Keeping Photoshop in Perspective

March 25, 2013 //
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Check emails.

See what your contacts are up to on LinkedIn.

Go to twitter. Click on any interesting links and find something to tweet about.

Facebook – has your opponent made their move in ‘Words with Friends’ yet?

Look up how many views you’ve had on your website.

Google someone from that film you saw last night because you can’t quite remember what you’ve seen them in before.

Have any more emails come in while you’ve been doing all this?

Start again from the top.

That’s two hours gone. You can whittle away an entire day following this same loop – especially when you’re working in communications and have a legitimate reason for getting involved in social networking during business hours.

It’s very easy to get sidetracked like this but it’s nothing compared to working in Photoshop. It can do such wonderful things – make even the flimsiest concept appear bright and dazzling and intricate. You’ll open it up thinking: ‘I’ll just have a play around until I come up with something’ and before you know it, it’s 3am and you’ve spent 14 hours tinkering with a 20 pixel square that’s only visible when viewed at 1600% magnification.

We’ve all done it.

If you don’t want to fall into this trap, it’s vital that you have a clear idea about what you’re going to do before you start. The idea is the main thing – the software you use is just a tool, something to get the job done more effectively. Photoshop is the equivalent of a builder’s lump-hammer or a plumber’s wrench.

At the very start of a job, Sophie and I always sit down and work out exactly what it is we want to say. I sketch layouts on sheets of A4, Sophie has a snazzy little notebook. We both use pens.

Only when our papers are peppered with arrows and crossings-out do we go to our laptops. With the message worked out beforehand, Photoshop isn’t such a time vampire.

This gives us much more time to check our emails, connect on LinkedIn, tweet, use Facebook, look at our website views, write blogs…

Mark

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Categories design, technology, working methods

Working with writer’s block

March 22, 2013 //
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When I’m not doing Zammerchatty things I’m trying to write creative things likes scripts and stories. Recently I’ve been prone to what is known as writer’s block.

Since deciding I have writer’s block, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why this is, looking into ‘overcoming emotional barriers’ and partaking in numerous advised activities to get me over it.

However, the writing I do for myself isn’t the only creative writing I do. All the copywriting I do is creative, even the dull things. It all needs to be created, mused over and put into the right words.

Writing at work isn’t just limited to copywriters either. Most people have to write to persuade, describe, direct and inform in their everyday lives. So what happens when you get writer’s block at work?

Well, you don’t have two weeks to explore your spiritual barriers or spend hours ploughing through writing and creative thinking activities. You need to get over it quickly. A lot of writer’s block at work tends to be procrastination I find. It stems from something overwhelming or a task we don’t know how to tackle. So in this case writer’s block can simply mean putting off difficult tasks – which we all do.

But there’s more to writer’s block. We don’t just put off the task, we come back again and again and stare at the screen in frustration. We feel helpless in the face of words. We’re not just procrastinating, we’re unable. The more stressful it becomes, the less able we are to tackle it.

So what can you do when this happens at work?

Here is how I tend to cope…

  1. Decide on a time to start writing and stick to it. This can be difficult. In the past I have ended up missing my starting time and then going ‘oh well, I’ll do it another time.’ No excuses. If you don’t start on time you still have to start late. With writing at work you usually have deadlines, use these to motivate you – it HAS to be done.
  2. I trick my brain. Here’s my thought process -  I don’t want to do this or I don’t know where to start – I’ll just write the intro, or I’ll just write down my ideas or I’ll just write down a structure outline. That not so hard, that’s all I’m doing today. Then I write the intro or whatever and hey, it’s not that bad, I’ll just do a little bit more. And then before I know it I’ve written half of it.
  3. Once you’ve tricked yourself into starting to write something, do a quick draft. The hardest part is getting started but once I’ve splurged all my info and ideas on a page and had a quick rearrange of the structure and a quick edit, I’m always surprised by how decent my quick first draft is. Once it’s all down in a semi coherent fashion, going through it slowly and methodically to get it right doesn’t seem so daunting.
  4. Reward yourself. I do this mentally, I get a deep sense of satisfaction by finishing a big piece of work. I allow myself to think I’m great for an afternoon. Some people I know reward themselves in other ways – chocolate bar, big lunch, early finish, 5 mins on YouTube. Whatever it is, make sure it works for you. Knowing you’ll get a reward at the end can be very motivational.

These are the things that work for me but there are many useful and practical tips out there. Take a look at these three (quick) blog posts to help you if you get stuck writing.

Sophie

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Categories communication, ideas, language, working methods, writing

The Hard Sell

December 3, 2012 //
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It’s very satisfying that the police have made a couple of arrests in relation to the PPI spam texts.

For the past few months, I’ve been getting at least two of these texts a week. They’re not random, my information must have been sold on by someone as the texts generally start with a ‘Hi Mark’ – irritating enough in its over-familiarity but also quite sinister in a ‘we know who you are’ kind of way.

For the last week, I’ve also been moving house. This means that I’ve opened myself up to the kind of cold calling salespeople who descend on you like seagulls round a chip-shop bin. As soon as you separate yourself from the herd, there’s a feeding frenzy of utility companies, insurance companies and broadband providers – even the estate agent I’m using to rent the flat is now sending me batches of emails detailing other properties I might be interested in. I’m worried that they know something I don’t – presumably that the place I’m renting is so bad that I’ll soon be looking for alternatives.

Does this kind of hard sell really work anymore? The relentless bombardment seems a bit old fashioned and outdated – more Gordon Gecko than Innocent Smoothies.

At our stall for the Cornwall Business Show in October we were targeted by a prowling salesperson who subjected Sophie and I to a tight, ten minute pitch that didn’t leave any pause or gap for us to chip in and cut her off. At the end of it all she said: ‘so what is it you do then?’

‘We try to get people like you to communicate properly,’ Sophie said and the salesperson moved on to the next stall to begin over again.

Her sales pitch was so effective that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the company she was representing or what it was that they actually did.

My only instinct in these situations is to say no and look for an escape route. It doesn’t matter what’s on offer or how fantastic the product is, if the delivery is too pushy and aggressive, you won’t be getting my business.

In these marketing savvy times it’s not about who can shout the loudest anymore, the correct tone of voice is what really matters. The only way to get this right is to be interested. You’ve got to work with your clients – listen to what they have to say, discuss their business, appreciate their requirements and work together to reach a conclusion. A token ‘what is it you do then?’ tagged on as an afterthought just doesn’t cut it.

Rather than seeing a potential customer as a figure on a spreadsheet or a daily quota of calls, isn’t it better to take the time to get to know them? Doesn’t it make everyone’s life a lot easier if our interest goes deeper than the bottom of their pockets? Won’t we provide a better service if we all care about the people we work with?

Mark

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Categories marketing, mercenary, relationships

It’s Not Christmas Yet

November 19, 2012 //
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It’s November. November isn’t Christmas.

The 1st of December is when I officially acknowledge Christmas and allow myself to start feeling a bit festive. Twenty-five days is enough of a build up, if you drag it out for too long it stops being special and you’re sick to death of the whole thing by the time Christmas Day arrives.

The earliest Christmas TV ad I’ve ever seen was on the 1st October. It was for a range of air fresheners – seasonal smells like cinnamon and pine trees and mulled wine and reindeer droppings (probably).

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a ‘bah, humbug’ kind of post – I love Christmas. I love the decorations that can be seen from space and Slade playing on a loop in every shop you go into. I love wrapping presents in a drunken haze at midnight on Christmas Eve and the re-runs of 80’s sitcoms’ Christmas specials. I love the freezing nights and hoping for snow – I even have When A Child Is Born lined up on my ipod.

It’s a time when you can step out of your normal world for a few days and enjoy some time with the people you care about, a time when everyone seems to be a little bit nicer to each other.

That’s why I’m so sensitive to the consumer feeding frenzy that happens at this time of year. It’s even worse when there’s some kind of clumsy, hamfisted corporate cliché shoehorned in there as well.

Take, for example, the corporate Christmas card. Below are a few examples of some of the worst I’ve seen – they’re all featured in the same catalogue:

Corporate Christmas Cards

Others show a traditional snowy scene and underneath: ‘TEAMWORK. Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together’ and a Christmas tree assembled from the words team, success, quality, attitude, excellence, commitment and achievement.

These kinds of cards latch onto the sentiment of ‘goodwill to all men’ and attempt turn it into a marketing opportunity.

But, before you start thinking that this commercialisation of Christmas is a recent phenomenon, here’s a quote from George Orwell’s essay: Bookshop Memories, written in 1936.

‘It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: “2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits”.’

Merry November!

Mark

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Categories Christmas, marketing, mercenary

What’s in a blog?

November 12, 2012 //
1

I’m not a natural blogger.

Sharing my thoughts, opinions and information I find interesting with people worldwide, somehow puts the fear in me. The fear of expectation…

Of course no one is really expecting anything. I imagine, like me,  people are  just happy to stumble across something worth reading or looking at.

So, deciding that I was probably over thinking the whole blogging thing, I did a bit of research into what makes a good blog and what makes a good blog for me. I started off with getting a definition of blogging. This is the best one I found:

Noun: A website on which an individual or group of users record opinions, information, thoughts, news etc on a regular basis.

The first thing that stood out was the ‘regular’ bit. I’ve been going very wrong there. Also the ‘opinions’ bit – I’m very fussy about whose general opinions on life I can be bothered to sit down and read in a blog and I’m not one to assume that people want to read mine. So with that in mind I’ve decided to stick to informational and tip based blogging.

I’ve listed below some the best blogs I found about… well blogs. And blogging.

Blogs (and blog posts) about blogging:

25 Best Blogs 2012 – Techland, Time

Top 15 Most Popular Blogs | November 2012 – EBiz/MBA

Top 10 Funniest Blogs of All Time – MackTheWriter

Best Tumblr Blogs for Designers – Creative Bloq

Blogging tips:

20 top tips to get readers to your blog – Creative Boom

ProBlogger – Just all of www.problogger.net. It’s great.

10 Social Media Tips for Bloggers – Mashable

Sophie

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Categories communication, ideas, meaning, social media

GWR Posters

May 23, 2012 //
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GWR Cornwall London CheltenhamI love these GWR posters from the 30s and 40s.

The illustrations are beautiful, the type clean, clear and simple. They offer little snapshots of a bygone age when train travel was romantic and exciting – steam filled platforms with glamorous women melting into the arms of stoic men dressed in overcoats and trilbys.

Here’s the modern equivalent, taken from Penzance station earlier in the year:

 2012 advertising campaign
I know that designers in the 1930s had fewer constraints than today. I know that there weren’t many other options than to travel by train so they were free to focus on selling the destinations by producing lovely illustrations. I understand that it was a simpler time with less competition, less restriction and less at stake.

Even so, did the current posters have to be quite so awful?

Firstly, there’s the floating pronoun. Who’s him? Because it’s the most prominent thing in the ad, I immediately assumed it was the fish – it took me a while before I noticed the silhouette of the boy.

Maybe I was being a little slow after a long train journey but that’s not the point. These posters are meant to be instant enough to leave you in no doubt what the message is, even when glimpsed momentarily from a moving train window. If you need to stand in front of the ad and re-read it over and over, it isn’t doing its job properly.

Here are some 1930s posters for the GWR services to Bristol:

GWR BristolBack then, the city was represented by the Clifton Suspension Bridge, ornate architecture and the grand entrance to the cathedral. In the 2012 ad, Bristol is represented by a big blue fish.

Why? Is the city underwater? Is the Giant Wrasse the national symbol of Somerset and Avon?

I don’t live there so I’m assuming that Bristol has an aquarium. As a train user and potential traveller to the city, I’m part of the ad’s target market – I shouldn’t have to assume anything.

Finally there’s the statement: ‘I’m just the guy who feeds the goldfish’. It’s a sad line, very poignant. I imagine it being said by a father who’s lost touch with his son. Perhaps he’s never there to play football with the boy because he’s working too many hours at the office in order to afford train fares.

But, if all you are to your son is the person who looks after the pet, if you’re less important to him than his goldfish, I’d suggest that there are some significant issues that need to be addressed – the sort of issues that can’t be solved by a simple day-trip to Bristol.

If the old GWR posters are evocative of the 1930s, I hate to think what the current ads say about us as a society in 2012. According to them, we’re muddled, vague and disconnected from the people around us.

Mark

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Categories advertising, design, meaning

The Horror of Easter

April 6, 2012 //
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I’m rubbish at remembering Easter. My awareness of it starts with the four day weekend. Eventually I get a card from my mum and I remember that I’ll be expected to attend a roast, bring some kind of chocolate egg for my younger sister and token gifts for the rest of the family. This usually dawns on me with horror around Good Friday.

I won’t lie, I find it stressful. This year has turned out to be particularly stressful as I’m not seeing my family but have failed to put anything on the post. After a bit of soul searching I realised this is because I don’t get Easter. Like most typical UK holidays it’s steeped in a confused mesh of Christianity and Anglo-Saxon history. Like all family holidays I find it a strange mixture of comforting and uneasy. Comforting because it’s a ritual, I see my family and uneasy because it’s a ritual and I see my family.

It got me thinking, as many things do, about horror films. Why do people constantly make horror films about holidays and ritual events? Christmas, Valentine’s Day, proms, birthdays and Easter. OK, it’s partly because it’s a nice easy theme to stick with and everyone gets the premise. But it’s also because of the sense of the uncanny. These traditional days are confusing, unbalanced.

These holidays don’t know who they are or what they’re about. They have no clear identity. If they were brands (see Christmas) they’d be failing. There’s conflict at the heart of them, their history is a muddle, their message is ever changing and their identity is a free for all (see Coca Cola’s Christmas). Easter is about Jesus rising from the dead (see zom-bie noun), but it’s also about eggs (they were traditionally not allowed over Lent), but it’s also about the spring and bunnies (Anglo-Saxon festivities). It’s an amalgamation of largely forgotten traditions. It has no clear identity so I don’t take it seriously.

Then you’ve got the personal aspect. The pressure of occasion, the presents, the family relationships – and what’s more horrifying than having a happy, family-orientated, traditional day turned on it’s head? It makes me anxious.

All of this lends itself well to the horror genre. They can highjack a holiday with ease. So if like me, you’re rubbish at remembering Easter, here are some films you can watch instead:

Sophie

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Categories branding, meaning, relationships

Pitching Your Personality

March 29, 2012 //
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We’ve all come across them. The ‘blue sky thinkers’, the ‘imagineers’, the ‘envelope pushers’ – the kind of people who wedge you into a corner and bombard you with maxims to show how great they are and why they’re so incredibly important.

But unless you’re a candidate on The Apprentice, it’s more likely that you’ll hate having to talk about yourself and your business. You might be able to promote your products, your services and your opinions without any trouble at all – but yourself?

Social media means we have to talk about ourselves more and more these days. Personality is important. We have to put pithy, succinct bios on our Twitter feed, Linked In profile, Facebook page and the ‘about us’ section of our website.

You might find it easiest to fall back on jargon and buzz words. If you’re pitching yourself at a very niche market, they can sometimes be useful shorthand. You’d expect an engineer to know what a slip-on flange is and a boatbuilder won’t be offended if you ask him about the length of his scantling. These words show that you know what you’re talking about, that you’re part of their industry, an insider. The downside however, is that they make anyone who isn’t familiar with the terminology feel excluded. If you have a broader client-base and you’re using your social media outlets as a shop-window, why would you want to exclude anyone?

The other extreme is the over-familiar: ‘Hey guys! We’re such great mates, why don’t we all go out for milkshakes!!!’ We’re not all in this together, we’re not part of the same gang – you’re a business and you’re trying to sell something. People may just want to use your services, not join some kind of consumer cult. Let them move on if they want to, don’t use Twitter or Facebook to stalk them.

Finding the right tone of voice to outline you and your business is crucial if you don’t want to come across as pompous or self-satisfied or desperate. The problem with writing is that it gives you too much time to think. If someone was to ask you what you do, you could probably tell them in a few words. But when you’re sitting in front of a laptop with a copy and paste function at your fingertips, the possibilities can seem endless.

It sounds like a glib cliché but the best advice is just to be yourself. Social media is everywhere so unless you’ve got a team of brand managers at your disposal it’s very hard to maintain an artificial persona. You’ll wake up in a foul mood one morning or tweet something after you’ve been on hold to the council for three quarters of an hour and you’ll get found out. That chummy, happy-family chattiness in your profile will seem fake and manipulative next to a comment about how much you despise your gardener for what he’s done to your rhododendron bush.

So be direct, be natural, write how you speak – but speak well. Otherwise you might find yourself stuck in a meeting room with a bunch of imagineers, singing from the same hymn sheet and running things up the flagpole to see who salutes.

Mark

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Categories communication, social media, writing

The Zammerchat Typewriter

February 2, 2012 //
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This is my typewriter. 

Zammerchat TypewriterIt’s a 1931 Remington Portable. I can’t be 100% positive but, after thorough research, I’m reasonably sure that it’s the same model as George Orwell used. I found it in my local junk shop on an occasional table in the middle of all the baskets of jewellery, tea trays stacked with yellowing board games, wigs, cigarette cards and porcelain ornaments. It’s exactly the kind of shop that Orwell described in one of his essays: Just Junk – But Who Could Resist It?

As well as designing for Zammerchat, I’m currently working on a book about Orwell so when I saw this typewriter buried amongst all the clutter, it seemed as though it had been placed there for me to find.

It now sits pride of place in the Zammerchat attic. I like having it around because, aside from the Orwell connection, it’s such a solid piece of machinery – a crafted object, dependable and practical. It’s built to be portable so the return handle doesn’t stick up. Instead the hammers of the keys are lowered by a pull-out slide on the right, the paper feed knob slotting into the spool. It can all be neatly compacted using a solid set of mechanical levers to make it easy to pack away and carry. 

It takes less time to get ready for typing than it takes for my laptop to boot up.

There are some other quirks that I’ve grown to love. On the back it says:

There’s a guarantee on the inside of the carrying case:

It also has keys for fractions – these are the most yellowed, the most untouched by the stamp of fingertips:

The names of some of the previous users are stained on the ribbon: Mary, Elizabeth, Emily. The keys hit home with a satisfying clack. You know you’ve written something when you hear that noise. It still works, 80 years after it was built.

I can’t type on it though, I make too many mistakes, re-write things too many times. I’m lost with out a copy and paste function. I’ve been spoilt by too much technology.

It feels good to have the typewriter around. It serves as a reminder of the fundamental basics of our craft, basics that are often obscured by focusing on the latest technology.

Maybe I’m just being pretentious. Maybe, after all, it’s just junk. But, as Orwell said, who could resist it?

Mark

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Categories technology, working methods, writing
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