The Essence of Time

Having worked in very time restrictive mediums (live television and pre-press design) My first years were spent wasting a lot of my time on elements of design that I thought were well worth the extra time but turned out not to pay off in the end.  Over the years I have learned to eliminate wasted time by following a few simple design recommendations.

1. Do not throw any designs away.  In the beginning of my career I felt like nothing I designed looked good and sometimes I would scrap a design completely.  On one of my very first important design jobs, I had run out of time. I had nothing to show my customer but the designs that I all but threw out the window.  I was sweating before that meeting thinking I was going to hear the worst comments about the garbage I thought I was giving them. However, to my instant surprise my customer loved them all and picked one to move forward with.  They've been a very loyal customer ever since.  That was when I started to keep all of my designs and realized that I wasn't designing for my likes and dislikes, but what my customer likes.  I may not know what they like right away so a design that I despise, might be the one that they love.  Not throwing any designs away keeps me from having to start over, lessening the time spent on the concept creation process.  This keeps my customers happy about the time and the cost of the project. 

2.  Never push a customer into a design that you want them to pick.  This will cost you precious time if they decide in the future that the design was not what they were looking for.  You will probably lose the customer if you push them into something they aren't crazy about.  Most customers want to be part of the design process and if you flat out tell them that their ideas won't work and only your idea will, it will keep them from keeping you.  Make them part of the process.  Listen to your customer and even if they say they want something that won't work in the format you are designing for, find a comparable design that will work in the medium requested. You will lose time and money if you try to bully your customers into liking something they don't.

3. Find your own style.  I used to find inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, but mimicking the design style of someone else can take up time that you can not afford.  There are set effects and tricks that I use on just about every one of my designs.  This is mostly for rush jobs that have a tight deadline. The main design element is original but there are some simple effects that I use on almost everything else.  I guess you could call it my own style. Once I figured out the simple elements that make my designs work every time, my time spent on projects has dramatically shifted, allowing me to concentrate on really making the main design element unique. I try to change these set elements  on the jobs that I have more time to work with. This opens new opportunity for my own set style to change. Give this one some time though.  It takes a thorough understanding of your design programs and it takes trial and error to find the right base design elements for you. 

4. Initial design concepts do not have to be perfect.  I spent years figuring out that the initial design concept does not have the be the finished product.  You can save yourself a lot of time when proposing a design concept to a customer if you don't completely finish the design.  I am not telling you to hand them something that is stick figures, but the little touches that need to be added, can be added later.  Explain ahead of time to your customer that the initial design is intended to get an idea of what direction they want to go in, and that once they decide the direction, the finishing touches and real eye popping elements will knock them over when they see the final product.  This also keeps you from wasting too much time on the finishing touches on a design that they may not chose.  This trick may not work for everyone, you have to be able to convince the customer that the best is yet to come.  You have to sell your designs. If you are not eloquent and don't have the confidence to talk them through to the next step, then you will have to take the extra time with a work that will speak for itself. 

I consider myself an extremely quick and efficient designer.  I have never missed a deadline, and  never will miss a deadline.  Turn around time might be only one element to keeping a customer happy in this competitive world of graphic design, but I find that if you can create effective designs more quickly than the guy next to you, you will win over the customer every time.

The Trouble with Color Matching

What is a Pantone Color?  Pantone colors seem like a miracle for designers when they first start designing for print.  It is a color selection system that should print exactly the color that they see in their swatch books. Designing everything using Pantone inks may not be the best idea. What most designers have never been told is that the Pantone Color matching system is great if your customer wants to pay for the specific Pantone inks to be ordered from Pantone and used in the press in place of the traditional Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black inks that make up standard full color press printing.  Once you design something that contains more than 2 pantone inks, the price is considerably higher than standard 4-color printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) due to the cost of ordering the specific Pantone Inks.  The combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks can create just about any color that you are looking for… with some major exceptions.  The problems arise when designers go overboard picking multiple pantone colors for their designs.  For example I recently had a customer send us a postcard from a design agency in which the agency had chosen 5 different Pantone or PMS colors as the “brand” colors.  This seems like the right thing to do to ensure the color will not vary from one printed piece to another, but one of those colors was Pantone Orange 21.  If you view Pantone Orange 21 on your monitor and in a Pantone Swatch book it is a very bright orange.  It was what seemed to be a very nice color choice. However since we had priced the postcard as our standard full color printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) printing, we had to convert the PMS Orange 021 in the design into the following color breakdown: 0% Cyan ink, 68% Magenta ink, 100% yellow ink, and 0% Black ink.  This color breakdown, which is the recommended color breakdown by Pantone, creates a much different orange color. Why? Since Pantone creates the Pantone Orange 021 ink using unique pigments that are completely different from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the final color is a color that can not be achieved using mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink.  The best we can do is to attempt to get it as close as possible.  Here is an image with Pantone 021 ink next to the suggested CMYK combination to show you the difference.

What you are viewing is not a correct and absolute representation of the inks since you are viewing these colors on a monitor that combines Red, Green and Blue to create the colors you see.

Although the difference may not seem like much to you on your monitor, the difference can mean a lot to your customer.

The best way to avoid running into this color matching problem is to purchase a Pantone Color Bridge, which shows the Pantone inks side by side with the recommended CMYK mix.  Once you view the differences it will change how you chose the colors for your next project.