Rendezvous Magazine – Vol. 01 Summer Issue

STEFAN SAGMEISTER

TALKS “HAPPINESS”

TOP 5 REASONS CREATIVE PEOPLE FAIL

SHOULD DESIGNERS USE

DATA OR INSPIRATION?

40 WAYS

TO ENANCE WORKFLOW

Volume 01 SUMMER 2015

Summer Issue

01 May 2015 1

In its simplest form, Rendezvous is a magazine dedicated to bringing all that goes without celebration in the creative process of advertising, marketing, and art, into the spotlight. It is a place for creative minds to meet up and discuss their art, process, objectives, and style outside the constraints of a client brief. The magazine will uncover business and financial strategies, client testimonials, methods for successful project completion, and much much more. The hope is that creatives will buy this magazine in search of community within their craft.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Top 5 Reasons Creative Peope Fail How to Manage Your Freelance Cashflow Should Designers Use Data or Inspiration?

Stefan Sagmeister talks “Happiness”

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LIKE IT OR NOT, WE ALL FAIL. But knowing why can help stop it happening again, says Rick Albano. We creatives can be a fragile bunch. The harder we come with our ideas, the harder we fall when those ideas fail. And the agency world can be a ruthless arena, from interviewing for your first job to pitching a campaign to a CMO. Furthermore, in social media marketing, the consumer ends up being your harshest (and most valid) critic. When something you created for a brand fails on a social channel with 40 million followers, you feel the sting instantly.

There’s no way to avoid failing creatively. It happens. It’s even encouraged. “Fail Harder,” says a big wall at Weiden+Kennedy.

A client recently told me we weren’t doing our job if we didn’t “fail forward.” Where I work, “Get it wrong to get it right,” is one of our mantras. It’s all part of the process, but learning from those fails is critical to your morale and success in this business, as is fine-tuning your creative process to limit fails and increase wins.

What follows are my top 5 reasons creative people fail — things I have done at least once in my career, and will probably do again...

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THE TOP

02.

01.

You’re too focused You’re taking on the industry. yourself too seriously.

Too often I have met, for example, young copywriters who know more about the agency world and award circuit than they do about the craft of writing.

Usually their work reads like formulaic lines from famous campaigns by Nike and Apple, but not as good. Sanam Petri of W+K (via RGA) wrote an article in The Guardian that goes deeper on this very subject.

The best advertisers I know are actually just really creative people who want to make cool stuff. Of course, solving problems for brands is our job, but doing it with a genuine passion for creating something that actually moves people (to laugh, to cry, to buy) is paramount to success.

It’s hard to tell creatives that they’re taking themselves too seriously. This is their Creativity™, dammit. Their juice. And to make matters more serious, this juice is the main ingredient in their own personal brand, dammit.

Our industry is built on pitting one creative’s branded juice against another person’s branded juice. Bearing your teeth yet? But staying loose is critical to doing great creative work. The trick is tapping into the creative child inside that makes things simply, based on instinct and passion.

To experiment and play, and to start each day with a smile. It’s really easy to get uptight with a deadline or pitch looming, but in the end we’re just using marketing as an artistic outlet (see point 1 above), so let’s try and have some fun with it.

REASONS CREATIVE

PEOPLE

FAIL

Rick Albano was the creator of trailblazing surfing blog Sissyfish, an A&R associate at Warner Brothers Records, part of the legitimate Napster.com team and a copywriter for Nike before becoming executive creative director for Swift

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You don’t have a creative outlet outside of work

04.

You don’t learn from your #fails

05.

Hellooooooo? You’re not listening!

Fail Harder: then what? If you don’t look at your mistakes critically

It’s a great time to be a creative. We have so much access to

and make adjustments based on feedback, you haven’t just

inspiration, from Tumblr to Pinterest to We Heart It to Instagram.

There has got to be something else in your life. There HAS to. Are

failed hard, you’ve failed bad. Agencies hang their hats on an

Never has it been this easy connect with other creatives and

you a photographer? A cook? A gardener? It’s essential that you find

ability to analyze work and change rapidly, especially in social

ask them questions about their craft. Consumers, our ultimate

time to make things for yourself. It’ll keep you inspired and ultimately

media, where you have the luxury of making quick adjustments to

audiences, are open books. But it’s up to you to pay attention.

positively influence the commercial creative work you do.

strategy and pivoting based on consumer reactions.

Spend time listening to that massive collective of creatives at

Instagram requires very little effort, but at least gets you to think

Stubborn creatives will stick to their ways of doing things

‘visual + headline’ and to broadcast regularly. I’ve also found

regardless of what other people say. Those who look at their

blogging to be incredibly helpful in satisfying my personal creative

creative careers as a constant evolution and education will not

urges, while also opening my eyes to inspiring work by others that

only continue to grow, but have a long lifespan in this business.

can influence my day job.

Which leads us to...

your fingertips who are posting new, raw ideas every day.

“LISTENING IS A REQUIREMENT FOR SUCCESS” Listening is a requirement for success. A good idea, or a groundbreaking piece of feedback, can come from anywhere. Planners are our friends. Junior level creatives are our future.

Criticism, as hard as it is for us artists to take, is an opportunity for growth. And who doesn’t want to grow creatively? The long and the short, by being aware of bad habits and creativity-stifling tendencies, creatives can approach their work with a fresh pointof-view.

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART & COMMERCE IS A ROCKY ONE...

And it’s particularly rocky when you’re a freelancer. For all its many joys, being your own boss also means being your own accounting department and occasional bailiff.

Freelancers face three key issues: staying on top of the paperwork, getting paid and ensuring the taxman doesn’t chuck you in prison. Taking care of all that can eat into the time you’d rather spend on designing. So how do others do it?

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT One of a series of map illustrations by illustrator Elly Walton

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A hand-lettered and illustrated Label for Noted, by Linzie Hunter

Stickers and packaging for Peaceable Kingdom by Linzie Hunter

One of a series of illustrated New Year’s Resolutions collected via social Hunter NY Resolutions, by Linzie Hunter

An architectural drawing, Belle & Bunting, by Scottish illustrator Willa Gebbie

Hand Lettering Headlines, by Ely Walton

Start a spreadsheet Elly Walton has been a freelance illustrator for 10 years. Her client list reads like a who’s who of the advertising, design and publishing fields, but despite her success, she’s been using “pretty much the same old Excel spreadsheet with my incomings, outgoings and tax payable on it” all that time.

Walton also records “the jobs as they come in, how I got them and whether it was a result of promotion or word of mouth,” she explains. “It makes a nice, pretty graph that I look at

Chase payment regularly While FreeAgent can automatically notify clients of overdue invoices, Gebbie fears that it could look “spammy”, so she prefers to do the chasing herself. “I write invoices as soon as I’ve finished the job,” she says. “Once a week I check payments and chase outstanding invoices. If they’re really late then I’ll start to chase every couple of days.”

Award-winning hand-lettering artist and illustrator Linzie Hunter is another convert to online systems.

occasionally to review my marketing.”

“Having a cloud-based system means that I can keep track of payments and invoices easily Walton uses an Adobe Photoshop template for invoices, prints hard copies – “I like to have a stack of physical paper to check through and stamp a little ‘PAID’ on it when it’s paid” – and invoices jobs on completion.

Don’t procrastinate Procrastination, says Walton, is the enemy: “[Tax] isn’t really that painful, but it’s a hell of a lot more painful if you leave it until the deadline.”

If you’re a sole trader in the UK you’ll pay Income Tax on your profits (sales less expenses) as well as National Insurance contributions; limited companies pay Corporation Tax on business profits; and if you’re turning over more than £81,000 per year (it happens!) there’s

wherever I am. My favourite feature is the ability to link it to your bank and PayPal accounts, so I no longer need to enter everything manually. It’s also good at showing you exactly where you are financially.”

State clear payment terms Tempting as it might be, one feature Wave and FreeAgent don’t currently offer is the ability to send drone strikes after late payers. Elly Walton is unusual – “I’ve been lucky not to have had a non-payer” – but stresses the value of clear payment terms.

“30 days is reasonable,” she says. “As soon as that date arrives, start chasing – as politely as possible, of course.”

quarterly VAT too.

Willa Gebbie agrees. “Sometimes clients don’t pay on time, but often that’s because of It may be worth registering even if your turnover is less: under the Flat Rate Scheme someone in advertising can charge 20% but only pays 11%.

Consider an accountant Doing your own tax return isn’t difficult, but if you’re VAT registered or running a company you might want to consider hiring an accountant. It isn’t too expensive and there’s something enormously satisfying about handing over a shoebox full of receipts and never having to worry about it ever again.

Like Elly Walton, beauty, fashion and portrait illustrator Willa Gebbie used a system based around a spreadsheet, in this case Google Docs, but in 2013 she decided to switch to FreeAgent.

“That’s when I finally got around to having a proper business account as well,” she says.

Until then she hadn’t felt it was necessary, not least because business accounts come with a plethora of charges after the first year.

“A normal account will do, as long as you keep your work money and personal money clearly separate,” Gebbie says. “As a sole trader, it’s unlikely that you’ll need the benefits (or costs) of a business account, so it’s better saving those few pounds.”

the finance department rather than the art director… it’s probably quite embarrassing for them.”

Be prepared Our illustrators have all experienced the ups and downs of freelancing. What hard-won advice would they pass on? “If you’re only just going freelance, make sure you read up about how self-assessment works and make sure you understand about paying tax on account,” Linzie Hunter advises.

“Otherwise it can be a bit of a shock to find that you have to pay an extra chunk in the first year. And get used to saving every receipt in your wallet automatically from the start.”

Willa Gebbie agrees. “Even if it’ll be some time before you start paying tax, you can offset the set-up cost of your business against future tax. That’s a really useful opportunity to take.”

Keep your work money and play money separate, Elly Walton counsels, recommending that you put a percentage of each payment into a separate account. “I think if all payments went straight into one account, hoping that by the time the tax bill comes around I’ll still have the money to pay it is a risky strategy.” We can say from painful experience that Walton isn’t wrong.

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