Hatch Cast – Working With Designers – S01E02

Hatch Conference » Podcasts

Welcome to Hatch Cast, our weekly business podcast

To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes

If you like the show, please consider leaving us a review in iTunes. Thank you!

The second episode of Hatch Cast, a weekly business podcast with tips and insight in 10 minutes or less, because life’s short and time is money. This week, we’re joined by Sean Lee-Amies talking about working with designers and design agencies.

Please Visit Our Sponsors and Support the Show!

Could this be you? Find out more about our sponsorship packages.

Episode Resources

Sean’s design agency, LA Designs

Help Spread the Word!

We’d be grateful if you could help us share our podcast. Click here for a pre-populated tweet. Thank you.

Transcript

A
Hello and welcome to Hatch Cast our weekly business podcast, we’ll be discussing live issues and events in 10 minutes or less because life is short and time is money. I’m Ali.

T
And I’m Tony, and this week we’re joined by our guest Sean Lee-Amies, a designer working off the south coast of England in a studio called LA Designs.

A
Hi Sean, how are you doing?

S
Very well thank you.

A
Why don’t we talk with you telling us a little bit about yourself Sean?

S
Sure, okay. So, I’m a branding and web specialist – what I really do is help businesses present themselves better offline (in the real world) and online.
I’m a hybrid, so I actually do both design and code. This wasn’t really ever something that I chose, it just sort of, came about from being self taught.

I’ve never actually studied design or development at college or university. During high school, I mean, I didn’t really do all of the things I should have been doing. I just sort of sat around at home, learning about; HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and how not to be build websites, design theories and that sort of stuff really. I was just sort of exploring and just trying to find out what I really wanted to do.

I got some really bad grades in high school so I could only get onto this BTEC in general ICT, which is equivalent to a GCSE. And my least fond memory of that experience was being told that “I wouldn’t get any extra points in HTML or CSS and that I should just do it in Microsoft Powerpoint.

T
** Laughing ** Stellar advice. So that person doesn’t have a career in web design I’m guessing?

S
No. I spent another 2 or so years and then another 2 years in a really horrendously soul crushing full time retail job.

T
I think we’ve all had one of them.

A
I haven’t.

T
You don’t want to go down that route.

S
You don’t want one. So, yeah, it just got to the point where I was really just sick of everything with that and I just wanted to get out and start my own thing. So, I cut my hours down to part time and I just carried on learning about everything to do with design and development really. A little while later, I really sort of focused more on the design and branding side of things, I think really just because, there are so fewer limitations when it comes to design as opposed to coding and development.

Yeah, so, I launched my business fully, 2 years ago, it’s doing really well and now I get to help out lots of people and businesses with better brands and websites.

T
Excellent.

A
So, you’re a self-taught branding and design expert, is that right?

S
Yeah, branding and web.

A
Fantastic. Well, let’s start by assuming the contrary. Let’s say Sean, hypothetically, you’re not a designer and a coder yourself, and, you’re instructing an external agency who are. What advice would you give yourself in that situation? So basically, general advice on how to approach designing with a design agency.

S
Okay. I think really you need to find out what skills the designer has. I mean, I’ve been approached in the past on a couple of occasions actually where the person in charge of the hiring doesn’t really know what they need. I mean they’ll have a sort of rough idea but it does feel like they wing it a bit.

A few years ago I was working with a social media startup and they came to me saying we need a front end developer and designer. So I thought “Yeah, that’s great, that’s me. This project would be perfect for me.” The problem was, he didn’t really know what he actually needed. I mean I was working actually as it turns out, with a Polish programmer, and he didn’t know anything really about HTML or CSS. And to make it worse, he was only available for about 3 hours a day.

T
That can’t have helped the project along?

S
No, not at all.

Even worse was the fact that I’d actually been brought into the project about 2/3rds of the way through. So it was less me designing and more me trying to work with the client to implement designs to somebody else’s project really.

T
Trying to shoe horn something into an existing framework.

S
Yeah. And, as if the language barrier wasn’t bad enough. They were also using various different types of versioning software, like Github and a couple of other bits of software to help host and maintain their website. And, I didn’t have a lot of experience with this, but at no point was it ever mentioned until we’d actually started. So, yeah, knowledge barrier as well as the language barrier, it just didn’t work out very well.

A
So, your advice would be: have a clear idea of the skillsets the designer has, have a clear idea of what it is that you’re actually wanting and don’t bring the designer in halfway through. Be prepared when you’re approaching a designer to, even if the project has been running, to approach it with fresh eyes. Is that right?

S
Yeah, absolutely. The only other thing that I could just quickly say is, find out how the designer works first. With development, it’s fairly straight forward because you have a set list of requirements, and you can sort of just say “this is what we want, can you go and make it?” to a programmer. But with design, it’s just not that easy to arrive at that stage. So, you really need to find out how the designer works, because, well, I know from all of my design contacts, we all do things slightly differently. So, what might work for one design agency, might not necessarily work for the designer they want to work with.

A
So do some research about how that designer works, maybe testimonials or…

S
Just have a sit down with them.

A
Okay, just sit down with them and talk with the designer.

S
Yes.

T
So, what advice would you give clients in preparing a design brief?

S
Okay, so when it comes to the design brief, I’ve never read a design brief and thought “Wow, there’s too much information here.”

T
*laughing” No.

S
So yeah, you really need to make the design brief as detailed as possible and that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be, like a 500 page document, but you need to really thoroughly outline each aspect of the project. So, you need to know what you want and you need to compare that against what you need and what you might need in the future.

So, if you’re having, if you’re starting a web project for example, you know, if you want to be able to edit that website yourself, that needs to be in the brief.

T
Yeah, yeah.

S
If you intend to host your own website, or, if you’ve already bought the domain name for example, that information needs to be communicated.

T
Definitely.

S
It really is, you know, just every aspect of the project that you want to start, or perhaps have partially started, just needs to be communicated. And my only other thing to say would be, don’t be vague. I’ve seen a lot of brief where the client or someone will assume that somebody knows what they’re talking about.

After working with various different designers, clients and programmers, it’s sort of like a designer sees things quite differently to a programmer. And a client will see things quite differently to both a programmer and a designer. There’s just different languages, so you just have to be as specific as possible.

A
Without naming any names Sean, if I were to ask you to pick a favourite client, or perhaps your favourite client, can you tell us what makes them stick out in a positive way? What makes you enjoy working with a client?

S
Okay, sure. One of my recent clients actually is really really fun to work with. They, every time they see a design and they like it, they’re really vocal about it, they’re really passionate about it. You can tell tat they genuinely are excited at what you’ve created and that is a great feeling to have I think. Tony, I’m sure you can agree with that.

T
Yeah, it’s great when you can tell a client loves and believes in what you do.

A
Positive reinforcement is important.

S
And, the other thing that they do is that they’re really honest. So positivity and honestly, if they see something and don’t like it, they don’t skirt around the subject, they just tell me.

A
Okay. As you know, Tony is a designer, and I met him by instructing him to create a design and branding and logo for my company, The Neutral Corner. He nailed in a day, the first idea he sent me, I loved and we perfected that.

T
The concept.

A
The concept was great. But, I got hung up on the shade of teal that we were going to use. And, poor Tony, he spent about two weeks, going back and forth with me. Sending me different mockups and different shades.

T
I’m teal blind now!

A
Sending me different shades of teal. I think the problem there was I could never quite articulate exactly why I didn’t like the shade of teal. Can you give some advice to clients, future clients of yours, or anybody really, how to give good proper feedback to a designer.

S
Sure. I think in that situation for example, it might be just a case of, it’s your baby.

T
It is their baby. But then when they bring a design agency into it, it half becomes, it’s like the design agency is adopting their baby for a short period of time.

S
Or at least taking care of it.

T
Yeah, or at least looking after it. You’re nurturing it together aren’t you?

A
Well the work reflects on the design agency as well.

T
Yeah, at Canny we like to talk about sharing our clients success. So, if a client’s logo and website sails high and is visible everywhere, we’d consider that a success and I think that’s great. Yeah, how do you overcome shades of teal scenarios with your clients Sean?

S
So I think you really, the problem is, is that sometimes, in any project, there are lots of decisions that need to be made. And sometimes, some of them are more important than others.

I mean, is it really necessary to spend 2 weeks, and I’m not judging, just to figure out what shade of teal you want? How is that going to effect the end result? If the answer is, “not very much” then perhaps it doesn’t necessarily warrant that level of discussion or decision making around it.

And to answer the original question of how to give good feedback, something that I do with all of my projects is a discovery process. What that is, I sit down with the client and talk to them, it can be over email, but generally it’s much better to do it face to face. Just to understand their project and to find out a bit about them and what I want.

What I do from there, is that I then go and source some projects that have been completed by other people, anyone really, just anything that looks good professional design that fits into the same sort of thing that my client now wants.

And then what I do is, I basically just go through each of them designs with the client and we analyse it together. That basically lets me get inside their head and figure out what they do and don’t like. And that itself solves so many problems. I mean since implementing that process, I don’t really have an issue with this anymore.

A
I guess it also teaches the client how to give feedback. If you’re together giving feedback on other people’s designs, the client sees how to give feedback.

S
And not only does it teach them that, it teaches them about design itself as well. Because, unless you’re a designer you’re not going to spend hours looking online at different designs and stuff, so, when you can show the client “look, you could do this” or “maybe we could go down this route, or that route, or that route” then they start to think a bit more about what they could do rather than perhaps, limiting themselves to one specific type of design.

A
Well, thank you very much for that Sean. We’ve run way over time so let’s stop here and thank you very much for listening.

And thank you very much for listening, this has been Hatch Casts.

T
Tune in next week when we’ll be discussing company logos and branding.

Feedback on the Podcast

If you enjoyed the podcast, or if you have suggestions for upcoming episodes, please leave a comment below!

The post Hatch Cast – Working With Designers – S01E02 appeared first on Hatch Conference.