Real Designers Sell a Process, Not the Result

Joshua Jeffryes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:22:22 -0500

To be successful in design, you MUST sell your process, not the result.

If you sell the result (a brochure, a website, a logo), then you commoditize yourself. You reduce what you do to a widget that can be interchanged with any other widget. Once something is reduced to a widget, all that matters is price, not quality.

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Joshua Jeffryes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:11:11 -0500

The primary issue here is that design is NOT making graphics, any more than engineering a car is painting flames on the side. Design is a process that solves client problems, and it may or may not involve making pretty graphics. Clients that think design is just getting a bunch of desperate hobbyists to generate random images are doing their business a disservice, and CrowdSpring is right there taking their money.

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Joshua Jeffryes — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:55:58 -0400

@Allen: Pretend you're running a lemonade stand, and you hire 100 lemon squeezers. Then someone invents a lemon-squeezing machine, but it's very hard to operate. You only need 10 people to run the lemon-squeezing machine, but there are only 8 people in your country that know how. The result is 100 unemployed lemon squeezers, and a 2 person shortage of machine operators.
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Joshua Jeffryes — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:47:00 -0400

Charlie, you may have had a bad experience and you're bitter as a result, but that doesn't mean your experience is true for everyone else. I survived being laid off and working several crap jobs after the big dotcom crash. You know how I did it? I took the best job I could each time, and relentlessly updated my skills and improved my chances of being hired.

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Joshua Jeffryes — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:43:57 -0400

Have you tried hiring a talented programmer or IT person? It's impossible. Every company in St. Louis, including my own, pounces on anyone with real talent as soon as they're available, and poaching between companies is rampant. Salaries are very high, and getting higher every month. It's not unusual here to get a 10-20% raise every year by switching jobs.

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Joshua Jeffryes — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:01:22 -0400

How about:
1. The shift from print to web in the design world, and how this impacts the industry, the designers in it, and way design interacts with the public.
2. The rise of person to person media (blogs, social networks, email, twitter) and the fall of business to mass media (newspapers, radio, tv), and how designers can adapt to take advantage of it.
3. The shift in the design world from huge agencies to small, nimble shops. Companies of 10 are stealing meals from companies of 500, there's a story there!

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Joshua Jeffryes — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:39:12 -0400

Why do we demand top down solutions? Simple. They're easy. We all want someone to magically solve all our problems, and take the responsibility off our shoulders, just like mommy and daddy did when we were 5. That's much easier than trying to figure out how to get everyone to change their behavior.

BTW, it should be cheetahs, not leopards. Leopards are ambush predators, they don't chase diddly squat.