Spec Work in Your Own Backyard

…and this time with a cousin in the creative community, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for their Art Works logo design contest. While not openly advertising it as a contest, NEA is asking for completed design work to be submitted with the proposal. Some may ask “So what?” But there has been long-standing opposition in the creative community about speculative work. For thorough explanations of this issue, see here and here. The fact that this has come up so often makes one wonder why such a notable institution would engage in this way.

The design community is chiming in from various corners like today’s Huffington Post article and comments on the NEA’s own Web page for the contest announcement itself. Debbie Millman, president of AIGA sent out a tweet today questioning NEA’s intentions.

If you had the energy to wade through the 23-page RFP (request for proposal), you’d note the curious lack of creative brief (I discuss briefs here). A government agency needs pages and pages of liability, rules and restrictions. But for such a seemingly important project, for which they are willing to spend upwards of $25,000, the fact that the creative criteria for the work is so thin seems negligent.

Here is the RFP. There are also two amendments—answers to proposers’ questions. Some questions revealed a lack of reading the most basic elements of the proposal, which NEA found themselves repeating over and over: how many design options can I submit? One. Some questions revealed a laudable desire for more information. One asked why they were asking for design solutions in a proposal. NEA justifies this request saying: Since we believe that art works for everyone, this is meant as an opportunity to solicit ideas from as broad a public as possible and invite this country’s creative community to engage with their NEA.

While this is a nice thought, the benefits are not to the country’s creative community; they are to NEA—free ideas, no guarantee that any idea will be selected and ownership of all submitted ideas.

Which brings me to a few big problems with this RFP (aside from the obvious).

The “winner” believes they can get $25,000 if their proposal is chosen. NEA makes no claim to compensate that amount; it is merely their budget’s upper limit. I’m sure NEA has figured out that it’s in their best interests to pick a design that they can live with (but which represents them well enough), and have money left over. This is what multiple free ideas gets you—leveraging power. And once the work is done, it’s hard to justify the worth. The designer did give it away for free after all. Why would the recipient bother spending $25,000?

Another problem is the lack of a well-fleshed out brief about the Art Works program. The thin criteria designers are reacting to amounts to designing in a vacuum, rather than designing for a purpose. The “audience” is the American people. Given our health care debate, you’d hardly think we were one people. Not that it’s impossible to design for such a diverse group, just that you would think an organization like the NEA with a $25,000 budget cared enough to communicate more.

Also, it is surprising that a government-funded organization, also receiving donations, has the staff time available to receive, organize, print and review hundreds, maybe thousands, of submissions. Is this in line with their mission? And I’m on their side!

If the NEA had kept to the original (implied) spirit by limiting submissions to students, it could begin to justify the contest if they were to build an educational campaign around identity development. But the project is open to the world at large. And the fact that they are also claiming ownership of all submitted ideas means that they are freeing themselves of liability should they decide to use those ideas down the road, uncompensated.

There is more to say on this subject than I should write in a blog post. I’ll just end with this ironic statement from the RFP, which is the third of three interpretations of the word Art Works, as seen by NEA.

3. “Art Works” is a reminder that arts workers are real workers who are part of this country’s real economy. They earn salaries, support families, pay taxes. Artists are also entrepreneurs and placemakers, who revitalize towns, cities, and neighborhoods – both the economies and the ethos of them.

I couldn’t agree more.

Update June 2: Read D.K. Holland’s piece in Communication Arts: “Where Our Wild Things Are: Graphic design ethics in an age of exacerbation.”

Service With a Smile

“Hello beautiful,” the hostess at an airport restaurant said as I approached the hostess stand. I was aroused from my airport stupor at the unfamiliar phrase. I hadn’t even been in the airport that long. I was simply tired and hungry and had opted for a later flight (and a free round trip ticket voucher) and had time to sit and enjoy a meal.

Her simple, yet rare these days, hospitality gave me a jolt. Immediately, my shoulders loosened and I smiled.

“Can I have a…,” I started to say, before she cut me off.

“I’ve got you covered sweetheart. A table with an outlet next to it. I see you’re a woman who’s a smart professional,” she said with a big smile.

I didn’t have a visible laptop case and don’t normally carry a computer, except on this trip I had one. I hardly looked professional and didn’t feel particularly smart in that moment.

I sat near the hostess stand and listened to her greet everyone who entered the restaurant. The most sour-looking frowns morphed into smiles upon her greeting. Later I called her over and asked what was her secret. How did she get to be so positive? A year ago she was out of work and was flipping through the channels on her TV. Today, she as a job and feels blessed.

“I meet the most beautiful people in this place. All the people coming and going from interesting places. What is not to feel positive about? I love people. I love my job.”

What I forgot to do was tell her boss to give that woman a raise.

Design All Around You

I couldn’t help but notice how retro cool these shallot slices were as I was chopping them for soup the other day. A great pattern on sheets or fabric. Thanks to the allium family for giving us great patterns, like the leek below.

Sunday Soup: White Bean Fennel

Sunday is a great day to make soup. For December 6, it's White Bean Fennel.

Design Briefs: Don’t Get Caught Without Them

Starting a project without a design brief is like setting out on a backpacking trip with no map or compass…only worse. There’s really no harm in wandering aimlessly in the wilderness if you have no destination and there’s no fear of getting lost. (This might be called fine art though.)

But while no parameters might sound like every designer’s dream, this approach is a recipe for failure for both sides but in different ways. The designer shoulders too much responsibility for designing in a vacuum and the client risks getting watered-down ideas and faces avoidable costs down the road.

What is a design brief exactly and who creates it?

• A brief can come from the client but a designer usually has their own and will initiate a discovery process.

• It can consist of 3 questions or 10, depending on the project and the person.

• It’s best to be done in person, via Skype or over the phone so that you can be challenged to provide bold, unambiguous answers.

• The brief will define the why, who, how, what and when of the project.

• It addresses the specific results you want to achieve.

Why people avoid it and why you should embrace it.

Shaping what doesn’t exist is harder than reacting to what you see. But your business is unique. You want to start going in the direction that leads to you and not start at a point that leads to every business like yours. A designer who guesses who you are without your valuable input is, well, guessing.

Underestimating the value of your values. And for that matter, why you exist, who you most want to serve and why you’re different from the competition. Design can be a murky, mysterious process that leads you to think your input doesn’t shape the design. Not whether you like red or want a key in your logo, but how your values, mission or aspirations lead the designer to ideas that define you—the most important signposts along the designer’s path. Your task as a client is to get as comfortable with murky as you can.

When you’re eager to see ideas it’s tempting to skip the planning. Your excitement is understandable. Your project might also be long overdue or the key decision makers are too busy to give input. When a brief is finally approved, the designer passes “go.” That’s when the creative juices start flowing and the most important work is done. You don’t want to go backtrack later because you took steps in the wrong direction at the beginning.

Self examination is hard but leads to a stronger brand. It’s this discovery phase where you say who you are, but also also who you are not. If that seems like shutting doors, keeping too many open can lead to a confusing and bland identity.

A reluctance to believe that good design is good business. We all have a different view of what makes good design. Start with someone in your camp who truly wants to see you succeed. That way, you can trust them to take leaps you might otherwise not feel comfortable with. Good design doesn’t just look good, it’s also about the right tools and how they function.

Here’s another post about working with a design brief, and another.

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(Image credit: Flickr creative commons / John ‘K’)

Fun Confusing

A friend who recently went through cancer treatment emailed to say he was doing well. He said it was a bit touch and go for a while but he’s on the upswing. I know him from dancing. He’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. He dances with every newcomer, women of every age and skill and always looks like he’s having fun, whether his partner can follow or not.

He said he has taken up a new type of dancing—in between cancer treatments and traveling for work—and he is having a ball. Each style of dance is helping him with the other one, he said. “But it does get a little confusing going back and forth between the two. Fun confusing.”

The other night at a foreign language conversation, the guy next to me was struggling to find the right words. I’ve been there—unable to be as articulate as I would like. The words you want to say in English rush to the front of your brain and then sit like thick fudge in your mouth as you try to translate. I looked at him and smiled “It’s like giving birth sometimes isn’t it?” “Yeah,” he smiled back and let out a big sigh, but still managed to say something we all understood.

On a recent trip, where I had to speak another language, I had moments of exhaustion and frustration. But in the midst of this—in moments of clarity—I reminded myself that we benefit from being out of our comfort zone. Short of sitting on a beach somewhere, almost all travel forces us to confront the unknown and be a beginner of sorts.

Of course, there are good and bad ways to be out of your comfort zone. Not every struggle is the right struggle.

That said, we’re too often sure of the steps we take, the words we speak. We avoid being out of our comfort zone because we can. We default to the known, the easy, the places we’re reasonably sure we’ll shine—if only a little bit.

In a recent yoga class, we were introduced to a new pose. Though we were a class of advanced students, we guffawed at the near impossibility of this pose. Nearly all of us crumbled and fell to the ground with a thud. Some of us laughed. Our instructor said, “This is the kind of pose you just have to have fun with.” Which translates to: you are not going to get it right the first, or even the second time, so you might as well embrace failure and not take yourself so seriously. We were speaking an unknown language with our bodies.

The key to fun confusing is that it should be an activity that uses enough of your potential, without being too much of a struggle that you can’t enjoy what you’re doing. Too easy or too comfortable and we don’t stretch enough. In his great book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains this concept as one of the eight aspects that constitutes a state of focused enjoyment.

So the question is, do you have enough fun confusing in your life? Or are you staying in your comfort zone too much?