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?

Eating, sleeping, and breathing typography

From time to time, we use this space to share some worthwhile information that was previously dispensed at one of the School of Visual Concepts’ professional development workshops. That would be next to impossible if we tried to recap all that went at SVC this summer in connection with TypeCon 2007. The school hosted 7 workshops for this international celebration of typography (appropriate since it’s organized by the Society for Typographic Aficionados). To take a peek at some of the things that went on — especially in the SVC letterpress shop — visit our Flickr photo page.

Carl Montford, with the Reliance Handpress he recently restored, and Jenny Wilkson, manager of SVC’s letterpress shop. If you’d like to read about how this press was returned to a useful life, check out this wonderful little booklet, Resurrection of a Reliance, written, photographed, and designed by Juliet Shen.