For the sake of time, I’m going to assume it’s a done deal. Your boss has called you in, told you that you were out, and that’s that. HR has come by and told you about things like COBRA (your health benefits, not snakes) and unemployment options. Your severance package, if there is one, has been laid out, and it probably has some strings.

You’re Out. Now What?

Assuming you weren’t fired because you were lazy or because you were a bad/risky employee, this time is very important. This is when you’ll set the tone for how you finally leave, as well as how people remember you. As much fun as it would be to go into a friends office and bitch about how you were just let go for no reason, I suggest keeping quiet. If you were in a small company, chances are you worked with everyone on some level. The boss/owner/whoever is in charge will make an announcement to everyone. Going around and talking about how much of a jerk they are only burns the bridge of a very important reference that you’ll want in the future. You can get angry at home, or better yet, at the bar. If you’ve got good work friends, you may be able to score some free drinks out of this.

Lists and Lists of Lists

If you were a productive designer, you probably had some projects going on at the moment of termination. Make a list of each of your currently pending projects, what stage they are in, and what actions are left for completion. The number one thing to keep in mind is to not burn the people you work with. All of these people, from your boss down to the newest account rep can be great references. How you act under this kind of pressure will be etched into their minds. BE PROFESSIONAL.

Designers are usually pack rats. We collect stuff that we see and that we use. Our computers are full of old concepts, and our sketchbooks are full of ideas that never made it. Gather all of that up. Make a list of each project that you had a big impact on. That, combined with a list of your favorite projects that just looked neat, will be the portfolio material you take with you.

Another thing that designers collect is fonts. When you come into a new position with your own fonts that you’ve collected, make sure to take them with you. Many font sets are copyrighted, as such, you can’t just leave them installed on the computer where you were working. That’s illegal. Make a list of the fonts that you’ve installed, and then remove them from the system. This way, anything that’s yours stays with you, but you won’t screw over the next person who needs to edit that Illustrator file.

Know What You Signed

In a lot of industries, you have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). In a broad stroke, these say that you won’t talk about or show the things you worked on while you were there. No giving away the secret recipe or the magic formula. Generally, NDAs have an out. Be sure to read your NDA, and any other agreements you’ve signed to make sure that by showing material in your portfolio, you’re not opening yourself up to being sued.

The last NDA that I signed stated that everything I worked on was considered ’secret’ unless the owner of the information published the information, or made it available to anyone not under an NDA. So, once the owner (in some cases a client) had made the final product public, then I was free to showcase the product as well.

If there’s something really nice that you want to show off, I suggest taking it to your boss and asking them if it’s ok to include it in your portfolio. In the event that the piece contains sensitive corporate or financial information, offer to substitute dummy numbers or sterilized text in place of sensitive data. Unless you’re a copywriter, you’re showing off the design of the piece. The text isn’t relevant.

Another type of agreement to be aware of is a non-compete. This usually applies to account executives and managers, but depending on the industry you’re working in, it’s possible that you might be limited as to which types of industries you can go into when you leave your employer. It’s a good practice to have the HR or office manager make you a copy of everything in your employee file. Especially documents you’ve signed.

Taking Files?

It’s safe to assume that most of your design work is going to be done on a computer. As such, you’ll probably want to take your source file with you. This can get tricky. The electronic versions are just as much your work product as the physical versions. Keep in mind that when you clear the list of things you want to take, be sure to include the final electronic versions of your work. I took the Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and PDF versions of my work, but left the source text files and excel spreadsheets. Make sure to keep any linked stock images, or external source files that you’ve made to help out with your work. These scratch files are work product and part of your contribution.

Things to Avoid

DO NOT DELETE ANY FILES! If, on your last day, you get caught deleting work files, you’ll probably loose your severance, and may be liable for a law suite. You’ve probably got a bunch of personal data on the machine, but before you go around deleting everything in sight, make sure that you’re covered. It’s safe to say that your next job will not like it if they know you went out and deleted everything on your system before you left.

DON’T BE A JERK! I’ve said it before, but it’s important: these are your references now. Talking bad about the bosses, the other co-workers, or being rude to clients is the kind of thing that will get you horrible references in the future. At this point, your goal needs to be to get as much as you can from your now former employer. And this includes glowing references about how much of a professional you were, even under those most trying of circumstances.

DON’T FORGET TO GET A LETTER! Since you’ve spent the past few days being a professional, now’s a great time to get your coworkers and managers to put it in writing. While you’re still fresh in their minds, have them put down their thoughts about you in a letter of recommendation. Going to another job interview and saying ‘yes, I was fired, but not for being a bad employee. In fact, here’s a letter from my former boss telling you how great a guy I am.’ This will say a LOT about you as a worker if your former employer is saying good things about you.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is, keep your head on. Don’t let emotions and bad ideas screw up your future. As a designer, you’re probably used to dealing with rapidly evolving situations and fluid goals that shift from day to day. Approach this as a design project. The more time you bitch, the longer it takes you get back to being productive. If you leave with your reputation in tact and your based covered, then you’ll be miles ahead of others who weren’t so smart.

In my line of work, we use PowerPoint as a means of doing page layout. I cringed when I first saw that somebody was using this screen presentation program for doing print design. How dare these dullards try to undermine the established reign of design software from Adobe. I must stop this, I thought.

And then I came up against reality. There are only two comps in our office that have Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign installed on them. And of those, only one person in our office can do more than edit text using the software.

This means that every time I make something in Illustrator, it is VERY likely that I’ll be the one doing the edits and updates on that piece. If the six becomes a nine, then I have to mind. I’m the one editing and updating it. This isn’t a problem for things that we’re sending out to a printer. But when it comes to simple things that we’re going to produce in-house (small presentations, information binders and the like) it becomes a chore to have to keep going back into Illustrator in order to maintain the info.

Enter PowerPoint. Since we deal with large volumes of data, our account execs work primarily in Excel. Spreadsheets are king, and that’s just how it is. If you want a table pulled into Creative Suite, you have two basic options: 1) rebuild the setup in InDesign, and the copy and paste it to your other Adobe software, or 2) export the data from Excel as a PDF, and then try pull that PDF data into whatever you’re doing.

The first method is time consuming, and tedious, but you get to maintain full editability in your data. The second method is faster, but you can forget about editing the data easily. Many words are broken up into individual letters, and some letters aren’t even in fonts, but are turned into outlines at random.

PowerPoint fixes both of these issues. I can do a simeple page layout (most of our layouts have to be simple because we’re dealing with big freakin’ charts and lots of numbers), and I can keep the numbers and table structure editable.

The biggest selling point here isn’t that I can edit it. I can edit nearly anything. The draw is that almost anybody else can edit the files. All you need is a copy of MS Office. From the CEO using the iMac down to the junior account exec working off of a laptop in the broom closet can work on this file, make corrections, and update the numbers. They don’t need me anymore, atleast not for this task.

By working in PowerPoint for smaller projects involving volitile data sets, I  can turn over the file to be edited much quicker by someone else after I’ve done the designerly stuff to  it.I’m now free to focus on the 4 page brochures, or the cool mailer for one of our much more fun clients.

I balked at bringing myself down to the level of PowerPoint design. It’s beneath me, I though. No real designer should have to work in such a medium.

Now I see the reality of the situation: I can dash out a quick piece, let other people fill in the gaps in information, and I’m free to work on important items. I don’t have to deal with changing the numbers or the plan names every five minutes.

While tough at first, Designing in PowerPoint has saved me time and allowed me to put my energy to work in more efficient ways.

One caveate: I’m only offering this praise to PowerPoint 2007. Office 2k3 is crap.

When I was job searching, I had a potential employer ask me to do a redesign of a city’s web portal. They wanted working HTML pages, a news crawler at the bottom, new images and a fresh and flexible design. I wanted the job, and I was considering doing the assignment. I asked if this was a design for a client of theirs, and I was told that the city in question was not a client of this firm. It was while I was doing research for the project that I found a RFP (request for proposal) from the city in question for a portal site redesign. The RFP listed ALL of the qualifications, verbatim, that I was given by this potential employer. When I asked them about it, I was told that the three of designers competing for this position would have their site designs pitched to the city, and if the firm was chosen for the job, then the designer that produced the bid-winning site would be hired.

I withdrew my name, and, after some discussion with the HR person I was working with, I found out that the other two designers had done the same, but without the knowledge of the RFP. That’s a great example of bad SPEC.

But what about good spec?

I’ve been working as an in-house designer for the past few months, and I’ve been asked to produce materials that our clients haven’t asked for. Brochures, mailers, simple web sites & emails, and other items. All under the guise of showing it to them, and selling them on it once they could see and feel it.

Internally, I balked at this. Why the hell were we making things that nobody was asking for? Who was going to pay for it?

I didn’t like the idea of making things I wasn’t being paid for, and I thought it was a bad idea for my new company to be doing that as well.

Regardless, I made the items. Payroll stuffers about preventive medical procedures, post cards for regular yearly exams, and so on.

The clients loved them. Once we sold one to client A, 8 or 9 other clients wanted them too. This was good SPEC.

Our account execs, knowing the areas in which our clients needed help with their employee communication, were able to provide a solution to a problem that was only just beginning to show its head. It was pure SPEC work. None of these initial clients asked for this stuff to be made. Many of the hardly knew there was a problem to be solved. But, by looking out for our clients, our reps were able to see a need and meet it without being asked.

That’s not SPEC as much as it’s Customer Service. And service is what our profession is all about.

But why the need to make the product before we had sold it? Why not let the account execs sell the service, and then come to me for the design? The answer is simple: It’s hard to get people interested in something when they don’t know what that something is.

As designers, we forget that the rest of the world may not be able to visualize what the end result will look like before it has been created. As designers dealing with non-design minded people, we have to show them what we’re talking about. And handing a finished (or nearly finished) version of what you would like to do for them is a great way to over come the visualization barrier.

That’s not an excuse to go out and start SPEC-ing all the work you can find. People know what a web site is, so you should be able to show them your web portfolio and be able to communicate to them what you would like to do for them specifically.

However, not everyone knows what a health awareness poster looks like, or what a summary of benefits looks like. To most people, these documents can produced as simple Word docs, and printed out on the office laser printer. But showing what these pieces can be (colorful, glossy, well-organized, etc) can give your clients a glimpse at what they could be doing better, and can lead to whole new areas of work for you.

If y9u’re going to do work ups like this for your clients, it’s best to track your hours as you would for a normal job. Once you sell them the idea, you’ll be ready to bill them for it, and you’ll already have a good idea of the cost involved in that type of piece for when your other clients see it and want one just like it.

Little value-ads like this for your current clients may be skiring the edge of SPEC work, but even if they’re not interested, they’ll see that their designer is looking out for them, and is interested in helping the grow their business. You may not get paid for the design, but at the very least, you’ll insulate yourself from being dropped easily if things get tight.

On the rare time that I’m stuck being the experienced one in the room, I find myself wishing I’d written down a lot of what I tell people. That way, I could send them that info, and not have to repeat it.

This post is going to cover Print Production. I’ll go over some basic terms and help with areas that usually present common problems to first time print producers. So, let’s dive in.

File Setup

Some things are pretty common knowledge, but I’m going to assume that the readers here are starting from 0. If you’re working in Photoshop, make sure that your files are set to 300 pixels per inch, and that you’re working in RGB mode.

There’s some debate about this since printing is done using 4 and 7 color printers. The way I look at it is, if you’re working on a system that displays images using 3 base colors, why would you try to work in a color scheme that can’t be accurately reproduced? Monitors don’t show cyan magenta yellow and black. They show red green and blue. You should work with the setup that will give you the most accurate appearance available, and on a computer, that’s RGB. You can do your color conversion over to CMYK once you’re finished. I find that I get better results when I do that.

Also, make sure to set up your files with a bleed in mind. Bleed, or color bleed, refers to how far the ink will go in relation to the edge of the page. Full bleed means that you want the color to extend to the far edge of the page. To make sure that this comes out like you want it to, you should make your files a little larger than you need them to be. The standard extension for full bleed in North America and Europe is 1/8 of an inch on each side. So, to produce an 8.5×11 print with the color extending, or bleeding, to the edge, your document should be 8.75 x 11.25. Your colors and images should extend all the way to this 1/8 inch mark over the edge.

Working on The Project

Now that the file is set up, you should keep somethings in mind. You should leave a gutter on the inside of you documents edge of 1/8 inch as well. When printers make a page, it’s usually printed on pager stock that’s bigger than the final product will be. Once the ink has dried, they’ll cut it down to size. Cutting isn’t always spot on. A good printer will keep it pretty damn close, but the reality is, things can shift a little here and there. If you have text or an important image that is sitting right at the edge of the page, you can’t always be sure that it won’t get cut off. The 1/8 of outer bleed and the 1/8 of inner space ensures that your prints won’t come back with a small whit boarder because the color didn’t go far enough, and that important info and images won’t get cut off.

To be safe, I try to keep things that have to be seen at least 1/4″ away from the edges.

Prepping Your File for the Printer

Now that the piece is designed and the client has signed off on everything, it’s time to get it ready to go to print. The first thing you’ll have to do is convert from RGB to CMYK, assuming you’ve been working in RGB up to this point.

Before you proceed, I HIGHLY suggest you save your work as a new file. This way, you’ll have a pristine RGB version to go back to should you need it.

First, I feel it’s necessary to do a bit of discussion about the differences between RGB and CMYK. RGB is the red green and blue color pallet that is used to produce the images on computers and televisions. RGB is great at displaying reds and greens at high saturation. There are shades of red that just can’t be reproduced using 4 color CMYK process printing. Most of the time, you won’t notice a deal breaking color shift in photographs. The varied amount of color in and shades in a photo hide the problems. The issue comes when you’re dealing with large swathes of solid colors like rich reds.

A great investment for anybody working with print is a color process manual. It’s a big book of colors and their cmyk values. When I come up against a color that I need to make in cmyk, but can’t seem to get right, I whip out the process book. Flipping through the pages, I’ll find what I need, or something close to it, and my problems are solved.

As for the rest of the image, using the color mode conversion in Photoshop really does a good job. Things were dicey back in the old days. But the latest versions of the Creative Suite have seen huge improvements in color conversion. I’ve gotten great results, and when things aren’t quite right, it’s rarely something that spans the whole document, but rather small areas. Those can be fixed easily using the process manual and some minor tweaking.

Once you’ve converted the colors to CMYK and are happy with what you have, It’s time to get it move on. If you’re working in Illustrator or Photoshop, you should make sure of a couple of things. One to know where your images are. Not their position on the page, but rather where do the images reside file wise. You’ll need to be sure that your photos and other imported graphics are embedded into your file. Otherwise, when you send it off to the printer, they won’t be able to use the file since there are links to images that they don’t have. Embedding your images will jack up your file size. Sometimes a lot depending on the size of the document, and the number and resolution of images you’re using.

Secondly, there’s the text. You should rasterize (Photoshop) or outline (illustrator) your text before sending it off to the printer. The reason is, you have a set of fonts on your system, and depending where you got them, they may have different names than the equivalent font on the printers computer. To make life easier on everyone, it’s best to remove fonts from the equation by turning them into images or paths.

Lastly, in Photoshop, you should flatten your images. This will get rid of things like layer effects, masks and transparency, and leave you with a simple, flattened image to send off. This makes your files smaller, and takes the guess work away.

Now that your file is ready, call up your printer and see how they’d like it delivered. If the file is under 5 megs, then you can most likely email it to them. Above 5 megs, your printer will probably have an FTP site ready for you to use.

Ask them to let you know if there are any issues with the file that you may have missed. This is VERY important because almost all printers will have an additional charge for fixing these errors. I’ve seen this charge run from $25/hr up to $100/hr. This is a source of income for them, and many people take advantage of it because it’s easier to let the the pre-press guys deal with it. If you’re on a budget, this is probably not an option. Something as simple as hiding your layer that has extra images or text on it can cost you an additional $50.

Printers and their pre-press people are going to be one of you biggest allies in this process, so make friends with them. Ask question, and get insight on how you can make their jobs easier (they like that). They want your client to be happy with the product as much as you do. If you’re client is happy, you’re happy. If you’re happy, you’ll send them more business.

If you’re time frame allows for it, you need to get a physical proof from your printer. This will let you see what the final output will look like. Digital prints (4 and 7 colors) produced on Heidelberg’s and HP Indigos will make your life so so much better because seeing the proofs from those machines before your job runs through it fully will show you exactly what you’re going to give your client. That proof will tell you where any errors are, and give you a chance to fix them. Many places will charge for a physical proof, but it’s worth it.

Printing Terms

I haven’t come close to covering the whole world of printing, but these tips should get you started on what you need. I’m now going to turn to some brief term definitions, and we’ll finish off with some tips.

Stock - refers to the type of paper or material that your piece will be printed on. Paper stock is generally discussed in terms of coating (glossy, matte, uncoated, etc) and weight. For a reference, normal printer paper is 20lbs. Business cards are generally on 80lb - 130lb stock. There are specialty papers like velum and odd weights like 110lb that can be used. Your printer is a good person to ask about which you should use. They’ve done lots of projects, and they’ll have some really good ideas.

Process - this is an easy way of referencing CMYK printing. 4 color process and 7 color process are the most common. You can run jobs using any number of the available colors. For instance, you could design a piece to be printed on white paper using only differing amounts of Cyan and black ink. This is a 2 color print, and is cheaper than a full 4 color print. Some areas could contain 50% cyan and 15% black, giving you a blue-gray color. When money is tight for a project, you have to be creative, and working in a limited color space of 1 or two colors can produce memorable and fun results that show off your ability to over come a very common problem.

Spot Color, Pantone Color, PANTONE - Since there are certain color that can’t be reproduced using process printing, the Pantone Corporation has developed shades of very specific ink. These inks will look the same everywhere in the world on any printer. They’re idiot proof. If you absolutely, positively MUST have a certain shade of green, Pantone has your back. Now, the down side is, you can’t mix Pantones. They are solid colors. You can vary their saturation between 0% and 100% (levels greater than 100% are called extra heavy saturation, and should be avoided unless necessary. ask your printer about this). Pantones are great when you’re producing things like business cards, letterhead and other corporate material that needs to have consistent color across the whole line. Telling a printer that you want Pantone 369U will yield a very delightful shade of green. Pantone makes a guide called the Color Bridge which will show you coated and uncoated color swatches along side their CMYK and RGB values. You can buy this at any good paper store.

Proof - The print out that shows what your final document will look like. These are extremely useful in ensuring that your printed piece looks correct when they do the final run. One thing to note: You can’t get true proofs for projects using pantone colors. Many places offer instead a digtal proof, or a proof produced for the purpose of checking the layout of the piece. Pantone colors are specific and standard around the world. If you want Pantone Cool Gray 9, the proof they give you will show where that image or text will be, but not an accurate representation of cool gray 9. But don’t worry, unless your printer is a total moron, cool gray 9 will look like it does on the pantone guide every time.

Bleed - is how far you colors extend in relation to the edge of the page. Full bleed means that, on the final output, the ink will be printed all the way to the very edge of the page. Full bleed is accomplished by extending the images and colors in your original design to 1/8″ beyond the edge of the design. 1/8″ is the standard distance for North America and Europe. This means that if you want your final piece to be 8.5″x11″, you’ll set up your file to be 8.75″x11.25″, and you’ll keep the info at least 1/8″ away from each edge, though you should allow for a bit of a gutter.

Gutter - This is the space from the edge towards the inside of your page. The gutter is the 1/8″ area inside each edge of the page that you don’t want to cross. Your print piece will be produced on paper that is larger than it needs to be, and then cut down to size. By keeping important images and text at least 1/8″ away from the edge, you ensure that when the trimming starts, you won’t loose valuable content in the process.

Black, Rich Black, Cool Black, Warm Black - Black isn’t as simple as you might suppose. Simply filling a page with black ink can leave you with a final product that looks weaker and less appealing than you might think. After all, you’re putting black ink on to a white page (usually) and, when you mix black and white, you get gray. This gray might not be noticeable, but when you compare strait black (100% k) to a rich black such as C 15% M 40% Y 30% K 90%, you’ll see that the rich black looks richer, more dark, and more black. In the Pantone guide, there are several versions of black. Adobe Illustrator by default converts your black to rich black. This is a good thing. Rich blacks can be warm, with more yellow and megenta, or cool, using more cyan. These can make all the difference in conveying the feeling of a printed piece. Black is black, but it’s so so much more.

There are many other terms and things to consider when dealing with print projects, and I’ll cover them in a future post. I’ve not touched on binding, mixed color processes (4 over 1, for example), multi-page layouts and common problems with those, or the use of custom coated areas and defining the use of specialty ink like metallics and foils.

Questions are also a big help. Please leave them in the comments. and I’ll get back to you.

These people derive a self-imbued higher status than their clock punching peers because they live on the hairy edge. They’re out in the trenches making it by their wits alone. Well, bully for them. If you can do it, bravo for you.

I hate it.

Nobody takes out Social Security taxes for you. Or FICA. Or State (if you happen to live in a state that charges rent). You have to deal with the clients that don’t pay their bills. You are the one negotiating the fee for your work, and you are the one responsible for it’s failure. Success will likely go to the man or woman who had the insight to pay you.

Freelance work, to me, is lonely work. My laptop is too small for me to stare at comfortably on for long periods. I love the dual 19″ setup that I have at home, so sitting in Panera Bread drinking my 13th refill of earl grey isn’t something I do a lot of.

Then their’s the cycles. When Christmas time comes around, get ready. A lot of work for well paying clients dries up. The people who normally hire out jobs to you are on vacation, or getting ready to be, and they’re not thinking about getting things in order for the new new year. They’re thinking about how they have to go spend a perfectly good set of days off with people they don’t particularly like all that much. Work slows down, and you’re making more calls, and getting fewer jobs.

If the economy slows down a bit, guess what? They’ll find a way to make due with the piss poor PowerPoints pushed out by the office manager while she’s in between setting up the conference room and dealing with expense reports. (yes, I’m talking to you. You know who you are)

Or, worse yet, they’ll go on Craigs List, and ask for somebody to do the job for $5.50 an hour plus left over begals. And somebody will take that job. Seeing this always reminds me of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath; the part where the family is in the migrant camp, and they hear about how there are mi.lions of people going out to California to fill only a few thousand jobs. The lowest bidder wins, and if you’ve got some talent, a bit of experience, and some small sense of what your work is worth, then it won’t be you. Keep moving.

For me, freelancing was a means to an end. Leaving one job and moving to a new town, I spent my time divided between job hunting, and job gathering. But, freelance work over an extended period does make you a much better hire in my opinion.

As a freelancer, starting out is tough. You have to build friendships, network, and develop talents that you thought you’d never need or have. It’s a lot of problem solving and way finding. You can’t go down the hall to ask somebody for help, you have to find the answers your self. You have to deal directly with picky clients, and you have to make them happy. If you don’t make them happy, they may just say to hell with you, keep the work, and not pay the bill.

You have to hold some peoples hand through the design process. You’ll answer questions like, why is this over here, why don’t you use this color, or(my favorite) can we center all of this text down the middle and add one of those light flashy things? (light flashy thing = lens flare)

The reality is, you’ll work with these people everywhere. Joshua Davis, on of the most amazing designers/artists around, deals with them. Just because your client is BMW doesn’t meant that they are more intelligent, or more design savvy. People are the same all over. You’ll have to work with the guy who can’t get his iPod to work on his computer, and, since you use computers, you know how to fix it, right?

You’re going to have to be two doors down from that picky client who always complains about the weight of the paper you chose, and how it isn’t the same as it was that one time for that other guy who did something five years ago.

There are a couple of ways to approach those people in the office that you now have to deal with: You can write them off as annoyances, shut your self away at your desk and hold your breath as they walk by looking for you, all the while praying that they don’t smell your fear. OR you can treat them like a client. Find out what it is that they expect. Modify the designs that you produce for them so as to make them feel good about the product that you are creating for them to present. You can explain that the reason the box is blue and not fire engine red is that the blue adds a subtle coolness to the image and lends to the over all calming effect that the piece is supposed to generate.

If you’re a freelancer coming into an office, there are a lot of things about your life that are going to change. The types of people you encounter isn’t one of those things. Designers moving from one firm to another in vein attempts to escape annoying people will ultimately have no choice but to move again, or, at the least, realize that their flight is hopeless and simply withdraw from the process.

I get steady pay checks now. Somebody else worries about payroll deductions for me. The coffee is free, and the office is anything but lonely, at least when my friends are around. And I still work with the people who annoy me. The names have changed, but I can see through the disguises. These people are the same everywhere.

They’re coming to get you, Barbara. There’s no escaping them. Approach them as a design challenge to be overcome, and you can turn these annoyances into allies.

I’m guilty of this as well. My first design job was at a small print company in Cleveland, TN. It was a magazine publisher, and I had never worked in the industry. At all. It was a 1 week deadline crunch to get 5 different magazines out. I said I could do it.

It was the hardest week of my life, and one of the best.

Now, fast forward a year or so later. I was interviewing for at job in the communications department of a fairly large non-profit. They asked me if I had any experience with After Effects.  My experience at the time with the program included me opening the program, not being able to figure out how to get a video clip into the timeline, and then closing the program in frustration after an hour of trying to use the damn thing.

So, when asked whether I could use the program, I said yes. I smiled, and, with poise and confidence, told them a direct lie. I got the job, and a week into it, I was given an assignment that would need to be done in AE. Now, I had to put up or shut. I learned to get around in After Effects in about an hour, and had the project done later that day. It was simple stuff, so I was ok. If it had been more complex, I would have been screwed.

Every creative person I know does the same thing. I’ve got friends who do application development for Facebook. I know one of them who has taken on a couple of jobs in the past that he couldn’t do. My oldest friend Josh, I know he’s done it a couple of times.

This is the kind of thing that we tend to do a lot of when we’re starting out. We’ll take on projects that we have absolutely NO business doing, let alone charging money for. The next thing you know, you’re spending over half of your time doing those projects. Before long, the thing you once had no business getting into is now your primary business.

My first thought when talking to new designers is to tell them to stay out of those proejcts that are way out of their realm. Those assignments are hard, and they’ll make you want to kill yourself or others at some point. But they’re also good and necessary. Creative people as a whole are curious. We get into things that we see that are shiny and neat, and as much as it can hurt at first, it is essential for us to keep finding new areas to stretch and grow.

We must constantly be reaching for things out of our reach. At it’s core, creative work across any field - engineering, software development, design, accounting - is about one thing: Problem Solving. It’s what we do. We see a challenge or an obstacle, and we try to get through it. It’s our creativity and ingenuity that sparks our imaginations into seeing a solution where other people only see a problem.

I love what I do because I love to solve problems. I like to find ways of working through something difficult, and there’s no easier way to find problems to solve then by jumping into something you don’t understand.

It’s like the game Myst. Some of you will know the game, others can try it out at GameTap. Myst gave you almost no information up front, dropped you in the middle of an uninhabited island, and told you to figure out what was going on. You don’t shoot at anybody, and nobody dies. You just have to fix what ever is wrong. But you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be like when it’s right. The game can be maddening, but it was one of the best selling games for many years, and one of my all time favorites. And, I’ve noticed, many of the creative people that are close to my age also have fond memories of it.

I encourage everyone to take on a project that is out of your realm, even if just a bit. Do work for a client that is beyond what you know, and find a way to make it work. You’ll be glad you did when it’s over. Unless you screw up.

Merry Christmas, all.

I’ll be covering topics such as dealing with client, contracts for designers, how to work print shops, and some basic design knowledge that you’re not taught in school, and maybe don’t know where to find. I want to help designers avoid some of the pitfalls and problems that I’ve encountered. I’m open to questions, and I welcome any and all feedback.

For my first post, I was hoping to do a write up on CSS and how to use divs in place of table elements. Instead, I’ve found a nice hot button issue to start us off: SPEC work.

Spec work, or speculative work, is something that, unfortunately, is all too common in our industry. Spec work is when a client asks a designer to produce work for free while dangling the possibility of payment in front of the them. A great example of this can be seen at times in places like the Craigs List Art/Media/Design Jobs section. They go something like this:

Hi, we’re looking for a new logo for our Landscaping business. We’ll pay $100 to the first designer who sends us a clean, professional logo. We’ll pay you $150 if you include a slogan with it. Send in your ideas, and you may be the one we choose for this amazing project.

What’s wrong with this? If I were a starving designer, or I was just starting out and had very little work to show in my portfolio, I would be tempted to spend my time working on this bogus project.

The problem here is, no matter what level of designer you are, this is a bad thing. As a professional, even a young professional, your time and your work has a value. Granted, a designer in college or just out of school will likely not be able to charge the rates of someone like Susan Kare, or Joshua Davis, but your work still has value.

There are very few people who can just sit down, and KNOW exactly how something should look. Most of us had some form of training. We’ve practiced and worked, tried and failed at our craft. Clients are paying us because we have been through the trouble of learning why you don’t put fifteen gradients, 2 lens flares, 3 different fonts, and 5 colors in a logo. They pay us for our knowledge and our skill in designing images that communicate ideas, feelings and messages. Images that connect a simple swoosh with sports; a small piece of fruit missing a bite with stable and easy computing. Someone had to sit down, and decide how the Nike swoosh would look. How to make it as simple and effective as possible. That single mark is worth hundreds of millions each year. And a designer did that.

The landscaping company above will, in all likely hood, not change the way grass is cut, or how we view perennials. With luck and some good work, they could have a solid business in there area, and maybe branch out from there. And part of their strategy for success should be a well designed, intentional logo. Something simple that communicates what they do. A mark that they can put on stationary, business cards, advertisements, and invoices that will distinguish them from others in their field. But what they’re asking for us much different.

What they’ve asked for is not at all unlike asking 5 plumbers to come by and fix a leak, but telling each one of them that the one they like the best will be the one that gets paid. The others, well, thanks for trying guys, but your time isn’t worth anything. You fixed the leak, but, we just decided to go with someone else. Better luck next time.

This sort of thing can sound something like:

“Hey, can you design me a website? I’ll let you put your name on it, and you can use it in your portfolio. You’ll get a ton of business from it!”

“Send in your entries for our logo contest. The winner will get to design all of our material, and your work will be seen by thousands!”

The problem becomes apparent when you try to do this in real life, with any other service based industry. Mechanics, restaurants, cleaners, hitmen, or even lawyers. Any time you need something done, and it requires a professional to do it, you have to pay. You need a bolt tightened to keep your car running? Pay me. You need me to type up a letter so you can sign it and make something legal? Pay me. You want I should make that guy dead? Pay me. You want the left overs disposed of? Pay me extra.

Try not paying any one of these people for work they do for you. It doesn’t matter that the job only took 5 minutes. You’re not only paying for the time, you’re paying for somebody who knows how and why something should be done.

Spec work devalues your time, and it cheats your clients out of the quality work our profession should deliver.

The criags list example above actually happened a couple of days ago. I was bored, so I decided to email the poster with a polite, though slightly sarcastic, email explaining why what they were doing was bad, and a simple way to rectify the mistake. Following is the complete transcript of those emails. I’ve left nothing out except for the email addresses and the last names.

FROM: Kevin
TO: CriagsList Poster

Hi,

While I’m glad to see a business willing to spend a whole $100 on their identity and branding, what you’re asking for is know as speculative work. Known as Spec in the design industry, it’s when a client wants work done without any promise of payment.

You’re asking me to spend time working on a logo and slogan for your business, and I have no promise from you that you’ll pay for it. You could get 10 submissions, and tell all of them ‘Thanks, but we went with one of the other guys’, and take the design you like the most and just rip it off.

This is the equivalent of me asking you and 4 other landscaping and lighting companies to each come out to my home, spend some time making everything look great, and then thanking you for your work, and telling you that if yours is the best, I’ll pay you.

If I were to ask you to do that, you would laugh at me. Yours is a service based business, and when you offer a service to a customer, you expect to be paid.

I also work in a service based industry. It’s called Graphic Design. I provide my knowledge, experience and talent to my clients, and they, in turn, pay me.

While you may find some poor college student desperate enough to take on this project for just the chance of payment, you will not be getting any response from experienced designers. Because this is your business, and it’s branding, slogan and feel should be the best that they can be, within budget constraints, I would suggest the following: Repost your request on CL, and ask that designers send in links to their resumes and portfolios. From those responses, select a designer that you feel good about, and tell them what your budget is. Then, let them get to work on producing a quality logo that will reflect your company.

That is how the real world works. If you wish to conduct speculative fishing trips, please do not waste the time of actual designers. For such requests, I would suggest you find a high school student or someone who isn’t very smart.

Thank you

FROM: CraigsList Poster (name removed because I’m not a jerk, but I wish I were)
TO: Kevin

You’re an idiot.

You’re obviously unemployed and untalented because in the time it took you to write that gibberish, you could of submitted something worth while and bid on the other $3000. worth of work that I just awarded to Peter, who was talented and trusting enough tonight to consider my offer and win… pretty big in both our opinions.

Dumb ass.

I didn’t feel that starting an email war would solve the problem, so I simply thanked this person for their time, and gave them the links to NO!SPEC, and to the AIGA’s official stance on spec work. when I looked on CL the morning I got the response from this person, I noticed that their posing had been flagged for removal.