A presentation on presentations
You’ll get some great points from this set of slides about engaging the brain in presentations… why you should fling your current PowerPoint presentations and take notice of this advice.
Put an end to work on spec
I read tonight of a new online business venture which not only encourages work “on spec” but uses it as a model for designers. What a disaster!
Before I get into this post, so you know what “on spec” means, from No!Spec, the definition of work “on spec” is:
“Spec” has become the short form for any work done on a speculative basis. In other words, any requested work for which a fair and reasonable fee has not been agreed upon, preferably in writing.
Back to the story.
The site in question — which I have no intention of promoting with a free link — uses this approach:
by having bidding designers (at least 25 entries) submit completed concepts rather than just proposals in the competitive process
Why have they determined that this model of business is okay for graphic design? Why should a provider — in this case a designer — invest their time, equipment and skills in a project where they’re one of at least 25 submissions to the client. So they have a four percent chance of being paid.
You wouldn’t think of doing this in other environments.
For instance, if you’re building a new home, do you ask 25 builders to build you a house “on spec”, and then choose the one you want to pay for? Hardly! Would a hairdresser cut hair all day “on spec” in the hope that 1-in-25 clients likes them enough to pay for it? No!
Design is no different.
Now, if you’re a new designer (or copywriter, desktop publisher etc) then you might want to take on some “free” work — pro-bono — to build up a credible portfolio before you have a lot of successfully completed projects under your belt. In that way, it’s a legitimate way to build up your reputation by showing a client the type of work (and client) you are capable of producing.
And there’s certainly a difference between creating personalised marketing samples to attract a client and creating full projects you “might” get paid for as one of several or even dozens of potential skilled providers.
But that client then expecting you to undertake full projects without the surety of payment … makes no sense for the provider … so in the end it’ll make no sense for a client. It devalues the intellectual property skills of the provider, devalues their time and ultimately costs clients more money anyway as that lost time is compensated for with paid hours.
A better approach — which I use regularly — is to guarantee my services and involvement in a project. The risk is on me to produce something suitable, or risk not being paid in the unlikely event my work doesn’t fit the bill. But — other than for poor performance — my involvement in the project is paid for, not “on spec”.
If a client is asking for work “on spec” because they don’t know you — then along with a guarantee you could use samples, existing work and client testimonials to help prove your value. So there are certainly ways to persuade a client who isn’t aware of your capabilities of your suitability for a project.
Stick to these proven, persuasive approaches and steer clear of the “on spec” requests!
Twitter Tweets On 2008-05-24
- Tapping my fingers for 4 months until the start of NCIS season 6 … tap … tap … tap … #
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Category Ads Don’t Make Sense
I just saw on TV an ad by Bigpond for DVD home movie rental. Creative, humorous ad … but nothing really special. The only thing is, the main thrust of the message was to sell viewers on home DVD rental, not necessarily Bigpond home DVD rental.
So they’re really just promoting the “home DVD rental” category, and not saying anything at all about how different they are to competitors like QuickFlix and others.
Epson have been doing the same thing lately — ads on the back of IT magazines advertising their products, but again showing no difference compared to competitors like HP and Canon.
The current ad shows how a stapler isn’t as good at multi-tasking as an Epson printer — yet Canon and HP multifunction printers are in the same category and perform the same functions.
Another recent Epson ad showed how their printers had individual cartridges for each ink colour (the main image was a case of pencils with one nearly used up) — again, just like their competitors HP, Canon et al.
If consumers are “duped” into believing Bigpond and Epson are the only companies to offer such products … once they realise that’s not the case, what will their perception be of Bigpond and Epson? Will it be lowered when they realise competing products also offer the same features?
So in that case, what’s the point of promoting a “category” of product like multifunction printers when consumers later realise yours is just of several choices? You might convince them to pick a multifunction printer, or get home DVD rentals, but you’re not ruling out your competitors in your marketing.
Wouldn’t you rather get people hungry for your own product, and see good reason to choose you over a competitor?
Optimising images online
One of the graphic aspects that business site owners sometimes overlook on their website is using HTML to change the display size of an image or graphic.
Here’s an example: on a website today, I noticed a tiny image loading really slowly (even though I’m surfing the web on broadband and the rest of the page loaded quite fast).
It was a sure giveaway that the image was really large and that it had been resized (width and height settings) in the HTML coding to display much smaller.
The display size was tiny: just 186 pixels wide by 25 pixels high.
When I viewed the actual image, it was a whopping 3456 pixels wide by 2304 pixels high!
In total area, that’s 4,650 pixels at the small size vs 7,962,624 pixels at the large size. So, in effect, the display size was less than 6 percent of the uploaded image size.
That causes a few problems:
- The image loads very slowly, making the website visitor’s experience worse because images aren’t displayed quickly
- With the way the image was displayed (186×25), the proportions have distorted the original image to a more landscape shape (squashing the image) — which results in a poorer display
- In turn, that reduces the “professional” appearance of the website (which you want to maximise)
- It also means that instead of “serving” up an image of around 2kb, the image is 3.56Mb (3,567kb) — that’s a lot of data allowance being wasted (which you might need to pay for!)
Any kind of resizing will generally make the image display look like it’s of lower quality.
So what should have happened?
BEFORE the image was uploaded to the server and displayed via the HTML code, it should have been resized to the exact display size. That’s what “optimising” an image is all about: making sure it is the optimal size for how you’re going to display it.
How do you do that?
The image should be opened in an image editor (offline editors like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Fireworks, the free Picasa etc; or online free editors/apps like Picnik or Photoshop Express) — cropped and adjusted as required and then exported/saved at the size it will be used online (186×25 pixels).
The cropping is important so there’s no squashing/distortion of the original picture. And also, a good web graphics operator would have lightened this image a fair bit, as the original was quite dark (so it’s hard to make out what it is supposed to be).
That would then create a tiny file (under 2kb as mentioned), at the size it will be used (”100% sizing”) on the webpage.
I actually cropped, lightened and resized the image as a test, and the resulting optimised image turned out to be 1.75kb.
So why does this kind of problem happen?
Usually because it’s a non-experienced person who has edited and uploaded the changes to the website. I can tell from this file that it was taken with a high end Canon EOS 350D camera — which is why such a large image (around 8 megapixels) was produced.
They then grabbed the image, included it in the page design, resized it within the HTML to the tiny size, and uploaded the image and new page coding (and probably wondered why it took so long!).
In the middle, they simply missed the step to properly prepare the image (optimise it).
An optimised image means page loading is faster, visitors are not slowed down by an image “taking forever” to display and there’s no excess data usage on the server (potentially saving 100’s of Mb of download data).
In this case, it’d save around 3,565kb for EVERY visitor to the home page — even with just 100 visitors per day (which is probably a conservative estimate for the site in question), that would add up to over 10.6 GIGABYTES of data saved every month!
For all of these reasons — make sure YOUR images are optimised on your web pages!