I work in a highly competitive industry, and often get this question at networking events and conferences from people in my industry. I like to see them succeed, so I give them this advice: don't worry about your website! It's just an extra cost that doesn't contribution to your bottom line or add value for your customers. That goes not just for web, but any form of style or presentation. Here are my tips for cutting out the waste:
- Company logo - don't need one, just use your name
- Business cards - new hires can design their own using web-based tools provided by the printing company
- Product photography - business was conducted just fine before the invention of the camera, using words to describe products
- Web design - have an admin type up the information in Word, save it as HTML and upload it to your website. All on one page is fine.
- Sales brochures - a print-out of your website
- Language - we don't spend a lot of time on copy editing, spell checking, correct punctuation. UX consultants who want to sell you their services will try to show you research showing how these things effect conversion rates, like how Zappos improved their bottom line by spellchecking customer reviews. Don't fall for these tricks!
- Suits - our company culture discourages wearing suits, even for sales people who meet with prospects. Controversial? Yes, but it lets everyone know that we have laser focus on our delivering value and cutting out wasteful spending on superficial things. Sweat pants are extremely cost-effective, easy to maintain and functional.
- Personal grooming - another area to reduce costs is on expensive and time-consuming haircuts, showering, shaving, make-up, shining shoes, dentistry, etc. These are nice, but humans survived just fine for thousands of years without these superficial aesthetic concerns.
Remember, in business, nothing else matters but delivering value for your customer. Consultants who want to sell you their services will tell you differently, but customers really only care about your product or service and couldn't care less about your website colors, logo or how your salespeople look and smell. These are added costs for trivial things that don't contribute to your bottom line. I recommend this approach to all my current competitors and also to new people trying to enter my field.
sigh yet another failure of web standards and browsers to address the most basic requirements of designers. HTML was originally intended for academics creating standardized documents, and more than 20 year later we're still resorting to hacks to make things half decent for any other use.
For every hooligan on the street, there are 10 friends and family at home, but shrugging their shoulders at the violence because they have no stake in society. "Let them burn it down, why should I care?"
The hooligans can be rounded up. What are you going to do with the much larger number of otherwise law-abiding citizens who can't be bothered to hold up the law in their own neighborhoods?
But why is a reminder is needed? If you exclude computer science, women received the majority of bachelor's degrees in science since the late 80s. It was 60% in 2008 and probably even higher today.
You work 8 hours a day, then come home and study for 8 hours, which is really just more work for your employer. Life-long education is starting to sound like a prescription for non-stop labor.
All true. Today's middle class are forced to act like newly-arrived immigrants, turning back the clock on decades of progress and rising living standards.
One can't help but wonder if it is not a coincidence that the average reading level of the comments written by my esteemed fellow HN members--as measured by such instruments as the Flesch-Kincaid readability test--shows marked improvement on this thread. Perhaps this phenomenon can be accounted for by observing the proliferation of superfluous polysyllabic adjectives which have doubtlessly been deployed strategically to serve as an argumentum a contrario to Mr. Sanger. And under the influence of the philosopher Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan, "The medium is the message," may we not risk the hypothesis that those who, in the language of the intellectual, dispute the relevance of the intellectual thereby refute themselves?
I agree, it's totally outrageous that people with "backgrounds in sociology and political philosophy" are preying on our most vulnerable global corporations and infiltrating their most sensitive and secret labor camps!
As a designer, I'm not very concerned about spec work. The wide availability of cheap desktop publishing software could have made design as a profession vanish because it gave people the ability to do it themselves.
But that didn't happen. Instead, people did try it themselves and the market was flooded with extremely poor design. Before, not having a logo at all was the floor, the absolute minimum of branding. But after DTP, the floor was raised - having a poorly-designed logo that you did yourself was the new minimum. Today, crowdsourced logo that you paid $300 for is rapidly becoming the new minimum.
Nothing changes for designers, because there is no ceiling. Thinking of design in the very narrow, branding sense: it cannot be commodified, because whenever the minimum level is raised, it becomes ubiquitous and generic, and that creates the new zero point. Designers get paid to design things to stand out from what's ubiquitous, whatever that happens to be at the time.
It's OK as a logo, except for the inconsistent light source on the shadows. As a toolbar icon, it seems like they decided to redesign it so that it violates every OS icon guideline in existence, except on Windows Phone 7.
"Many designers or agencies might scoff at the notion of a “non-designer” being able to learn and understand the principles to help them arrive at a design."
They would, except that most of them were once non-designers who learned the principles of design. That is how you become a designer.
Or maybe he means non-designers can learn how to design by reading a book? Yeah, I guess designers would scoff at that - reading helps, but you really have to practice to be any good.
- Company logo - don't need one, just use your name
- Business cards - new hires can design their own using web-based tools provided by the printing company
- Product photography - business was conducted just fine before the invention of the camera, using words to describe products
- Web design - have an admin type up the information in Word, save it as HTML and upload it to your website. All on one page is fine.
- Sales brochures - a print-out of your website
- Language - we don't spend a lot of time on copy editing, spell checking, correct punctuation. UX consultants who want to sell you their services will try to show you research showing how these things effect conversion rates, like how Zappos improved their bottom line by spellchecking customer reviews. Don't fall for these tricks!
- Suits - our company culture discourages wearing suits, even for sales people who meet with prospects. Controversial? Yes, but it lets everyone know that we have laser focus on our delivering value and cutting out wasteful spending on superficial things. Sweat pants are extremely cost-effective, easy to maintain and functional.
- Personal grooming - another area to reduce costs is on expensive and time-consuming haircuts, showering, shaving, make-up, shining shoes, dentistry, etc. These are nice, but humans survived just fine for thousands of years without these superficial aesthetic concerns.
Remember, in business, nothing else matters but delivering value for your customer. Consultants who want to sell you their services will tell you differently, but customers really only care about your product or service and couldn't care less about your website colors, logo or how your salespeople look and smell. These are added costs for trivial things that don't contribute to your bottom line. I recommend this approach to all my current competitors and also to new people trying to enter my field.