The 5 Things All Studios are Afraid of, and How We Remedy Them.
Giving out pricing
We’ve toyed for a very long time with opening up our pricing system. To be quite honest, we can nail down the exact cost of many jobs through a fairly formulaic process. It would take a day or two to apply programming to this http://entermotion.com/estimates to make it give you exact numbers. We could even assign a percentage multiplier to account for how busy we are at any given time adjusting rates accordingly.
We haven’t done it for one reason. To assign direct pricing to our services commoditizes them. We sell our creativity by the hour; nothing less, nothing more. We empathize quite directly with our potential clients who desire a starting place in regards to pricing, but it just can’t be done while staying true to the original intent of our business.
Getting Inside Don Draper's Head
We recently had a conversation in the office about the show Mad Men, particularly about Don Draper. We noted that while Don certainly seems to have his professional life together (most of the time), his personal life is a completely different story. He is authoritative and sure of himself at work, but as soon as he steps through the front door of his home, he’s thinking of leaving again. He seems to have it all- the beautiful wife, the well-behaved children, the big house, a liquor cabinet in every room. But man, he just can’t get it together.
Then we talked about how it’s interesting that people can focus so intensely on something and become good at it. Then sometimes their brains sort of give up on thinking so hard, and the easiest tasks become difficult when they’re away from the office.
Productivity Away From the Office Desk.
Monday thru Friday, for about eight hours each day, you’ll find some of us in the office. But that’s not the case for others of us. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, we’re stationed all over the place, including overseas. It’s not just us. More and more people are embracing the flexibility their jobs offer, and doing their best work at home. There are elements of being at home that are drastically different than being in the office, some of which have taken us a bit to figure out. We thought we’d share a few tips we’ve found helpful along the way.
Office hours.
Establish them. Even at home- especially at home- this is an important thing to do. While perks of working from home include being able to stand up and chat with family members for a few minutes in the middle of the day, or access the coffee machine any time you want, or even pet the dog while doing something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power, there are times when you need to remain uninterrupted.
Entermotion
in General, Home Office, Working Remote
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Are You Tracking Your Workflow or is it Tracking You?
A design studio or agency does a perpetual exercise in organization. Every day, there are jobs that need to get done. Some are very small jobs. Some are larger. Others are in between. There are also the parts of whole jobs… they all need to get done. They’re all a priority. Is it even possible to manage them? How do you keep track of client issues that need to be followed up with? How do you juggle the project you’re working on with all the other projects you’re overseeing? There’s got to be a way.
Every studio has to come up with their own method of tracking jobs through its workflow. And the system in place probably varies depending on how many employees there are within the company, whether or not there’s an account manager in place, and the number of clients the studio has at any given point during the year.
The Happy Studio- Make Your Studio Like a Home.
As creative people, we often find that our creativity translates into lots of aspects of our life beside design. While Gestalt, “variety within unity” and color theory apply to all the great design arts, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at everything design related just because you know the basics. It’s true that you could probably have a great conversation with a fashion designer or an architect about how similar graphic design is to their professions- but it doesn’t mean you can sit down and design an award winning skirt, or esplanade.
Still, we for one, would like to believe we at least have the skills to make our space comfortable with a little thinking, and study.
Our studio
A creative space is what you make of it. Some people are inspired by the blankness of white space, others are claustrophobic about it. Some people love loud busy areas with lots of activity, some are irritated and/or terrified by it.
Our studio is wide open. Bigger than we need. If one person is on the phone, everyone hears it.