Andy Logic

For the first time in its 100-year history, AIGA has decided to consider and apply actually relevant criteria for evaluating entries in a design competition. Not surprisingly, and as if on cue, the old guard cries foul.

Yesterday, designer Paula Scher published an essay in Imprint magazine that took issue with the reformatting of the principal annual AIGA design competition, newly renamed “Justified.” This competition will apparently do what no AIGA competition has ever done: have the jury consider the results and effectiveness of the work as a part of its evaluations. This is bold and odd new territory for AIGA, but better late than never, I guess.

So in light of this clearly un-AIGA-like departure from what she has grown to love, Paula Scher put pixel to screen and wrote a response piece that artfully combined soaring condescension with flimsy straw men to craft a grand, hydra-like, multi-headed insult to AIGA administration and members, competition participants, and all of their professional clients. She called her essay, “AIGA: Unjustified.” Yep, clever (she’s a designer, after all).

You should read it; it is a petulant and myopic tantrum disguised as an obtuse essay that repeatedly tosses jibes at everything and anyone who detracts from or does not serve the ego-fueled cultivation of design celebrity among an insular clique of peer artists ever consumed by the fetish of artistic self flagellation. Basically, it’s a defense of traditional AIGA culture. But I repeat myself.

One designer summed up her arguments rather concisely and appropriately as: “Having objectives is hard. Just reward me for making things I think are pretty.”

Indeed.

A comedy tragedy of errors

Given the competition description and criteria for “Justified,” Paula responds with the obtuse question,

“…did you notice that words like beauty, creativity, surprise, innovation and inspiration are nowhere to be found?”

Really? Her question here begs another compelling one: why should anyone suppose that these admirable qualities are unwelcome or irrelevant in an effective design effort, or should be considered outside the context of the “Justified” competition? Indeed, should we each propose to imbue our client-project design work with these qualities only if they’re listed in the RFP or creative brief we’re offered at the start of a project? No, it’s simply stupid to make these obtuse assumptions. Yet, this is precisely what Ms. Scher has done.

She goes on to completely miss the point and then beat up her own mistake- (or purpose-built) straw man:

“‘Justified’ changes the goals of AIGA’s only remaining competition. The goal of the new competition is not to inspire the design community to better design, but to ‘explain design’s value to clients, students, peers and the general public’ by ‘justifying’ the work. The justification is part of what is being judged.

I’ll just come straight out and say it: if educating clients is the goal here, this competition probably won’t achieve it’s goal [sic], and moreover may have bad consequences for the designer who hopes to enlighten their clients about the ‘value’ of design.”

No. Either Paula misses the point entirely or she purposes to flog her own fiction. I’m going to surprise myself and give AIGA the benefit of the doubt here by pointing out that, contest specifics aside, they’re endeavoring in this contest to encourage the development of actually useful skills among their members. For, in fact, the ability to convincingly describe the beneficial results of one’s efforts at cultivating success IS a professional responsibility and must be developed through practice. Paula Scher disagrees. Odd.

It requires a willful pessimism to assume that the presented case studies will have no impact on potential clients, and a certain willful myopia and distortion to assume that the contest itself is meant to do nothing more than “educate clients.” I’m no fan of AIGA and even I can find the genuine value in the exercised results of what AIGA is doing here; yes, even if they’re missing the point, too.

I agree that design contests are a waste of time and distract from what matters in the design professions, but it is the substance of Paula’s criticisms and what it reveals that is so shameful and disappointing. She goes on to criticize, malign, and marginalize, in various ways, all of the imagined goals and possible outcomes of a results-oriented endeavor (she does know that design is a results-oriented endeavor, right?). The result of which is that she betrays her (and the traditional AIGA) fundamental definition of design and what purpose it should serve. Her clear view is that design for prescribed aims is a naïve and worthless endeavor; design should be eschewed for artistry, and so should simply be beautiful, daring, innovative, and surprising for its own sake—client’s interests be damned. Screw the client; I need to work on my celebrity status and get some accolades from my peers, yo!

Not surprisingly, Ms. Scher demonstrates her obviously shallow understanding of results, of customer habits, of clients, and of the designer/client relationship with this vacuous statement:

“The ‘Effectiveness’ criteria are scarier. It’s rare that clients and designers will totally agree on what makes a design successful. That’s because, for the most part, clients and their audiences are most comfortable with things that already exist. Relying on sales as a demonstration of success or popular response as a criteria ensures a predictable mediocrity. It’s counter to AIGA’s goals toward better design.”

Firstly, why on earth should it matter that a client agrees with the designer’s professional understanding of design success? Initially, this is a matter for the competent designer—who should only ever take up with clients who are willing to invest in the designer’s expertise rather than be limited by their own ignorance. Later, the success will be self evident. So, again, the straw man argument. And the market public has demonstrated time and time again that it will respond to excellent, new, disruptive design. Secondly, sales ARE the appropriate measuring stick for retail success. There are other measures of market success, and these should be accounted for, too. It’s a shame that a lauded design professional would assume otherwise. Thirdly, aiming for market success in no way ensures predictable mediocrity. Rather, a designer working with clients who demand success-destroying practices and deliverables that obviate the designer’s professionalism and expertise is what ensures predictable mediocrity. No designer should entertain such unprofessional relationships or projects. Yet Ms. Scher assumes that this is all to which a designer can ever hope to aspire.

Well, given that AIGA has ever been led with this manner of unprofessional ideal, distorted view, and distracted practice, one can understand how Ms. Scher would make such assumptions; despicable though they are.

The list of myopic, vacuous, and insulting observations by Ms. Scher is far too long to list here (read the article yourself). However, in her entire essay, she made but a single astute observation:

“There have always been many complaints about these kinds of competitions in general. Work that was awarded tended to be pro bono assignments, or personal promotion pieces, or in other areas where a client didn’t interfere much. There might be a lot of work that wouldn’t immediately — or perhaps ever — have a measurable effect in the marketplace. It could be dismissed as ‘design for designers.’”

Ya’ think? This is, in fact, the fundamental problem with design competitions; they tend to ignore anything practical or results-oriented and focus solely on the subjective artistry and masturbatory qualities of the work. Thanks AIGA—design as self pleasure is sure to have a grand impact on everyone’s rent payment and payroll this month. You stay classy!

Paula made her morality and ethos abundantly clear when she observed that,

“The AIGA membership never believes that their clients respect them.”

Wow, thanks, Paula, for encapsulating the predictable results of AIGA membership in such a concise manner. I’m sure the aspiring design pro community is now clamoring for inclusion in this august preparatory institution. Sarcasm aside: no, really; thanks. You’ve likely just saved the careers of an entire generation of design professionals by revealing what it means to be an AIGA member instead of a competent and prepared design professional.

Finally

Culture creates consequences. This is what you get from a celebrity-driven, art-misrepresented-as-design culture comprised by folks ever distracted by design competition (there’s no such thing as a design competition, by the way) and subjective peer accolades. There should remain no question why I have for years been a vociferous detractor of AIGA and the distorted values the organization represents and perpetuates.

I sincerely hope that Paula Scher’s exposure of what AIGA has for 100 years worked to effect has a consequential impact on today’s design aspirants. As for AIGA and its apparent referendum on design-as-art culture—you reap what you sow. Good luck with your new competition.

I recently read an interesting and well-presented story about how one web agency transitioned from client work to being a software company. This sort of tale is not uncommon and for some folks it makes perfect sense to do so.

In this case—Why we gave up web design after 10 successful years—the arguments presented and the described premise for moving away from client work is simply a detailed warning for how those who lack professionalism are eventually and rightfully run out of the business by their own idiocy. The subtext to this story is, when you build a business upon compromise and/or if you lack professionalism, your business is doomed and you’ll have to find some other way to attract income.

Unprofessional Premises

When you take on creative work for a client, they own a share of your time.

I used to think I was an entrepreneur running a web design company, but the reality was far from entrepreneurial. Clients were my bosses, and we were at the mercy of their whim.

False. If you’re a professional and you run your business properly, your clients do not own a share of your time and never do your clients become your bosses. They are your clients and you are the professionals. You run the projects; you define the process, you define the deadlines (for both their team and yours), and the client’s whim never enters into it. In fact, client whim should be defined in your contracts as grounds for project termination. If it’s not, you’ve failed in your obligations.

Most web designers work constantly just to keep their clients happy, because unhappy clients don’t pay their bills. Regardless of how good their legal contracts are, a web design company that pisses off their clients won’t stay in business for long, and to keep clients happy sometimes means compromising your work to do what you’re told.

Idiotic premise. The author is describing how awful, commoditized customer service is run. This in no way describes a professionally-run enterprise. Professionals do not compromise and don’t have to because they’ve done what is required to obviate having to “constantly just keep their clients happy.” Professionals don’t just “do what they’re told.” In fact responsible pros are the ones telling the clients what’s going to happen. That’s why they hired a professional and not a lackey in the first place. If the author had no idea how to weed out poor client fits or run projects doesn’t mean that his tale is relevant to actual professionals.

I fired a number of clients in our time, but you can’t fire everyone you disagree with. At times, to pay the bills, you’ll probably take on work you suspect you shouldn’t, and deal with people you wish you wouldn’t. Bit by bit, you sacrifice your ideals for expediency, because the alternative is worse.

But eventually, your conscience grows thin.

Yep, this is what happens when you build your business on compromise and expediency. Compromise begets compromise. So yes, the author has a point…and that point is that when you have no grasp of professionalism and you have no boundaries and you have no uncompromising values, you’ll soon have no choice but to get out of the business of working with people who are looking to enlist the services of professionals.

Web design companies tend to range from 1 to 10 people, with the vast majority having a couple of staff and a handful exceeding 100 or more. Like plumbers, they tend to focus on one geographic area: as far out as they can comfortably meet people face to face.

The most successful companies tend to be in the biggest cities. If you’re a magnificent designer but you’re based in a remote mountain cabin, you’ll have a harder time than a mediocre designer in NYC.

False. Few web studios I’m aware of concentrate on their own geographic area. My own studio is in a virtually-unknown little city and works with clients from all over the world; Japan, Israel, Canada, England, Australia, and many different states in the USA. In fact, few of our clients are from our own backyard (though we do have some). The author mistakes his own unsuccessful, limited, anecdotal experience as being relevant to anyone. “We couldn’t do it so you’ve got no chance.” Idiotic tripe.

And finally, the author leaves us with this gem:

I’ve always wanted to make the biggest difference I can with my life, and I couldn’t see me achieving this with a web design company. For no matter how much great work you do, it’s not the work you choose to do. You’re always working for someone else.

Professionals do the work they want to do and get to pick the clients and projects they prefer. That is, in fact, a professional responsibility. For if you take on a client or a project that you’re not able to devote your full care and enthusiasms toward, you’re cheating your clients out of money better spent with someone better suited to their cause.

If you’re just looking for any project or any client that walks in the door, you’re not a professional. You’re a merchant. And your results will make this distinction clearer with each passing project. Eventually you may have to hang up your so-called professional enterprise and embrace a career as a merchant. Oh, hey! Just like this guy did!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with choosing to fire your clients and devote your energies toward application development and sales. But in doing so, don’t describe your personal and professional failings as being anyone’s fault but your own. Especially when you have documented them so clearly and in such detailed fashion for all to see.

Professionals succeed only by being highly skilled and uncompromising. If you’re neither of these, don’t be so pathetic as to offer up a story in which you pretend to have chosen a path. These guys didn’t choose anything. They were run out of the business due to their own failings. This is a cautionary tale, but only for those who lack what it takes to be a professional.

For a designer with any consequential skill and potential, hell and purgatory are the same place. And heaven is not to be found bouncing around from one good place to another. Find that good place with the right people and grow. Lift others up with you while you do it.

Integrity first and last! I have proclaimed it several times before in articles and interviews and it comes from my almost 20 years of hiring experience. Not surprisingly, this factor appears in law 47 in The Tao of Warren Buffett:

“In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity, because if they don’t have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you.”

Amen.

(via Thinking Aloud)

1. Your clients are people, not brands. Make sure your processes, decisions, and interactions reflect that fact.
2. Only take up with clients who will allow you to deliver your best work.
3. You, not the client, must define the project process and everyone’s responsibilities. (They hired a professional; be the professional.)
4. Professionalism requires responsibility; gather as much of it as you can.
5. Compromises arise only when you invite them; don’t do that.
6. Creativity is not design.
7. Iterate, experiment, explore dozens or hundreds of versions; show the client only one or two. Ever.
8. A deadline is a promise. Never break your promise.
9. If it in any way affects you, you are responsible.
10. Have standards. Standards are not flexible.
11. You’re paid to care. If you don’t care, don’t take the project.
12. The buck stops with you.

Many agencies may have a set of codified values or a code of ethics that everyone in the company is expected to maintain. Usually these are values that the agency promises to maintain both outwardly (with respect to what clients will experience) and inwardly (with respect to interpersonal responsibilities). When hiring, though, a common agency practice is to hire based on skills and aptitudes and it is only after being hired that an employee learns about the values and ethical standards from the employee handbook. As a common industry practice this is simply unprofessional, shallow-minded idiocy and it brings consequences.

No seriously. Consider for a moment that skills are something that will (supposedly) grow on a weekly basis and aptitudes are there for the agency to feed, for the employee’s and the agency’s growing mutual benefit. Core values, however, are established long before the prospective employee comes to the agency and no employer can change them. These core values determine the outcome of a person’s every articulation of a code of ethics in practice.

Perhaps you can detect a problem here with how these facts jive with common hiring practices.

Despite how you may think of it, hiring someone is your endorsement of who they already are. Hiring someone says that you agree with and affirm their integrity and values as demonstrated by everything you’ve seen and heard from and about them. It is therefore vital that you work to gain clear insight into your prospective hire’s core values and find corresponding evidence of it in their previous work and relationships. If you fail to do this you are demonstrating hypocrisy and a decided contempt for the values you’ve expressed and demand (either that or you’re demonstrating a great ignorance of behavioral psychology and the moral basis of behavioral ethics).

In short, you must hire only those people who already maintain the values you expect to be articulated in your agency.

As I’ve mentioned before, inviting someone of questionable moral fabric into your enterprise is just about the dumbest thing you could do. Furthermore, hiring someone with the right skills yet lacking the right values, with the idea that you’re going to teach them your values, is like teaching a pig to dance: It’s a waste of time and it irritates the pig.

* * *

Being entitled as “Lesson 1″ does mean that further lessons will follow. While I’ve written copiously about hiring before on Design View, I find some compelling aspects of hiring important to touch on in detail from time to time.

My business partner and I run a design and application development agency, but we do so in what is probably an uncommon manner:

We own the place, but we’re not the highest-paid people in the company.

In an industry where owners and principals are typically the only fixtures in an agency and everyone else is transient, and often treated as such, owners make a habit of being at the top of the pay heap. There’s no guarantee how long a design agency will last so owners make a habit of getting theirs now (“get it while the gettn’s good”). Not us. We’re building something.

The approach taken by many agency founders in our industry is quietly (or not so quietly) destructive, often making obsolescence a fait accompli. By contrast we’re making an investment in the future of our enterprise rather than stripping the land at each harvest. This is to say we’re making an investment in what matters: our people.

Our people come first. We’ll never be able to pay such skilled and dedicated folks what they’re actually worth, but we reward them as close to that as we can manage and have an eye toward continual progress. Next, we feed the savings war chest according to plan and pay our bills (and we operate with no debt). Lastly, we pay ourselves. Expedient practices could repair salary issues toward a more typical model, but luckily we recognize the folly in expediency and we learn from lessons.

I hear stories, I read articles, I speak with people who endure idiotic agency expediency, and I have lived it in some measure myself previously. So many of our peers know as much as we may, yet they so often choose to ignore the lessons in these clear examples. And if they are not agency owners or principals, they lack the self respect to object and change things or leave on principle.

I’m left with the impression that the reason so many choose not to invest is that they have no confidence in or hope bound up with their professional endeavors. You’ll have to forgive my observation of the obvious, but these are not working stiffs, but professional cowards. Many, perhaps, have good reason to be.

I don’t choose to work as a coward. I don’t choose to create merely a shallow field and tend it as though I’m waiting to strip it at harvest and leave for greener pastures, and neither does my business partner. We’re building something. One day we’ll realize the goals we’ve set, but right now we have confidence in what we’re building.