Design Sapling.com

In order to get other people to care about what you’re talking about, you have to pitch your ideas to them on an emotional level. When creating a presentation, you can’t just throw out all of your statistics and data. Over the last 4 or 5 months, I’ve followed Garr Reynolds blog, Presentation Zen, where I’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks in creating effective presentations.

For my second presentation to my work group, one of the handful that will help me complete my second goal, many of the principles of good presentation design have been incorporated. I MAY videotape this presentation tomorrow. If I do, I’ll post the video here.

UPDATE!
I added sound to the presentation and uploaded it to Slideshare. It’s embedded right below!

My current goal is to help incorporate what I presented to my colleagues into our daily routine. I can tell it isn’t going to be easy. Everyone once in a while, you’ll have a client who wants to tell you how to do your job. This can be great because the client makes all the decisions and you just implement it. It’s easy, it’s quick, it’s painless…unless that client makes bad decisions. At some point, you have to let the client know that although you value their input, you are the expert and you highly recommend another route. If you do it with some tact, you can even make the client think it was their idea. When a coworker recently insisted that I design something a certain way because the client said so, I had to tell my coworker that I understood what the client wanted and I had a better solution (and, it wouldn’t hurt to present several ideas to the client and see which one wins out).

He insisted I do things a different way.
“Why do you think that way is better?”, I asked.

“He says he wants is like this,” was the reply.

“Yes, but he wants it that way because he realizes that way works. But you can see that this other way also works and it actually works better. Wouldn’t you agree it works better?”, I said.

“Yes, I can see that, but the client it wanted it this way.”

The point is one of my coworkers is stubborn and a lazy designer. Nothing is planned out. Whatever the client says is good enough. But when someone comes to me for my expertise, I don’t go into Code Monkey mode and throw something together as quickly as possible. I want to plan out how things will work best. I use what the client asks for as a guide to ask them more questions. “What about that technique you’ve shown me do you like?”, “How do you see users interacting with that functionality?”, etc…

This particular coworker does not care about the speed, effeciency, and user-friendliness of his programs. They are usually riddled with bugs and the user will often do things the “wrong” way because it’s not clear how something should work. When we get a call about the problem, instead of fixing his design, he says, “You’re doing it wrong. You’ve got to do it this way.”

The problem that I am going to have in completing my goal is that he is too stubborn to actually implement any changes. He doesn’t believe they are necessary because he’s work is good enough. And honestly, his work IS good enough because our clients generally don’t know they could have it so much better. We don’t do creative work. My talents are lost. I’ve got to make him WANT to change. That’s my biggest challenge. I want to do this in 4 month because…I plan on quitting in 5 months. I put up my resume on Monster.com a few days ago with a request for $75,000. I received my first phone call today from a company in Indianapolis looking to interview me. Right now, I’m just testing the waters to see what the market is like.

Today, all staff and faculty at the school I work in had to go to a mandatory staff retreat. “Ohhh great!“, I thought when I heard the news. Well, I was pleasantly surprised! Not only did I meet a lot of people who I didn’t know, but I had a lot of fun and I think the school is going to start making some changes in how we communicate.

On the bus, before we arrived at the camp, we all wrote down things we liked and didn’t like about being staff at the school. At the end of the retreat, the 4 most recurring complaints were discussed: Lack of communication, lack of cohesiveness…we don’t work as a team, people not excited to be working there (Hello!), and well…I don’t remember the last one. It doesn’t matter; they ALL came down to communication. We broke off into four groups, each group tackling one of the problems and coming up with solutions. EVERY group decided that improving communication would improve the problem they were discussing. Communication is essential. Unfortunately, one of the solutions a few groups came up with was mandatory meetings to discuss what everyone is doing. That’s a bad idea because most of the other groups work don’t directly affect my job and knowing what their doing won’t help me at all. But a newsletter discussing what we’re doing would be nice.

My next post will explore why I’m not happy at my job and how communication is a root issue with that.

Here’s pretty much the final version as far as the illustration goes. The font and background will change to something appropriate for print.

I’ve decided to create either a t-shirt or a greeting card from one of my doodles (if you’re on Facebook, you can see a photo album of my doodles).

Here’s a first draft. There will be guts and blood and maybe hearts above the hooks head. I can see this on a t-shirt. I can see it on a greeting card too! I can’t recall seeing very many funny yet disturbing greeting cards like this could be. Maybe I’ll sell it to the local card shop, Vons.

I have to go to a mandatory staff retreat in a week at Camp Tecumseh.

I work in a small group of 4 people. We work with clients that depend on us to help them, sometimes at a moments notice. This retreat might be tons-o-fun, but it takes the bus an hour to get there and an hour to get back. Meetings are generally a waste of time because not everyone at the meeting can use all the information presented. To have a mandatory meeting for everyone working (in many different fields) at a shool, I can’t imagine much more than 10% of this will be helpful.

There will be “team building / leadership” activities however, and I’m looking forward to seeing how effective those will be. I’ll post what I learn when I return.

Have you ever heard anybody say, “Sorry, that’s not my job”? Maybe you’ve said that once or twice. I know I have. Why? Because I wasn’t motivated by my job. When I worked at a discount movie theater, I only did what I got paid for and nothing else. It’s a bad attitude.

Instead of just doing “your job”, how about just “making a difference.” Does your job make a difference? Do you ever refuse to help because its not in your job description? Do you have your job just to pay the bills? When you step back and think about the person you want to be, your ideal self, are you still doing that job?

If not, get out ASAP and get started doing what your ideal self would be doing. The only thing that has stopped you in the past has been yourself.

I recently attended a web development conference in Seattle, An Event Apart. It was great! I learned a bit I didn’t know, reinforced some stuff I did know, and met a lot of cool people. I won’t get into the technical stuff, but I will say that I’m very marketable right now. And the conference fueled the fire to start something.

Here are somethings that many entrepreneurs here could benefit from:

Jeffrey Zeldman reminded us that the reason people visit your site is because of the content. Making the content concise, meaningful, and well-written are our priorities. Especially guide copy, which is the text that helps people navigate your website and understand the functionality (like “Register here!” and “This is where you can find out about widgets.”) I’m going through my clients sites currently in development and making sure the guide copy is well-written. Most of the other content is supplied by the client, although we’ve also gone in and edited some content (with client approval) to make it more effective for the web. People scan content on websites; they don’t want to sit there reading their lives away.

Mike Davidson gave one of my favorite presentations at the conference. It was about breaking the “rules” of good web practices in order to evolve the web. If we don’t push the web to evolve, then it will become static. Now, he doesn’t mean ignore accessibility for the sake of creativity. He means make things usable by using hacks in the face of standards & good coding practices. Eventually, if enough people are using a certain hack, the standards committees will act on the issue so you don’t have to use the hack anymore. It becomes important. Creativity is what drives innovation and success.
If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. But we want things to be better, don’t we? So break the rules!

Also, my goal of presenting web standards and accessibility to my work group was a success. We’re going to start incorporating web standards into all of our projects, using style guides, and having a design schedule. This is exactly what I wanted. And I’m to continue giving presentation on this stuff over the next few months to help everyone get up to speed. Awesome!