TGIF!

Find a way to sneak out of work early today, because it’s Friday!!!

Team Chemistry

What is the most vital characteristic of a successful team?

I believe the answer to be the effective combination of leadership, diversity and chemistry. While good staffing can elevate leadership and diversity, team chemistry is very difficult to achieve.

In my experience, whether it is winning a championship or landing a major business opportunity, effective team chemistry is what makes or breaks and organization.  As a college baseball player for five years and as a professional marketer for three, this scenario has held true.

The components of this chemistry include: a unified respect for team members and management, a common discipline, a shared commitment and passion and the ability to positively work together amidst differences in experience, preference and personality.

Leadership must represent these components, and subordinates must fall in line if effective chemistry is to be achieved. The fruit of this organizational achievement is not only profit and success, but the creation of a work environment that can be enjoyed everyday by every employee. 

A Fresh Perspective

Often in the day-to-day as designers, we get locked into an "align all" mentality, micro-managing every pixel set before us. Sometimes it’s important for us to find intriguing ways of executing our creativity.

New media theorist Peter Lunenfeld describes this need in relation to software itself…

"Consider the command "snap to grid." It instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space. Artists regularly disable the "snap to grid" function the moment they open an application because the gains in predictability and accuracy are balanced against the losses of ambiguity and expressiveness."

A professor of mine once taught a course with the main objective of developing innovative processes and breaking free from disciplinary boundaries. Our team attempts to do this weekly in a little exercise we like to call our creative breakfast. In attempt to disable our snap to grid function we decided to design something using an unexpected medium. We created a 3-tiered cake with a healthy twist– it was built solely out of veggies.

Getting away from the typical print and web media for a couple of hours really helped us to keep a fresh perspective.

How you can make the Tonic veggie cake yours:
Create the base by slicing a head of lettuce into a 2-inch thick tier. Line with broccoli, red bell pepper slices and orchids. Use red cabbage for the second tier and line with cauliflower and carrot slices. Complete your third tier with an additional slice of lettuce, and line with carrots, jicama, and cherry tomatoes. Top with a flower made from cabbage and cauliflower…or try your hand at carving a flower out of a radish. The key here is to have fun with it, get off of the computer, and find a new form of creative expression.

Leibovitz on Design

I recently attended a lecture by renown photographer Annie Leibovitz who presented a collection of work from the past 15 years of her life. Of course immediately when you think of Leibovitz you might think of the Rolling Stone photos, or celebrity shots like her portrait of John Lennon before he was killed. But I discovered a deeper side to this recent mother and working professionals work, something that I thought applies to how we communicate to our clients and their customers.

During her lecture someone asked her to describe the perfect portrait. She replied that there is no equation or formula for that. Of course there is a level of technical expertise and composition that is expected, but at the end of the day, what makes a great photograph/portrait is personal and unique to each person viewing it.

To try and pack everything into one image or one message is impossible and fruitless. The “perfect portrait” is more like the appropriate sample of a larger picture. It is a result of her creative process. First she schedules time with her subjects, without a camera, to observe, listen, absorb and learn. She said this is very surprising for her clients since they expect her to simply show up and shoot pictures. She actually visits them repeatedly and tries to watch them during their day. Then after absorbing the essence and reality of her subject, she devises ways of capturing what she feels are the most revealing and interesting aspects of their personality or identity. Her subjects are just as involved in the making of the image as she is as the photographer.

I started thinking about how this applies to our craft and our client’s experience. Each project we take on offers us the opportunity to learn about something new. At Tonic, we strive to equally absorb our clients products, and services as well as partake in as much of the client experience as possible. And in a similar way, many clients are surprised expecting us to dive right into design or solving their problem. This process of learning is what leads to more insightful solutions. One where we capture insights from our learnings that lead to a final product that resonates with clients due to their influence on our final designs/solutions. They are as much participants in our final products as we are.

(Photos from ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005)

Menus + Mementos

Bad Design of the Month Award

Logo development is always tricky.  To create a successful brand identity, it’s imperative that your design team must know the target audience inside and out, or else you’re at risk of developing a, well, let’s just say, disaster.

The 2012 London Olympics committee hoped to develop a logo that would still be relevant 5 years from now, and that would also appeal to the "MySpace generation."  Unfortunately, they chose to forgo any research on what is appealing to a younger demographic, and designed this logo:

The logo received widespread public criticism, calling it “hideous,” “worse than 1980’s graffiti art,” a “toileting monkey,” and a “waste of money.”  Meanwhile, an animated clip featuring the logo was removed from the organizers’ website as there was concern it could trigger epileptic fits.  Over 47,000 signatures have been posted on this website petitioning the use of the logo, yet the Olympics committee continues to defend it.

Lesson learned:  Let’s face it– nobody wants to be “that guy” who presents a bad creative concept in front of a large group of people.  To avoid becoming “that guy,” we recommend hiring a design firm that thoroughly researches the target market, and then develops a brand with the audience’s perspective in mind.