term projects, but still they don’t appear think it through any more deeply than if they were buying a Big Mac.

As an aside, I feel I should point out, that although I will rant and bang my head on the desk over the decisions and dealing with some clients, for the most part (I’d say 80%) the people I deal with are intelligent, easy to deal with professionals. I don’t talk about them because there’s no story there.

Anyway, back to the point. We were recently approached to do a website for a small business. Should be a simple job, a straightforward attractive layout with 10 – 15 pages of light content. Basic SEO and some nice photographic treatments. So, off I went, did my research, got the quotes in from the designer, copywriter, etc and went back to the prospective client. I had, as is habit, sent the proposal/quote to a few colleagues and peers as I like to ensure we are generally competitive and not about to charge massively outside the going rate, feedback was that we were massively undercharging, but I let it go on this one as it was for a startup business and it’s good to hook ‘em in when they are young.

Prospective client was not happy, quote was apparently MASSIVE, and way more than anyone else had quoted. I doubted the veracity of this claim but agreed we could try and cut it down a little for them if they were happy for us to cut out some of the services we were supplying.

I offered a discount on the photography and copy if both could be supplied up front. No problem says the client, they can supply both photographs and copy. Excellent, that will make life easier all round. Here are some of our competitors and suppliers brochures for they copy they say. Excuse me? Here are some of our competitors and suppliers brochures for they copy they say. Err, we can’t do that, I explain why not. Oh.

Photography, we don’t really need that do we? Well, it will help sell your products. We can take some photos ourselves? Urm… you can but they may not be up to the quality we would like for the website (no offense and all that). Oh, ok here’s some trade magazines, just scan in the pictures and use those. Excuse me? Oh, I know some of the people in the trade mags, it will be ok. Urm… not sure about that, if you can give me the photos in a sensible format with some written permission we might be able to do something but we can’t just take other people’s photos. Why not? I explain copyright again.

Some time passes, prospective client is not happy, we are messing them about, they need a website and they need it right now, we are not playing ball by being difficult over this whole copyright thing. In what I suspect may have been a moment of utter madness I get a missive from one of the heads of the business something along these lines

Can you visit [url of another web studio], they did a website for one of our competitors, can you just copy that website, just get it done and then we can work out the money later.

I nearly cried. Although it did clear something up. This other studio is where one of the alleged ‘reasonable’ quotes came from. I checked their pricing guide, their price for an absolute basic 2 page site was what prospective client has said they quoted, their price for what prospective client wanted was pretty much the same as I had quoted. At this point I am considering a polite ‘please go away’ letter to prospective client. But I can never give up on a challenge.

The saga is a continuing one, I would imagine if someone points prospective client at this they will decide to go elsewhere, I don’t mean any malice towards prospective client but they have made several basic mistakes in their dealing with us, let’s go through these:

Copyright is serious business. I’m not going to go into details here because I would imagine you know this. The client didn’t. They did not understand either the legal implications or the moral implications. Basically, you cannot just take someone else’s work and use it without permission/license/etc.

There often seems to be a misunderstanding over the value of services, I find people don’t get why they should pay for one or more of:

• Copywriting
• Photography
• Design

These are all things that people have to work on, as easy as we make it look, it isn’t. We have studied and practiced at our respective areas and as much as anything else you are buying experience and knowledge. We will not lead you down the wrong path, in fact we will steer you straight as much as possible. If you ask for something retarded we will tell you as much (politely), we won’t just do it because it’s what you ask for. Ok, that was off the subject a little, but my point is that effort goes into creating this stuff. When someone has created these things for someone else we have no right (morally or legally) to just take them and use them. Don’t think for a moment that no-one will notice. If we do our job right and promote your business effectively then I hope someone would notice.

I personally, and this extends to Shinytastic, have a zero tolerance attitude to stealing other people’s work. We will not lift photos, copy, design elements, etc from another site without express permission. By express permission, I mean from the copyright holder, not from the client as a sort of ‘we’ll deal with it if anything goes nasty’ type permission.

Quoting is no fun at the best of times, it’s less fun when the client pulls unrealistic numbers out of their head and claims they are quotes from reputable sources. We do this for a living and we have a fair knowledge of what other people charge for the same service. Frankly if I’m given something astoundingly unlikely I’ll just phone the studio/agency it’s purported to have come from and ask them if it’s real.

A website can be expensive, but it depends on your demands and requirements, if you want something massively impressive, then I’m afraid it’s going to cost more, if you are willing to cut down your requirements it will cost less. We will not make it cheaper by just stealing the more expensive bits from elsewhere.

We don’t do cheap and nasty websites, I don’t think theres much point, I think it makes the client’s business look cheap and nasty and does nothing for our portfolio. If you don’t have much to spend now we can come up with a cheaper solution (within reason), but you need to take our advice on board. If you don’t have a multi-national budget you won’t get a site to challenge a multi-national, but that doesn’t always matter. Buy within your means and work upwards, we are here to advise as much as to create.

If you have a budget you need to stick to, just tell us. We are not going to screw you over and it makes it much easier to write a proposal if we know up-front if you can afford it. I know people like to play the whole battle of wills thing between client and supplier to see who does best of out of the pricing, but honestly, it’s a waste of both our times, tell us what you can afford to spend and we will tell you what you can afford.

Supplying assets can be a source of confusion. Putting the legal issues aside for a moment. If we were willing/able to take copy and photos from an existing printed publication we would expect the photos supplied on disk and the copy supplied in an email or word document. Otherwise we are just going to have to charge for the time spent slaving over a hot scanner/keyboard. Fine if you have the budget, but if your aim is to cut costs in the first place, this isn’t the way to go about it.

One last thing Logos. As part of the package offered to prospective client, we included a corporate branding package, just a simple logo with colour scheme and stationary. Prospective client decided they didn’t want to pay for the logo and asked, ‘Can’t you just do us our name in a pretty font instead’. Yes, we can. We call that a logo.

…

I feel I have waffled far too much and strayed from the point to a silly degree. But there’s lessons in there for both clients and studios (if you can cut through my crap to find them). Have I missed the point? Am I being too much of an evangelical perfectionist?

I’m not sure where I stand on Flash/Actionscript. Not to suggest I don’t like/approve of it, I think it’s an amazingly flexible language/set of tools, I’m just not sure I should be playing with it.

My problem is that I rarely get offered Flash work so I don’t get a huge amount of practice. I have no real sense of how long it will take me to do something or what it’s worth, so in turn I tend to warn clients of this and probably end up undercharging them to a stupid degree. I enjoy the process of working with Actionscript, although ONLY if I’m using my PC with the stupidly big monitor. Theworkspace has improved since Adobe took over but it’s still far too cluttered and has hints of the old Macromedia workspace that I was never able to get my head around.

Anyway, once I’ve got past the “Oh fuck do I have enough hours to do this job in?” stage it always pans out ok, I HATE doing Flash work in a hurry, I’m happy to hack up PHP and HTML in my sleep but anything with Actionscript involved needs me to open my eyes and concentrate for a while, I like to leave that bit of space for the inevitable bit that turns out to be slightly trickier to code than expected.

I’ve just done my first Actionscript job of this year, I would have enjoyed it more had I had more than an evening to do it in but in this case it was an “OhGodWe’reAtTheDeadlineCanYouHelp?” type brief. I generally refuse these but Nick gives me a good amount of interesting work, and more importantly pays on time which really swings it for me. He needed a scrolling Flash menu system as part of a bigger flash project, I felt a bit in the dark trying to write functions for a system I didn’t have much information on but it worked out ok (pending Nick getting back to me). He needed it as a proof of concept to show the end client it would work ok, so to some extent I could have cheated and just shoved in some animation that looks like it works but frankly I’d rather do it properly first off.

Look at my sexy flash menu and read EXCITING notes on the brief and what it does.

It’s roughly based on a menu I worked on for Oliis. This one includes a back-end php/mysql system to edit it.

Just a note on the Killer B-Movie gig, it’s on the 31st March not the 21st. I am an idiot, I cannot read my own diary properly.

I did a wordpress!

My first crack at a Wordpress Template and I’m fairly happy with it. The template is for a site called “Conversations with a Cuban Sow” which I’m working on with Emily (Moonshine PR site doesn’t actually exist yet, this is on the list of “Stuff which must be sorted soon”). The Cuban Sow site is a PR blog for Emily’s mother’s forthcoming book of the same name which Emily is doing the PR for, in her words:

Conversations With a Cuban Sow is the forthcoming book by Elisabeth Bird, an English national living and working in Cuba.

This is Elisabeth’s blog, complied from letters sent to her daugher Emily over seven years and gives a fascinating insight into the daily toils and troubles, highs and lows of life in Cuba, both political and personal.

The WP template is very much a work in progress as currently Emily is still compiling the information for the site, technically it’s not been launched so I’m effectively making her life harder by now linking to it in advance of us finishing it off (sorry Em). It’s an interesting project to be involved with, there’s going to be a fair amount of content to come along with information on press coverage/etc so we will be modifying the template as the PR work builds up. I’m just going to have a quick tweak to make sure it’s all W3C compliant then lay off until Emily get’s her copy in order.

The layout itself is very simple and clean, it’s not aimed at designers it is purely a framework for Emily and Elisabeth’s words so it needs to be easily legible and simple to navigate. Emily drew the pig!

Working with Wordpress templates is a surprisingly pleasant experience, my background is very much in bespoke, ground up applications so it feels a little weird to be fiddling with something someone else has initially built, but the documentation is brilliant and the way the WP system works is so simple and effective I wish I’d started playing with it an age ago.

Aside from this I’ve been working on a mountain of other bits and pieces, the majority of it being paid work which isn’t of particular interest. I have just finished some nice Actionscript work which I may chuck up later on, also working on the complete branding for both Shinytastic, Moonshine PR, pretty much completed the History Of Guns album graphics, so now moving onto sticker and T-shirt designs for them while we plan the PR campaign. I’ve started writing a ‘Recommendations for Clients’ guide on how not to utterly piss off your Graphic Designer/Web Developer/etc which I may chicken out of posting. Still trying to get to grips with my new D40x, I purchased the Magic Lantern guide as recommended by Jen although forgot about bank holiday postage issues so probably won’t get a chance to read it until next weekend now. I did post some fucking awful photos from the Line Out Showcase in Southampton last weekend I really need some low light practice, I wanted to try and edit them but time really is not on my side right now. I also need to find time to completely rebuild OnLineOut.com, it’s starting to age badly. My big non-paid priority right now is to sketch out the long term plan for the label, but I want input from other people before I even start to think about that.

Happy Easter!

Believe it or not, I have actually started writing about 5 articles for this blog, and have a load of recently completed work to upload, I’ve just not found the time to finalise any of it. Shinytastic is doing well, too well in some ways, the workload has been increasing and I’ve so far been unable to find any new staff I can trust. Any good at PHP and live in the Maidenhead/Reading area? Drop me a line (freelancers only for now). I do really want people who are local as I want to build good working relationships, both with the freelancers and Shinytastic and between all of us and the clients.

Adrian, fellow typophile and general purpose excellent designer was recently involved in an exhibition which I completly failed to be aware of until after the event but I loved the photos

Here’s Adrian’s write-up and more photos.

I absolutely promise to write about some of my own work in the near future, although before I do, check out Miranda’s new site.

Following 10 years in web design/development I have FINALLY found the time to create an identity for my business:

Shinytastic

It’s only recently I’ve really had a need for an identity of any sort. For the large part of my career I’ve been acting purely as a freelancer, and as such contact with the actual clients has been minimal, and whenever I did have direct client contact I just used the name of whichever agency I was working for them through. Last year I decided to take the risk and start up as an agency/studio of my own, it’s taken a few months to actually decide on a name and the interim has been filled with those awkward conversations when calling a client’s office:

Me: Hello, can I speak to Geoff MarketingManager please?
Receptionist: Who’s calling please?
Me: Bob Barker.
Receptionist: Where are you calling from?
Me: Urm…. my desk?

Ok, I deal with it slightly better than that (not much though). Now I have the joy of yelling SHINYTASTIC like an over-enthusiastic child.

Choosing the name was a bastard of a headache. I hate choosing names for long term projects, it seems to get harder every time. Line Out Records was a relative pain in the arse, but back then I didn’t think too deeply about the value of a name, as long as I liked it, it was fine. I guess it’s because I put so much weight on a name/identity now that choosing it becomes so much harder. I generally much prefer a nice abstract name that can be associated with anything, for the dual reasons that most of the projects I work on are fairly far reaching and I don’t like having them tied down to any one thing, I might decide I want to expand a project over time. Say for example I chose the name “Bob’s Web Design”, as soon as I start offering video editing (which I do) it looks like a web designer that does video editing on the side as opposed to a creative studio which can work with whatever you give us.

Aside from the possiblity of expansion I like a nice abstract name because it doesn’t put so many pre-conceptions in the mind of possible clients. I also feel it gives an air of creativity that a descriptive name doesn’t, this has proved, within my limited experience, to really make a difference to the clients you end up working with. It shows you are willing to take a risk, try something out, you are not likely to be lumping your clients with a boring standardized website/interactive CD/exploding monkey. The biggest jobs I’ve worked on have been through the agencies with the most abstract and original names and branding.

The actual process of choosing the name involved far more faffing about than should really be required. Lots of thesaurus reading, random word lookups, I even wrote a script that slices up selected lists of words and re-arranges them in a random manner. None of it worked this time (it has in the past). Shinytastic is based on the language I used when working with Damien at GD30* we were both a bit poor at using correct technical terms and so would just use 1984 style language (unintentionally) to discuss the jobs:

“You handle the server side functionality and I’ll do the styling” translated to “You do the tricky-worky-work and I’ll do the pretty-shinyness” a good design was “shiny nice nice” or “shiny-good”. Now I write it down I see quite how annoyingly smug we must have sounded, but it got the job done. Shiny was generally my favourite word for “good” and I’ve been known to excessively overuse “fantastic”.

I’m happy using a word for my studio that I’d actually use in real life. I appreciate it sounds a tad retarded, but it’s upbeat and positive, and I think it’s nicely original. I’m not interested in creating boring work, so I don’t want a boring identity. I hope it doesn’t put people off but then it can’t put them off anymore than a web designer without a website. Reactions so far have been mixed, but the reactions of clients and peers has generally been good, so I’m sticking with it.

The screenshot above of the current holding page is not final by a long shot but I needed something up there to show to prospective clients, I have an inbox full of enquiries to my lineoutrecords.com address (existing clients passed that on to their friends), I don’t want to be mailing from a new address – bob@shinytastic.com – where the domain has nothing but a blank “coming soon” page. The current image is certainly in the direction I want to take the branding. As suggested by the ever brilliant Tim of EvoHosting, I’m going for a Retro-Future look, which suits me because I like it.

I still need to sort a bank account, business cards, proper logo and branding, official announcement to existing clients, and probably a bucket of other crap. But at the least I have a basic identity.

* Speaking of which, he’s likely to kill me if he reads this, he spend a large portion of the time we worked together trying to convince me to do a creative blog. Sorry Damo.