Development - Craig Jamieson

Freelancing Creative Director Failure

My career has never been the norm, not by any standards. I did not get a matric, I dropped out of college, I was self-educated in design, computers, development etc and instead of joining an agency, I started freelancing from day one. But eventually I joined an agency and was quickly hired as a Creative Director and did a descent job of leading the digital charge within the Ad industry. But it was never smooth sailing and I have had to resort to freelancing again, with very little success. Now if I had the answers, I would at least have a fighting chance of understanding why after 10 years of successfully freelancing, I was suddenly unable to. So I have a whole lot of assumptions as to why, freelancing as a Creative Director is doomed to fail.

Before I start explaining, I want to apologies for the mixed use of CD and Creative Director, I simply felt it made sense to use one or the other as I typed it. It’s how I roll … deal with it.

Networking

Any good freelancer will tell you that one of the must have things you need to go it alone, is a pretty strong network. Well I have been a CD is some of the most respected agencies in the country, if not the world. I have successfully worked on many campaigns for multiple brands and formed relationships not only with my colleagues, but the clients too. I don;t mind saying I contacted everyone I felt comfortable enough to reach out to, but with very few people able to offer much more than encouragement. Which leads me to wonder, why that is.

Expensive

My first thought is that people may think I’m an asshole, it’s possible, but I can’t control what people think of me and I try not let that get me down, besides that would make a lot of people pretty two-faced, cause I generally feel pretty liked. So my next thought has to be that people assume I am too expensive. Truth is, I probably am too expensive. While I would not dare charge the rates an agency does, I do believe given my experience, I am worth a descent wage. Even if I wanted to work for less, I’d also have to be responsible and charge the type of money, I am used to earning, or what am I doing this for. I can;t exactly be a homeless CD, it just doesn’t work like that. Any CD would understand what I’m saying, firstly we don’t earn as much money as people think, we gave up getting rich a long time ago when we chose creativity as the main focus of our career, by joining the creative leadership team at an agency. It was a very conscious decision. The hope being that maybe one day we might be promoted into a higher earning position, get profit share or some day get our name on the door. The industry is pretty good at coming up with reasons not to give you the annual 5 – 8% increase agency folk might get, there is no pay for overtime and a world cup period where festive bonus cheques comes once in a lifetime, at least it did for me. But still, I believe I charge a fair rate, so much so that the number I had in my head is actually less than I earned, before I joined an agency.

Skills

You’re the big cheese, you direct creative, so your skills are probably a little rusty. Now I’ll explain this in detail next, but to be clear, you cannot freelance as a creative director, you are a creative director freelancing in digital. So it means you have to do the work, the teams you used to manage did. You have to design, develop, art direct, write and so on. And truth be told, there’s a lot of CD’s I know who were never very good at doing any of those things before taking on the CD role, they were good at brown-nosing the man who hired them over Friday drinks. But that’s not me, as I said, I successfully freelanced for a decade prior to becoming a CD, and given that I was self-taught, I made it a habit to constantly keep learning, so despite being a CD by day, I used to study at night. I admit my confidence in this area, was not as high as I would like, but that’s only due to the high standards I aspire to for myself. I was always a believer, that I need to know as much as anyone I manage, so I can make informed decisions. I am also quite a geek, and wanted to stay up to date and engage with colleagues in my industry who were doing big things, away from managing talent within agencies.

Director

The creative part of what I do, combined with the skills I have, means I’m pretty much covered. It’s the director part that I debate, even if it’s only with myself. Good CD’s lead by doing, they have the respect of their teams cause they lead from the front, but another important thing is relationships of mutual respect. If you think it’s easy to walk into an agency and actually freelance as a CD, let me tell you, it’s tough work. Creatives in agencies have mis-guided egos, so trust me, being told to lead a team is challenging. A CD is supposed to direct creatives, and depending on the agency, be responsible for not just the teams, but the direction creativity goes within the agency, but if you’re only a temporary resource, it’s not likely you will factor into the operational or drive the vision. It has been my experience that other than being a contractor, you are rarely ever asked the CD at an agency. Often I have been asked to help with campaigns etc, but I tend to fill the role of an art director or designer. Positions on a freelance level that are not a whole lot of fun for someone who has been leading creative teams for the better part of 7 years.

Conclusion

Freelancing is supposed to be about working for yourself, choosing when, how and what you work on. Waking up late, going to bed later. Sure there’s a bunch of challenges associated with that, but for a long time I did it, producing some amazing work, that spans a client base and a network across the globe. But then things were simpler, I had no education, so I earned enough money to pay the few bills I had, but it provided me the opportunity to free up my time to learn more, usually by playing. However now, as I furiously head towards my 40’s and I’m responsible for more than just myself, but now a 6-year-old kid and some poor financial decisions, I can no longer earn what I need to be a freelancer, yet alone a freelance Creative Director. I don’t know that I have explored this in it’s entirety, so perhaps there will be a follow up post and it might only be a play on words or my own understanding of responsibility, but you might be an art director, a designer or even a contracting creative director, but you will never be a freelancing Creative Director, it simply makes no sense and you are setting yourself up to fail.

2015 Web Design Trends

I recently taught a web design fundamentals course and at the end I shared some of the most common web design trends I have noticed during 2015. I have not and will not attempt to predict what will come, but there is certainly two obvious directions we seem to be going into. Firstly there’s the rich multimedia experiences, that care less about download speeds, but offer visitors something entertaining, something like Flash websites used to do, before Steve pulled the plug. I have a huge amount of respect for the efforts these teams have gone to, given how difficult this is to do with todays technology. The second trend is just he opposite, super simple sites that focus more on content, speed and minimalism. I recently ~~re-designed~~ re-aligned my personal site and unconsciously added a few trends without even realising it. I simply had no consistent images I wanted to use, so I decided the use of colour, large fonts and minimalism would suit me better. Hope you like my list.

Hidden Main Menus

With only a hamburger menu on the right hand side, the navigation is hidden, only on selection to reveal a full screen navigation that is hard to ignore. I’m sure there are other’s who may have done this before, but I first noticed that Teehan + Lax were early adopters of this technique.

Make it Big

Large full screen backgrounds are nothing new, but large fullscreen videos that seem to load relatively fast, are just epic.

Multimedia Experiences

The team at ultranoir have crafted an amazing online experience, the likes of which I have not seen since Flash ruled the rich media experience online.TimeSifht165 is a Digital & Interactive Fan Artwork inspired by the exceptional story of a unique French car : The Delahaye 165s and the amazing thing, is you can drive the car with your desktop keyboard or through your phone.

Patterns

I’ve started spotting patterns everywhere as a way of breaking the large device focussed stereotype layouts that were all of the web over the past couple of years. They re not only gorgeous, fill the screen, but they can be interactive. The light vector graphics also help with speed, but still offer a richer visual appearance.

Typography Microsites

It’s interesting to see a font get an entire site dedicated to it. Font microsites are popping up everywhere and none as slick as the FS Millbank microsite, which is gorgeous on any device.

Flat Design

Flat design is everywhere and with SVG being the preferred image format, I doubt flat design is going anyway any time soon. Love it or hate it, it makes sense in our multi device world where speed and vectors are king.

No more Boxes

It’s fantastic to see html sites breaking out of their grid like structures and telling stories in new ways. Again similar to how Flash sites were built, this is another tribute to the interactive era of the past, or maybe the beginning of an exciting future.

Simplicity

Simple, clean, content focussed sites that purely drive the message home make sense when we consider how despite faster internet bundles, the internet just seems to be getting slower.

No header background

Almost every template you find these days has the same large image background, and while we love the large format video experience, sometimes it’s simply lovely not having a large image in the background. Another great example of simplicity.

Very Large Typography

Someone commented during my course that this site reminds them of the mad men era ads, where there was a huge focus on copy driving the campaign message home. With the use of web fonts, we can pretty much use any BOLD font we like and do something beautiful with words and type.

Speed & Performance

I love how Google have stated that performance is a feature. Speed is super critical to users, UX people cannot stress enough the importance their research has identified speed as one of the most important things to users. But it’s more than that, with pages filled with all sorts of animation and other functionality, how fast these services perform is equally as important. People want a fast, smooth experience and taking into consideration speed and performance will ensure your site is a hit, not only with users, but with search engines too, who now rank you on both speed and performance. I think this will be the biggest trend going forward and as you might have noticed with the minimal websites above, simple is influenced by speed.

Learn to study

One of the most common questions I get asked over the years is how to stay skilled up as a designer. Well it’s rather simple, I keep studying. Now everything we do is a learning curve, and that almost seems natural as a designer, but learning also comes from studying. I have no formal education, I have a masters in nothing. But I have committed a lot of my spare time, to learning through studying online courses.

I try and study something new just about every day. Sometimes it’s just reading articles online, sometimes it’s trying a technique or an idea I have had, but mostly I use a couple of really good online resources.Some of my favorite resources to study are

Treehouse, for a wide selection of design, development and other soft skill courses
Udemy, for specific application and skill courses
Skillshare, which is good for just about anything, someone who was brave enough to teach, was willing to share.

Granted this doesn’t give me any sort of certification, but in an industry where it’s probably better to do good work than have any certification, studying daily, is a pretty good thing to do. If you’ve read my blog thoroughly over the years, you’ll know I also read, a lot, so I will be sure to share a few of my latest finds real soon.

The tip here is to become disciplined in your approach to staying skilled up within our industry. It doesn’t matter that as a Creative Director I might not use most of these skills, it just challenges me to think differently and fills me with knowledge about things I might have to give direction on.

Another thing is to at least learn something, be it a chapter, a full discipline or just a workshop, try and study something every day.

One last thing is to learn new things, stuff that makes you uncomfortable, challenges you and is something you never even considered you could do.

I am genuinely interested in design, in all it’s forms, it’s as much a hobby to me as it is my career, and seriously no one has ever really had to hold a gun to my head to get me to learn more. I think due to my lack in formal education in my youth, I have learned to love studying.

Non-responsive web design

I’m sure you have all heard the buzz words, responsive web design (RWD), adaptive or responsive sites. But incase you have been living on the moon.

Responsive web design is fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. It was first defined in an article and a book by Ethan Marcotte.

To me, this term is already old school. If anything we should be talking about, non-responsive web design … websites that have not adopted RWD principles. To me simply, sites are responsive. We are so past the desktop browser being the only way to view a website. So please, if you haven’t already, do your people a favour and make sure you don’t have a non-responsive web design.

The only thing that’s constant, is change

In the earlier years of my career, I did much smaller projects. Microsites, personal sites, presentations etc. Then things got bigger, campaign sites, platforms, e-commerce sites and so on. Now days, I am very much interested in building product eco-systems, and I like to work on the same project for longer periods of time, by constantly iterating and improving things. I love how platforms like Medium, Pinterest and the like are always evolving the smallest details and constantly improving on their designs.

I could never have imagined that when I began my career, I was constantly about new things, but now the new thing, is a small detail that makes for a better experience for users. What I find amusing is that we used to redesign, and then make a big deal about it. But now we keep changing things, subtly as if no one will really notice, the site just kinda feels better. As they say, the only thing that is constant, is change.

Material Wealth

If you are interested in learning user interface and user experience design techniques, then a good place to start, given the wealth of useful knowledge shared, is the Material Design site by Google.

We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is material design. This spec is a living document that will be updated as we continue to develop the tenets and specifics of material design.

I consider myself fairly seasoned when it comes to interaction design, but if for no other reason than learning how to articulate the points made, Material Design has plenty of learnings, information and inspiration.

Focus on the project, not awards

It’s my opinion that creatives in the ad industry are focussed on the wrong things and they’ve lost site of the experience you go through actually working on projects. Too often I hear people start a project with statements like, “we need an award winning idea”, “this is an award winning campaign” and “this is the agencies Cannes entry” and honestly while it makes sense to keep your eye on the prize, let’s not forget the journey, so to speak.

I guess however, I can only really talk for myself. So I’ll try and explain things as I see them. I enjoy being recognized by my peers, the industry and even our clients. I love my FWA certificate, my Pixel Award etc. it’s good for my career, good for my reputation, my ego even. Most importantly, awards are good for business.

But I enjoy making stuff even more. I’m a journey guy, I appreciate what I and the team I work with go through on a day to day process as we craft our project. Sure there’s a lot of headaches in between, but getting us through that shows the kind of metal we’re made from. Each iteration we go through, every step we go through, brings us another step closer and sometimes further from our end goal, passionately pushing around pixels, debating ideas and figuring out the code. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me excited to do what I do every day.

Of course if you know me, although I see work as play, it’s not all work, I’m a clown, I always have time to laugh, to make an ass of myself, pull pranks and to do midnight food runs. We play together and we hurt together, but we’re in it together and those bonds are the lasting ones.

So I’d be so brave as to suggest you put on your big boy pants, you roll up your sleeves to get the job done and forget about your shiny shoes and monkey suit. Enjoy your work, stop focussing purely on the end reward, if you do great work that should be reward enough, and besides when you do great work, more often than not, you will get the recognition you deserve.

Legocy

Today is Mandela Day in which we celebrate on Nelson Mandela’s birthday every year. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share with you the Legocy project which I had a hand in earlier this year.

In support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, YouTube asked agencies to enter a competition by making a short film as a tribute to Nelson Mandela. The smart folk at Quirk Jozi came up with doing a short Lego stop frame animation to one of Nelson Mandela’s most famous speeches. The hope is to get enough signatures and send a request to Lego to make a Freedom Fighters Lego set. As I have been collecting Lego for a personal project for a while, I was asked to help with the cast, and of course being such a huge Lego fan, I jumped at the opportunity to have a play date with the team at Quirk. In addition I helped build them a responsive one-page site, provided the domain and hosting. They won the competition, and below is the end product.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tdheV2I_Vw?rel=0]

Please add your name to the list www.legocy.co.za

Handoff

On Monday 2nd June, Apple announced new operating systems for their computer and touch devices, OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. There are many new features, but something that stood out for me was Handoff.

Handoff

Now your Mac knows the last thing you were doing on your iOS device and vice versa. So you can start something on one device and instantly pick it up on another.

With the ability to start surfing a website on your desktop and then immediately jump onto your iPad, responsive design has never been more important. This experience is going to become seamless and I’ll bet we’ll all wonder how we ever lived without this feature, but if your site is not properly responsive or dare I say, it’s not responsive at all, the users journey might be cut short. So any developers who have not yet learnt responsive techniques and to any site owners who have not made an update, perhaps it’s about time.

Crafting Digital

Last week the digital industry came together to celebrate the 2013 bookmarks awards and it’s great to see some great work being produced.The focus seems to be integrating campaigns and more around the idea, as it should be. But I feel that there isn’t a very high standard of traditional digital craft.

I went through all the award-winning work on 10 and 5 and there are only a handful of agencies who are really standing out for me. The thing that stood out most is that no one is caring enough about craft. Most of the supporting sites on campaigns aren’t great and simply functional. But there’s no real love for beautiful design, clever code, fast loading mobile friendly sites or any advances in technology. Hardly any of the sites I visited were responsive, reduced in file size or anything resembling the standard of design I have a spent an entire career trying to replicate. The best designed stuff came out of Ogilvy Cape Town, who are a traditional Ad agency, but in my opinion, in the running for the top digital agency too. Not that I’d take anything away from the teams at HelloComputer, Native VML and Quirk who are really coming into their own and crossing that line between traditional digital and integrated full service agencies.

At the end of the day, I totally understand that clients don’t really care about using SVG graphics so that things scale beautifully on retina displays and are tiny in file size, but as the digital industry, we should care, we need to set the standard. If work cannot be crafted by the time it needs to launch, the beauty of digital is that it’s easy enough to polish after the launch and we can always continue to refine our stuff and let’s be honest, if we are going to use it to promote ourselves, then you don’t need a budget signed off to show your work some love.

What I’d like to see from the bookmarks are categories that look at high quality web design and development, best interfaces, mobile apps etc. These need to follow best practices, be light, adaptive and certainly not follow the cooky-cutter format most of them currently have. They also need judges who understand this. While I have a huge amount of respect for the senior representatives from the previous winning agencies, they are not necessarily qualified to be judging work that is technically brilliant as important as it is aesthetically pleasing.

I like that the bookmarks award individuals in categories like User Experience Designer and Strategist, but what about best interface designer, digital designer, front-end developer and so on.

I feel bad writing a post like this, because I have never entered the bookmarks, I also haven’t been producing as much work over the past few years, but I do believe in craft and I do believe in our industry, so whether I’m producing the work or not, I feel I have a responsibility to motivate the industry to do better work. Yes I’m a kak writer, my rambling here isn’t going to inspire much, but if the lack of gold compared to the huge amount of bronze awards are a sign, the level of work is worse than my writing, with the exception of a handful of talented folk, we have a way to go, so let’s not forget about craft.