Essential documents for a design start-up

You may not need all the marketing materials from the previous post when starting up your design business, but you should prepare the following documents in a standard format.

1. Business cards and stationery. You don’t actually have to print your letterhead on its own, but you should design these together so they match.
2. You don’t actually have to print out your letterhead, but you should create a PDF to use as a template to place behind other documents. Then you will have a consistent look on all your correspondence, which you can print as needed.
3. Letter of introduction. Draft one up. You shouldn’t send a form letter to each client, but you’ll probably repeat a lot of information, so there’s no need to type it out each time.
4. Press Release. Be sure to include the following information:
   1. Who is the subject
   2. What has happened that is newsworthy
   3. When did the event occur
   4. Where did the event occur
   5. Why is it newsworthy
   6. Your name and contact information for more information
5. The Proposal. Begin your proposal with a letter that gives a brief overview of the project. Prepare a statement explaining why your company is the best firm for the job, and what experience you have managing similar projects. Give a thorough project overview that includes the project background (your interpretation of the project history), and the work requirement. Be as specific as possible, including size, page count, colors, presentations, type of proofs, the distribution, and anything else you can think of. Then make any technical recommendations for the project, which is basically making suggestions to make the project better or cheaper. This demonstrates your understanding of the project and that the client is getting a custom job. Your cost proposal should address only the known work and expenses that the client has requested. Specify how you will charge for other expenses — anything that falls under the scope of the job but has not been defined. Spell out what you are providing for your rates. Other things to include in your proposal: time-line for the project; and design trade customs, also called the terms and conditions, that your company uses to conduct business. That last item is what makes a proposal template essential!
6. The Contract. If your proposal was thorough, your contract repeat much of it. Include all the details about what you will provide, costs, billing terms and methods, and reiterate your terms and conditions. It is very important for the contract to be as specific as possible, in case there are any misunderstandings between you and the client. Leave space for signatures and dates.
7. Printing Request for Quotation (RFQ). Not all printers are equal, so you should create an official RFQ to send to prospective printers. The printer needs this information they need to give you an accurate price. Include the following:
   • Printer Name
   • Your name
   • Project name
   • Date of request
   • Statement requesting a quotation of the print job and who to contact with the quote
   • Print size
   • Page number
   • Binds
   • Stock
   • Quantity
   • Delivery method and format
   • Printing due date
   • Delivery location and method
   • Any other job details
   • Disclaimer: “ABC Company will not pay for over runs and will not accept under runs unless authorized by an officer of the company.”
8. Purchase Order for printers. Basically the same as the RFQ but includes a PO number and acceptance of the job. Include the quoted price and your job number (and any quote reference number provided by the printer). You should include a line for your signature and date (you may sign electronically if emailing the PO).

That takes care of the essentials. I’m not including invoicing or collection forms since that’s a whole other topic. Let me know if I missed anything else and I’ll update this post.

11 Ways to Market Your Design Company Offline

There are plenty of ways to advertise and market yourself over the internet. It’s easy to forget that for print designers, real-world offline advertising is still vital to your business.

1. Business Cards

The most obvious marketing tool should be your first printed material. The business card is essential for passing along your contact information to potential clients, peers, and vendors. Unlike other businesses, a design firm represents the work they do by their card design. Make it great – but also make it practical. An impressive looking card might not do its job if it’s too hard to read, over-sized, or too thick for a business card holder.

2. Company Brochures / Capabilities Brochure

Brochures can be designed any way you like, and can fit any budget, but they will all serve the same purpose: to represent the quality, skills and capabilities of your business. Brochures can give company background, give testimonials from past clients, show off past work, and describe services you provide. Brochures can be leave-behinds or mail-tos, or something to give visitors to your studio. They can be two panels or 16 pages. Once you’ve figured out your marketing message, you can determine what kind of brochure to make.

3. Mini-Portfolios

You wouldn’t leave your full portfolio with a client, but you might leave a mini-portfolio designed with that in mind. It’s something small enough to send through the mail, and cheap enough that you can leave it with a potential client. A versatile mini-port is a simple custom folder with separate printed inserts (chosen with the clients in mind) showcasing your work. Leave a mini-port when you are under consideration for work.

4. Designer Biographies

If you have a staff, write interesting and personable biographies about them so that clients can relate to your company. Hire a writer if necessary. Bios can be included on your web site, but there’s no reason you can’t print a “Get to know us” staff sheet to show off the breadth and depth of your company’s employees.

5. Press Releases

The best thing about press releases is that they can get you free advertising. If your release is interesting enough, you might even get an article. Use the third-person, present tense on your company letterhead. Follow the inverse-pyramid structure with the most important information at the top, so that it can be shortened without losing anything crucial. Include photos wherever possible to include the likelihood of bring printed.

First, determine in which publications you wish to appear. Visit their websites to determine where to send the press release, and follow any protocol given.

6. Traditional Advertising

Advertising is planning and buying an ad space that conveys your marketing message and includes a call to action. What publications do your ideal clients review? Those publications may be the place to advertise. However, traditional advertising can be expensive and there’s no way to measure results. Go for repetition.

I’ll expand on how to create the idea campaign in a future article.

7. Specialty Advertising

In essence, this means getting your name on something that your client has or wants. You’ve seen branded mugs, pens, and calendars, but you can come up with something more original. Make something that will sit on your client’s desks or dashboards and remind them what a great designer you are. Since specialty items are more expensive, they tend to go to existing clients or those clients you want to woo.

8. Hold an Open House

If you’ve got a decent office to work out of, come up with an excuse to get potential or existing clients to visit you. Prepare a seminar on file-preparation, introduction to FTP, lecture on investing, or just throw a seasonal party. Whatever the excuse, it’s a chance to show off your talent and build relationships.

9. Get Viral

On the internet, viral videos get people talking. Whether hilarious, outrageous, or crowd-pleasing, a successful video will get people talking, and word-of-mouth is almost always the best advertising. Viral videos don’t follow the same rules as they would in traditional media.

In the offline world, you can apply the same concept by doing something hilarious or outrageous. Doing something that doesn’t follow the rules. Be ambitious: get on the 6 o’clock news.

Think about Richard Branson.

10. Guerilla Style

Guerilla marketing is using unconventional or outrageous techniques to generate exposure for a company, product or service. The potential for upside can be tremendous, but a poorly executed guerrilla marketing campaign can alienate or offend your target market, so be careful. Also, check local laws.

Examples: poster pasting, windshield flyering, handbills, adding your flyer or sticker to newspaper boxes

11. The Phone Book

If you don’t have a business phone line, you’re missing out on some included advertising: the phone book listings! Usually the line listings are free, while the panel ads can be pricey. Check your local listings to see how you’ll fit in.

How to Write a Design Brief

A design brief explains everything your designer will need to know about you, your background, your market position, and objectives. Writing a brief will ensure that you know what you want, and so will your designer.

A detailed brief brings focus to a project and provides better value. It gives your designer an important starting point, knowing what’s important and what you’re trying to accomplish. This means less redesigns, less time, and ultimately less money will be spent on the project.

Things to include:

Corporate profile. Nobody knows your company as well as you do. Provide a summary of your business, as well as a brief history.

Market position. A realistic evaluation of your company, service, or brand relative to your what the competition is doing.

Current situation. Explain what’s happening to bring about the need for this project. For instance, a new product launch that needs advertising.

Communication background. This includes both previous and present communication activity, such as research, advertising, direct mail, graphic design, public relations etc.

Marketing Message. What’s the context of the specific message in relation to your business plans? Include pieces of information to be shown in the designed item e.g. text, logos, images etc.

Target market. Demographics – the age, gender, income, employment, geography, lifestyle of those you want to reach.

Objectives. What do you want to achieve? Make your objectives specific and the results measurable.

Available budget. Providing your budget tells the designer if it’s worth his / her time initiating the design process. Offering an unrealistic budget will turn away good designers and simply asks for poor results. Explain the range of your budget and the designer may suggest different options - better quality paper or special finishes, for example.

Schedule and deadline. You’ll get the best results if you provide a detailed and realistic schedule of how you would like the project to advance. Take the following into consideration:

• Consultation (research, strategy, brief development)
• Creative (concept and design development)
• Production (artwork, printing and other production)
• Delivery

Finding New Design Clients

New Business Development

Developing your marketing message will make new client development simpler. Targeting the right client will also minimize rejection. When deciding what clients to go after, don’t ask, “what do I do?” but ask “what do I want to do more of?” The answer is your marketing message.

Resources for Targeting New Clients

Trade Directories list the name and contact info of many firms. Contact library reference departments for referrals to the publishers. You can ask “Where can I find the names of health care companies in the Chicago area?” and they will refer you to the correct directory. Many such directories are available on CD or DVDs, or may exist online, so you don’t have to key them.

Industry Trade Shows and Conventions are great places to gather leads and view a firm’s existing collateral. This has a major advantage: you can see who needs your design work.

Trade Associations are found in The Encyclopedia of Associations which lists thousands of industry groups. Companies that join Trade Associations are aggressively pursuing new business, so you can safely assume they need design services. They are solid leads.

Other Places to Look for Leads

The daily newspaper business section reports new business developments, products, and expansions, which may require design services. More importantly, these news reports give you a “foot in the door” - a relevant topic by which you may approach the firm.

Office or industrial park directories where your studio is located. Present yourself as their “local” design firm. Approach them as neighbors and they may be more receptive.

Old awards annuals usually showcase clients who were open to creativity, and willing to take a risk. They would probably do it again.

What Kind of Client Do You Really Want To Talk To?

Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma, in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market, teach that successful businesses often target their efforts into a narrow philosophy based on how their customers demand value.

When your client’s customers make a decision to buy something, their decision is driven by their demand for value. The authors found that the lowest possible cost was not always the best way to compete for consumers’ money. People were willing to pay for: something that lasts longer, something unique, something that represented a long-term solution by way of a continued relationship with the seller. If you determine in which of these factors your client’s market is most interested (price, uniqueness, relationship, quality), you can determine how to approach and sell to them. When you know who you are talking to, you can make yourself irresistible.

Client Analysis

One case study business found a lack of new business and performed an analysis of clients they had, using an eight-point list:

• The firm’s design strengths
• Its weaknesses
• Existing client types
• Their locations and billings
• Different types of projects these clients had
• Average profitability
• Percentage of new clients from referrals and ads
• Direction to establish for new client developments

Using this information, the business identified its target market, wrote a positioning statement, started a massive research effort to identify potential clients, and launched a marketing campaign. The result? Twelve new clients and a new marketing assistant to handle calls and mailings.

– Summary of The Graphic Designer’s and Illustrator’s Guide to Marketing and Promotion, Chapter Two.

To-do-list Solution using QuickSilver and GeekTool

There are many ways to manage your to-do items, including Apple Mail, and Microsoft (gasp) Entourage. If you want to access a complicated list from anywhere, you could even use a free wiki. However, if you mainly review your To-Do items from one location, an efficient method is to maintain a text file named todo.txt. Why a text file? Because it’s easy to use, and you can edit it in a number of applications. You could also sync the file using .mac or some other system, actually, and access it from other locations. But the main reasons I like the idea of a todo.txt file is because QuickSilver includes a tool to quickly add items to your list, and I recently discovered GeekTool, a slick way to integrate your list right onto your desktop. The text is displayed anywhere you like, over top your desktop image.

So to begin, create a todo.txt file (Bonus tip: TextEdit won’t let you Save As a txt file unless you go under Format and select Make Plain Text). Create an item of something you want to do — and that’s the last time you’ll need TextEdit to add an item!

Assuming you have QuickSilver running (make sure you have the Text Manipulation Actions installed), invoke it and press “.” to enter text mode. Type another item you wish to add to your list. Press TAB and start typing “Append To…”. TAB again to select the file, and you can probably just type “todo”. QuickSilver will automatically add a new line with that item. If you want to get all nerdy, you can add other information, like searchable tags or categories, every time you add an item. Further discussion of text format lists and their potential.

So now you have a todo.txt. Here’s where it gets awesome! Download GeekTool here for free, open the disk image and double click the preference pane file to install it. This preference pane is not as complicated as it appears. You probably want to select the default Group and delete it. Then create a New Entry. Double click the Group to change the name to Todo List, then from the combo box, select File. Choose File will allow you to browse for todo.txt. Select this, and make sure you have Enable GeekTool checked. By default, your list should appear on the very top left of your desktop. You can drag it anywhere and resize it to your liking. Once you deselect the list, it will look like it’s built right in to your desktop.

(GeekTool allows you to do other cool things, like displaying images from the web on your desktop, but I’ll let you explore that on your own.)

Now your list will always be there to remind you; you’ll never have to open a program to see what you need to do. It’s a simple and elegant solution - give it a try!

PC-user-Proof your Mac

Ever had a friend who wants to use your computer, but they are not Mac-savvy? Perhaps even *gasp* Windows users? Here are some steps to take to prepare for a situation like this.

First, set up a new account for “Guest”. In that account, set up shortcuts on the desktop to anything that a guest may want to use — most likely Firefox, and MS Word. Remove everything from the dock and hide it. No doubt you will also appreciate not having your own shortcuts and personal files on the desktop.

Quick Tip: a quick way to create a shortcut (also called Aliases) is to ALT-CMD-drag your application icon to a new location.

Next, open Finder Preferences. Uncheck Hard disks, connected servers, and spring-loaded folders. The first two are to simplify the desktop, the last so Finder behaves more like a PC.

Change the Desktop Picture to one of the default Apple images that have been around for a while. The new Windows Vista wallpapers look very similar to these, so the PC user will feel more at home.

Finally, a lot of PC users are very upset over the misconception they have that Macs are not capable of right-clicking. Rather than explaining CTRL clicking, you may want to buy a cheap two-button mouse for them. Don’t try to explain the virtues of having an additional modifier key for keyboard shortcuts. Trust me. PC users LOVE to right click. Let them hold on to that, so when they are finished with your Mac, they will still be able to enjoy their own computer.

Be sure you have a password on your primary (presumably admin) account, to prevent any anti-Mac hacking by malicious guests.

Finally, you should enable fast-user switching. Open system preferences (under the admin login), and go to Login Options. Check off Enable fast user switching. I like the icon setting because it uses the least room in the menu bar. Authenticate, and you’re finished!

Too cheap to pay for AppZapper?

AppZapper is a really easy to use Uninstall program.

As you know, uninstalling a program on the Mac is easy enough - just drag the application icon into the trash. But often you are left with preference files, caches, etc. AppZapper will find those for you too, and with a click of a button, move them all to the trash at once.

The shareware price is a deal at $12, but the software isn’t perfect, and maybe you don’t want to pay for something you could do yourself. You are allowed 5 free “zaps” as part of the demo. But an easy way to use AppZapper forever without paying is to let it find the files that need deleting, but instead of pressing “Zap!”, just go delete them yourself. Then press “Cancel” until next time.

Spotlight meta tags

I rarely use Spotlight any more, since QuickSilver does such a fabulous job of finding files on my computer. But unlike Quicksilver, Spotlight searches an underused file property (or should I say Info) that users may access by highlighting a file and pressing the CMD-I. Notice the first field is called Spotlight Comments? It never even occured to me what that field is for, but you can add metadata (tags) to any file so that it becomes searchable via Spotlight.

One possible use for this… Let’s say that you like to test out a lot of freeware Mac applications, but you end up having so many small programs in your Applications folder that you forget what they even do. By entering a description into the Spotlight Comments field, you not only get a description, but searchable data. So months after installing Audacity, you think “hmm, don’t I have a freeware audio editor somewhere? Now where did I put it?”

So now you can launch a program without even knowing its name

QuickSilver: DJ your own party!

QuickSilver gives you great power, if you want to cue up an ongoing song list. Let’s say you’re listening to your party shuffle, and you have the urge to listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits, but you don’t want to switch out of Party Shuffle mode. No problem! With QuickSilver, you can cue up any track, album, or a whole discography, into Party Shuffle, and have it continue on with the mix when your craving has been satisfied.

Open QuickSilver and make sure the iTunes Module has been installed. Now go to the iTunes Triggers page, and check the ‘Search iTunes’ command. You’ll want to set up a distinctive but easy to use trigger. I went with a Mouse Trigger - hold down left-click for 0.5 seconds in the top right corner - but you can choose anything you like.

Now when you trigger ‘Search iTunes’, you can search by artist, track, or album, and then press TAB to open the actions. Down arrow to “Play next in Party Shuffle”. You can even make this the default action.

Now whenever you have a craving for a particular song, you don’t have to go looking for it in iTunes, and then restart your Party Shuffle when it’s finished playing, you can just let QuickSilver make your life easier!

QuickSilver: create new shortcuts for any app!

One of the biggest productivity boosters in QuickSilver is the ability to use Triggers. Triggers can be, well, triggered from key combinations, mouse gestures (if you have the Abracadabra plugin loaded), or mouse clicks (with the Mouse Triggers plugin loaded).

If you have the User Interface Access plugin loaded, and I recommend doing so, you’ll be able to use any Menu item from any application as the trigger action. This means, for one thing, that you could create new shortcuts within any application, simply by programming them in with QuickSilver.

Here’s an example of what I did today: In Flash MX, I wanted to create several new blank keyframes, but this was only accessible from the menu - no keyboard shortcut! So I created a trigger that I invoke by clicking twice along the left edge of my screen (Mouse Trigger plugin). This triggers the Menu Bar Item (User Interface Access plugin) action “Insert>Blank Keyframe”. Two quick clicks as I draw, and there it is: a new blank keyframe. Maybe there’s another way to do this specific action, but this is an example of QuickSilver’s flexibility.