king talk

A prostitute won’t give you free sex just so that she can then charge you for the pillow talk. She won’t give the good stuff away for free.

For some reasons, designers are happy to do so. They create elaborate concepts and plans – sometimes even multiple proposals – pack it all into a high gloss presentation and then hope for the client to be gracious enough to pay them afterwards, when the whole thing needs to be put into practice.

This might work if you are a big agency and you have a lot of time to kill. But it can be lethal for smaller companies or freelancers. If you don’t have a lot of money and resources, you simply can’t afford to do unpaid pitches. Working for free is not going to change your financial situation for the better.

Why do people want pitches, and why is it bad?

1. They don’t know you and they want to make sure that you are worth your money. This means that there is no confidence (and probably limited interest) in your work – which is a bad basis for working together. A good portfolio and some recommendations can turn this ship sometimes.
2. They don’t know what they want and would like to collect ideas upfront. In this case, you’re giving away what you do best upfront. It is pretty common that the winning agency will be told to use some of the ideas of its competitors.
3. They don’t know IF they actually want to do something and they want you to figure out if it is worth it. This is probably the worst form, because more than often it doesn’t even lead to a job for anyone.

In our three years of existence, we never participated in an unpaid pitch. We did two paid pitches in two years – still too many for my taste. We like to charge for our sexy time.

I’m a huge fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, which means I have tremendous respect for John Cleese. In this video, he is talking about how he started writing, what helped him and what hinders the creative process.

One of his main points is that interruptions kill creativity, especially when you try to do deep thinking. Now, I know that these days it is en vogue to  promote lateral thinking and group thinking as the golden way to be creative. And certainly that kind of thought process carries great value and produces interesting results – as a matter of fact it is how most projects here at envis precisely get started.

But in the end, it only represents a small part of the creative process. The rest is mainly deep thinking, developing narratives and solving problems (and of course pushing pixels and lines of code). And this is where focus and concentration are sacred. Cleese makes a compelling case here, as he has more experience in being creative than most people out there calling themselves designers. Writers like him are probably among the most skilled people when it comes to using creativity, simply because they have to create both, a problem and a solution and weave them together into a story.

I really hope that this way of thinking gets back some traction in the design community. It is easy to point at a pile of post-it notes and label that »creativity«. But for every post-it, there is a story of an idea yet to be developed – and those stories deserve more exposure.

Are you tired of viewing the boring PowerPoint presentations over and over again? Sick of Comic Sans and WordArt elements flowing around the slides building up a »conglomerate of ugliness« together with bad ass Excel graphics and low-resolution images?

So check out Prezi, a nice flash based presentation tool using ZUI (Zooming User Interface). It looks quite a little bit like our ZUI presentation which we made two years ago for FH Joanneum. Maybe this is the reason why we like the look of Prezi  ; )

If you want to can try it online or download it at your desktop and use it offline, paying only 39 bucks for 3 months.

via golem