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.

Searching Through Web Content, Part Three of Three, Google Alerts

This is the last of my three part post on Searching Through Web Content. The three parts were RSS Feeds,  Twitter and now, Google Alerts. It's taken a while to write this because between the second and third post I completely changed the way I post information to my Twitter feeds, @YourArtDirector and @IHDesigners. I still use these ways to find content online, but I am letting Twitter do the work instead of me. I'll be writing about automating Twitter soon.

What Are Google Alerts?

Google Alerts are a good way to get content delivered right to your inbox. Basically your telling Google to save a search and send you an email when it finds results. Google Alerts are still in Beta, but already it's a powerful tool.

Setting up a search

You have choices of the type of content you'd like to receive, news, blogs, videos etc. Then you can set how often you'd like to be notified—for example as it happens, once a day, once a week. Maybe you just want to see the newest information—you don't have time to wade through a giant list. You can limit the number of posts you receive in your email alerts.

Email is just the start of ways to receive Google Alerts. You can have your alerts come to your RSS feed reader. As I mentioned in part one, Searching Through Web Content, RSS Feeds, this is a good way to look through lots of content quickly.

You can receive your alerts as a CSV file, in other languages and as HTML or plain text. So customizing your alerts to fit how you want to work is very easy.

What can I use Google Alerts for?

Google Alerts are a great way to see who's talking about your company or product on the web. Just enter the name of your company, a product, a person or anything you need to keep an eye on. If you set it up to receive emails in HTML, like I did, it will look a lot like a google search result.

What does a Google Alert look like?

One of my searches is for "In House Graphic Designer". With this search I find a lot of job posts for my Linked in Group, Design Job List. A typical post will look something like this.

Journalist and IN HOUSE Graphic Designer Wanted (Midtown West ...

By admin

Journalists Wanted A weekly newspaper needs experienced journalists with strong writing background and unsurpassed editing skills, as well as very good organizational abilities. Minimum of 2-3 years of editorial experienced required. ...

Web Design Jobs - http://www.thesiteurl.com/

You can see you can get a lot of info very fast and easy. So go to Google Alerts, set up a search and see what you find in your inbox.

Some Related Posts

How To Get More From Google Alerts

Google Alerts: A Great Freelance Writing Tool