Reading Subtext

As a designer, it took me years to learn to say, “No.”  The experience that gives confidence in one’s own actions was not yet there.  These days, though, I embrace the word.  It’s a challenge and a thrill to defend what I know is best for the client and their clients.

Some clients don’t like the word.  Others expect a little bit of a fight.  So, how is a creative to know when to stand and fight or raise the white flag and do as requested?  It’s a dance that can be tough to learn, and I am so grateful to have been on both sides of the equation in my life.

Reading subtext is as much an art form as design.  Practice the art of reading subtext, just as you practice your creative skills.  Improvisation has taught me a fair amount about reading subtext and learning people’s wants, despite their best attempts to be subtle or hide it.  Once you start practicing this little game, it becomes thrilling to test your skills.  It is the keen skill of listening and observing in order to predict what might happen next.

When you’re with family and friends, practice reading subtext.  When people make an offer or a statement, what are they really saying?  In improv, every line means something.  Every physicality means something.  And the two together can lead the scene and the improvisers.  It becomes easier to anticipate what is coming.

The same is true in films.  Try watching a film you have seen a few times already.  Take notes of each bit of information, and see if they pay off later.  Typically each line, scene and transition further develops the story.  Everything means something, whether we see it or not.  Be warned, though, practicing this can ruin your movie going experiences later if you don’t learn how to turn it off and just enjoy the film!  I have, however, watched movies that I have seen millions of times, just for the sake of capturing those subtleties I missed the first time.

Clients and creatives, practice the art of reading subtext.  Take the time to really listen to one another so that you can communicate clearly and work better together.  Every line, every physicality means something.  Are you paying attention?

Our best work is the work we do for the sake of others. It is in the lives and hearts of people we serve that we craft our legacy.

- Steffanie Lorig, Principal, Lorig Design

The Power of People

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.

- Margaret Wheatley

The relationship between clients and creatives fascinates me endlessly.  Why are some more successful than others?  Where does a project derail, leaving both parties frustrated and jaded?  What is the recipe for a thriving client-creative relationship so that it can be duplicated?

In my life, I have had professional relationships flourish and others wilt.  This is the natural course of life, so we find out what we value, appreciate, and need to be successful.  But by paying attention to the signs, we can become great predicters of an outcome.  Let’s use the example of a child.

A child reaches for the hot burner on a stove.  The parent stops the child and says, “No, that’s hot. It will burn you.”  But the child has no concept of a burn.  The parent looks away.  Child reaches for the burner again, touches it, and immediately starts crying because it burns.  Moral?  Sometimes the burn teaches us to move with caution.

We have to learn the hard way sometimes.  We don’t heed warnings because we want to do it ourselves.  And soemtimes we get burned as a result.  But, often enough, good comes out of the bad.  We learn to recognize cause and effect, and how to prevent the bad from happening again.  (Sometimes this can make us too cautious, too.)  In the end and if we are lucky, we learn that working with only the best helps us be our best as well.

All too often, I hear clients and creatives complain about one another.  Being in the middle has helped me see that it is the power of people that make the results great.  Great client-creative relationships happen by design.  It’s my belief that if you surround yourself with the best people, then great things can happen.

Never doubt the power of working with great people.  Treat and pay them well when you find them.

The Old Days

Recently I found myself in a conversation about the old days and how much more difficult things once were.  (Wow, could I sound more like an old timer?!)  A friend of mine and I laughed heartily about the days of creating newspaper layouts without the help of Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.  Remember the hot wax and roller, or the pencils you used for hand-cropping images?  If you do, then you’re probably laughing, too.  It seems like such a crude way of creating a page layout, having worked with today’s programs for so long.  Today we can sit down at a computer and design a 100+ page book without getting our hands too dirty (or burned by hot wax).

The tools we have on hand today make things much cleaner and more efficient.  That is, only if we know what we want to do when we sit down to use these tools.  Before you put that wax on the paper, you were certain of the outcome you wanted because you had prepared for so long.  You thought and thought before you used the wax because it was so final, and starting all over again because of a goof was incredibly unappealing.  Without this preparation, the final results were a complete mess.  There were physical, visible results to poor planning.

There are a whole host of new tools for today’s business communications.  We have an entire Creative Suite, but we also have social media tools on hand.  Lately I have heard many people asking about Facebook and Twitter management for business.  Asking for help from an expert is great, of course, but it seems to be more and more common to neglect the original purpose for using these tools.  Why push and push to get more friends and followers without looking at the bigger picture?  What are you strategically trying to accomplish?

In comparison to using hot wax and a roller for page layout, it is incredibly easy to set up a new account on a website.  Our new tools make things physically cleaner in comparison to the old days.  But without that strategic thought process prior to starting the work, the end result of our efforts can still be a big mess and lost time.  It’s important to remember this when we’re managing our client-creative relationships.  Almost everything we do professionally is improved greatly by the use of clear concepts, goals and measureable results.

Clients that don’t know the results/outcome they want can be dangerous. They take the wildly inefficient approach of asking a creative to just have fun with the work.  This is tempting to a creative because it happens rarely and they think it will be a huge success, but this is where the entrapment begins.  The end result is usually much less attractive than the idea of going wild with a design concept.  The client thinks the creative just can’t get it right, and keeps limiting the amount of tweaking.  Meanwhile, the creative gets irritated with the client because they have provided what they thought was spot-on, only to have the project drag on and on with entirely too many revisions.  Both parties end up frustrated, but can’t quite see the physical evidence that a concept, desired outcome and measurable results were not specified from the beginning.

Creatives that do as you wish are equally dangerous. Be wary of the creative that says yes all the time.  It is a challenge for some to set clear boundaries and limitations; however, finding a healthy relationship that allows for two-way conversation is important.  Creatives who resist requests that harm the design process or final outcome are the type I want to work with because they help me become a better client.  Like Cesar Millan says, “Set clear rules, boundaries and limitations.”  People actually crave rules, boundaries and limitations.  They may not admit to this, of course.

Lessons
In the old days, we had physical consequences to poor planning and rushing through work.  If we moved too quickly, hot wax might burn us.  The tools we use today are changing the game of being a creative, but some of those lessons from the old days still apply.

Take the time to make sure the concept is key.  Honor the practice of a trusted, peaceful working relationship.  Follow the Golden Rule.  Do the best work you can do–all the time.  Laugh at the old days, hard-earned lessons and stop to appreciate the present.