Do you have trouble getting colleagues to invest in your creative vision?

This is a great topic for all designers, and I'd like to say I wrote the eloquent headline and next paragraph, but it was actually written by a member of my LinkedIn Group, In House Designers, (Thanks Marcy).

Do you have trouble getting colleagues to invest in your creative vision?

Does this happen to you? A colleague asks for you to design something to meet the needs of their department. You use your expertise to do just that, but as they have no creative, design or marketing background they tear it down into something that simply pleases their taste. They have the final say but you know that what they want doesn't meet what they need. I am often frustrated because I believe I can articulate well the reasons why their ideas will make the marketing efforts useless but yet they don't listen and I end up delivering a very sub-par end product I'm not proud of. Would love to hear any comments/feedback/experiences...

By Marcy, LinkedIn. Link to Marcy's Site and Blog

My Response

I've been in a company where that was an issue, and not for the reasons you'd think. At first I was the only guy, in a company that did trade shows and a magazine for the scrapbook industry. I always felt like some of the women I worked with trusted my technical skills but weren't sure I had what it took to design something that would appeal to women.

Honestly though I've had some problems with this throughout my career. Here are two things I have found that have helped me.

1. People think that what designers do is based on a whim or mood, they see no science behind it. Show them the science, eye tracking studies, color psychology, anything to show them the method behind your madness.

2. Have a strong brand and a document to back it up. If you have a strong brand and a document that tells them what the corporate colors, corporate fonts, what you can and can't do with the logo, like size and what it can be placed on, you eliminate a lot of what they can complain about. A detailed brand doc lets you point to something and say, "Can't do it, it's against the brand!". Of course you should probably say it nicer than that, lol.

Armed with those two things you'll have an answer for just about everything.

Operation: Twitter Automation, not autopilot, but a time saver.

I mentioned in my post, Searching Through Web Content, Part One of Three, RSS Feeds, that I search through a lot information looking for things to post to my LinkedIn Group, In House Designers and my Twitter accounts, @YourArtDirector and @IHDesigners. Well it just became too much and I had to figure out a way to automate it.

I took what I had learned from searching through all those blogs and websites and automated it. I choose what I let go to Twitter automatically very carefully. If the site or blog becomes a constant sales pitch I drop it. I also follow some great designers on Twitter and use Google Alerts to find blogs and sites to automate.

First I use a program called SocialOomph. What it does is follow everyone that follows me, and rotates automated messages thanking them for following me. Why in the world would I want to do that? Following others is a fast way to get more followers. I use lists to follow the people I'm most interested in, the rest I glance at from time to time to see if I want to ad them to my lists. It took me about 9 months to get 400 followers. Now that SocialOomph is turned on it has taken me about a month to go from 400 to about 650.

I use TweetDeck to monitor Twitter. I used to use HootSuite, but I switched for reasons I will explain later. I use multiple columns in TweetDeck to follow my lists, direct messages, mentions and other things. One column is monitoring what I tweet so I can make sure the automation isn't getting too salesish. This isn't an obvious function in TweetDeck. Here's what I did to set up monitoring myself. I made a private list of all my Twitter accounts in Twitter, then in TweetDeck I made a column to watch that list. That's where I find my posts for my LinkedIn Group, In House Designers. It allows me to look at only the posts that have gone out in the last day. I can also use TweetDeck to schedule tweets for a time I want them to go out. I use that feature to send out things I want to Tweet about that aren't automated.

I use a site called TwitterFeed to do my automatic posts. I know a lot of people think automating Twitter is missing the point of Twitter, but I was spending two hours a night to search through RSS feeds and posting them to go out the next morning from 9:00am to around 1:00pm my time. Now I enter those same RSS feeds into TwitterFeed and they go out all day and night, which exposes me to a much wider audience, and I post more information. I was doing the same exact thing manually as I do now automatically only I'm doing it better. TwitterFeed also has some filtering you can use to limit some posts. Like I mentioned above, I mix in tweets about my company, products, trade shows, webinars using TweetDeck, but because I am growing my followers, the messages I care about are going to a lot more people.

Lastly I use Bit.ly to track clicks and make URLS smaller for Twitter. Bit.ly ties in directly with TweetDeck and TwitterFeed to shorten URLs automatically. I also have a bit.ly widget in my browser's bookmark bar to quickly post anything I see while surfing sites and blogs. I also recently saw that Bit.ly has Bit.ly Pro in Beta now. It has more features and allows for custom URL shortening.



Best of all, all of these sites and programs are free. I could do the same thing, (except SocialOomph), in HootSuite for $20/month, which is why I stopped using it; I'm not making any money doing what I do in Twitter and LinkedIn. I do it to build resources for other designers and myself.

Take some time to set it up, watch what it is doing, so you don't become a sales tool for someone else. It isn't exactly autopilot, but it is a lot less time than it could be.