It’s back to the future with letterpress classes

The more time designers and art directors sit parked at a computer monitor dishing out pixels, the more they crave something tangible and touchable. To the rescue is the revived art of letterpress printing. At Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, a large, neatly arranged room full of vintage flatbed and platen presses is just down the hall from the school’s Mac labs, providing some sort of karmic equilibrium. Designers are drawn to the letterpress classes because there is no “delete” key. Instead you have to plan and think through your designs very carefully before going to work. It turns out that’s not a bad way to approach digital design work, either. 

  

Make your clients love you? Start with what they hate.

One of our favorite workshop leaders at SVC is Ted Leonhardt. He not only built a small design firm into a large one, but he also had the opportunity to serve as executive creative director for the entire Fitch network of design shops around the world.

Late last year Ted led a workshop at SVC where he shared some of this findings about building stronger client relationships. A good starting point, according to Ted, is to find out what irks clients about their ad and design agency relationships and start from there. And that’s exactly what Ted did.

So here, in condensed form, are some of the top gripes clients have about their marketing communications partners:

“Don’t try to sell me anything.”
Clients, like the rest of humanity, can smell a sales pitch a mile away. And, like most of us, they resist, even if the ideas proffered are good ones. Instead, always put your suggestions in the framework of, well, suggestions that are offered in the spirit of helping to solve a client’s business problem.

How to get a great website (or anything else)

We know what you’re thinking. If we wanted to read what Seth Godin had to say, we’d just go to his blog, not yours. Point taken, and we’ll stick to reporting ideas spoken at SVC in most of our future posts. But these 10 tips on how to produce a great website bear repeating, in our opinion, because they could apply to an ad, an annual report, or just about anything creative people are engaged to do. Don’t you agree?