Bob Wertz

This post was originally posted on September 12, 2016 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Real jobs have deadlines.

As a designer, I hear “As Soon As Possible” an awful lot. Most people are shocked to learn that ASAP is actually my lowest priority. Jobs with concrete deadlines are always in line ahead of jobs with no real deadline.

Understanding why the client needs something ASAP is the first step in understanding whether you are dealing with a crisis or a “crisis.” There are a couple of reasons why clients avoid giving you a real deadline:

When can you get it to me? If the client is asking you to set a deadline, the project probably doesn’t have a firm due date. It likely needs to be done quickly, but they don’t want to look stupid and throw out a date that is impossible. Or they are hesitant to suggest a date that is too far out in the future. So they throw it back to you. In that case, sit down and start developing a schedule that works for everyone. If they need it faster, they’ll let you know in the process of setting the timeline.

Everything is a rush! For some clients, everything is a rush. Every email is marked high priority. So don’t overreact and rush into the project. Ask for a specific timeline. This is client’s normal operating procedure so stick to yours. If it’s a real rush, they will tell you.

It’s going to take forever! Some clients have no idea how long a project is going to take. So they are anxious to get started. Asking for a deadline will diagnose that immediately. I once had a client call in a panic and rushed over to meet them only to find out that we had four months to complete a simple poster series. Crisis averted.

My boss wants it now! Sometimes, the client is panicked because their boss is on their back. They may not even know when the project is really needed. Work with them to set a schedule to share with their manager. Have them confirm the schedule will meet the manager’s needs and get back to you. 99% of the time, the manager will be fine with the schedule.

I need it yesterday! Some clients ask for the world. And the ability to travel back in time. Setting a timeline is important here, but so are problem solving skills. I’ve seen clients ask for 50,000 brochures on a very short turn, only to find out it was because they needed 1,000 for a trade show. (We ran the 1,000. Then ran the larger print run later.) The clients are typically panicked and aren’t thinking straight. By focusing on the timeline, you can help them figure out what they really need and give them the best solution for their problem.

Sometimes, the client really is asking for the impossible. Tell them. But here’s the key, after you tell them that you can’t meet their deadline, tell them what you can do for them.

Oops! Sometimes the client makes a mistake and forgets to make a request or communicate a deadline. And this is where you can play the hero. Set a timeline for how to get them what they need and do your best to help them out.

Designers drop the ball sometimes, too. If it’s your fault, apologize and own the mistake. Then, move heaven and earth to make it right.

In every single one of these scenarios, communication is key. Be up front about the schedule, challenges and costs. Remember that the client is often under a lot of pressure and may not be thinking straight. Most importantly, don’t take the ASAP request personally. Just view it as what it is… an opportunity to save the day and build a better relationship with your client.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on March 23, 2016 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

All professionals need a personalized email address and a home on the web. And Gmail accounts and Facebook pages don’t count.

I saw a branding consultant recently without a branded email address. Who hires a brand consultant who doesn’t invest in their own brand? I saw a company trying to recruit managers… just email an AOL account. (In case you are wondering, the company wasn’t recruiting for AOL.) I was trying to find out information on a store in town and all they had was a Facebook page that hadn’t been updated in a couple of months. I don’t really care what your business is — from a home-based business to a large corporation — if you don’t have a real email address with your own domain name, I’m less likely to take you seriously. And if your only web presence is a Facebook page, you don’t have a real business.

Look. I get it. It’s easy to get by with the free accounts. A penny saved is a penny earned. Absolutely. But investing in a domain name and a Google apps account? It’s not that expensive. Without your own domain, you send a message to all your clients and potential clients that you can’t or won’t invest in your own company.

It used to take some effort to get on the Web a decade ago, but now, services like Squarespace provide great solutions for small businesses and take care of hosting, e-commerce and more. Like Gmail? That’s fine. You can customize your address with Google Apps. Other services like Hover can help you get your domain and email set up. There are seriously hundreds of services to help you look professional. It’s not that hard and not that expensive.

Having a professional online appearance is every bit as important as dressing appropriately or speaking intelligently. It’s a necessary investment that lets people know that you are serious about your business.

Unless you aren’t serious about your business. And then, I guess, any email address or website will do.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on November 13, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

I get asked a lot what it’s like to have three kids. Mostly from people with two kids thinking about whether they want to have another. Sometimes, the question comes from younger couples who are thinking about having kids.¹ And I always struggle to answer.

My standard answer is that when you have three kids, you have to switch from man-to-man to zone. You lose a little control. You are outnumbered. And while that is completely accurate, it sounds scary and intimidating, which isn’t at all what I want to communicate. I love having three kids.

My other answer is that with three kids, how far apart they are really matters. I’ve had friends with three kids under four years old. For us, our oldest was seven when her brother was born. Those are two radically different situations. But that doesn’t really answer the question.

Sunday morning, an interaction with the kids gave me the answer I was missing. We were waking up and getting ready for church.

Middle child: What are we doing for breakfast?

Me: I don’t know. We’ll probably have a small breakfast now and maybe go to brunch after church.

Youngest: WHAT! We can’t go to a restaurant! We need to go to church! (He LOVES Sunday School.)

Me: We are going to church. We might go out to eat after church.

Youngest: Why can’t we eat at church?

Me: Because they aren’t serving breakfast at church.²

Oldest (from another room): We’re having breakfast at church?!?

And that’s what it’s like having three kids — like adding a person to a game of telephone. It gets a little bit crazier. Funnier. Unpredictable. Often delightful and occasionally frustrating. But never boring.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on September 29, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A few years ago, I stopped at a fast food restaurant in rural, upstate South Carolina where a car was circling the drive thru over and over and over. She’d drive up to the ordering station and wait a second. Then the car would drive to the window, pause, and then drive around again. This happened a couple of times. It was very strange.

When I walked in, I nodded toward the car at the window and asked what was going on. The woman shrugged, obviously embarrassed, and said “Just improving the drive thru wait times…”

Lots of people wonder how something like the Volkswagen ¹ emissions test scandal can happen. It’s actually very simple:

1. Set a specific goal.
2. Figure out a test to measure it: a survey, a timer, a standardized test, etc.
3. Make sure everyone knows how important the test is.
4. Provide rewards for people who achieve the test objectives. And penalize people who don’t meet the test objectives.
5. Smart people will eventually figure out how to do well on the test, even if it now has nothing to do with the original goal.
6. Management pats themselves on the back for great test results.
7. The test no longer reflects reality.

This cycle is everywhere in business today and manifests itself in different ways. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve fraud and cheating. But this process is why:

1. Engineers design products (cars, cell phones, etc.) that meet specific test objectives, but not real life usage.
2. Customer service reps in banks, car dealerships and retail stores remind you over and over to answer “highly satisfied” on a random survey.
3. Teachers teach to the test.
4. Managers make short sighted decisions to stay under budget.
5. Advertisers make really annoying online ads to improve click through rates.
6. Fast food workers fake drive thru response times.

If you connect success on a metric to an employee’s financial well being, that employee will change their behavior to meet the test objectives. And yes, sometimes, if the pressure is great enough, they cheat.

I’m sure those fast food workers wanted to have good drive thru response times to make their boss happy. I doubt there was a financial incentive. Maybe if the boss was happy, their life would be easier. Or perhaps they were afraid of being fired. Whatever the reason, they cheated to meet their test objectives. They lost sight of — or more likely, were never told — the reason for the test.

The test itself isn’t the problem. Testing and evaluation is a key part of management in a corporate environment. But today, it’s really easy to test and measure everything. Over reliance on metrics in management makes the test more important than the goal. And that never ends well.

You’ll simply get what you test for.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on May 14, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Why are so many people and organizations obsessed with acronyms? Especially acronyms that spell another word. From small nonprofits and churches to schools and large corporations, really bad acronyms are everywhere.

NASA’s Messenger Probe crashed into Mercury after a long and successful mission. And as I read CNN’s account of the mission, I was stunned by the fifth paragraph:

Messenger (an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) was launched in 2004 and traveled more than 6½ years before it started circling Mercury on March 18, 2011.

Wait. So the Messenger probe is actually M.E.S.S.E.N.G.E.R.? Or is it Me.S.S.En.Ge.R.?

NASA designed a space probe to fly to a planet named after the messenger of the gods. And NASA feels like they need to construct some bogus acronym to justify the name “Messenger.”

Acronyms are fine if they really help people remember and understand the program or product name. But in most cases, the acronym simply becomes a name and slowly loses all connection to the meaning.

And the worse case scenario is that you are so obsessed with creating an acronym, that you select a poor name in the process. Avoid creating acronyms just to be clever or just to justify a name choice.

Your best bet is always to give products, organizations and programs strong, appropriate names.

–

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on August 5, 2013 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A little math problem for you…

One 15-minute PowerPoint¹ presentation has 5 slides. Another 15-minute PowerPoint presentation has 15 slides. Which presentation is shorter?

Obviously, both are 15-minute presentations. They are the same length.

But time and again, I talk to people who reduce the number of slides in their PowerPoint because they want to make the presentation “shorter.” They think that if they have fewer slides, they will talk for a shorter amount of time. Often, they don’t take material out, as much as they condense it on the remaining slides.²

That’s completely the wrong way to think about it.

Next time you have a presentation, think about how long you have to present and build your story to fill the allotted time. Then create an appropriate number of slides to support your presentation. You may have more slides and move through them quickly. Or only a handful of slides.

But remember that the length of your presentation has almost nothing to do with how many slides you have.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This post was originally posted on June 1, 2009 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

One of the defining design characteristics of a ship in the Star Trek Universe is the forward viewscreen. And in the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek, the entire concept of the viewscreen has also been reimagined.

By looking at how our vision of the future has evolved, we can often learn more about how we as a society have changed. And I think by looking at how the concept of the viewscreen has changed over the last four decades, I think we can draw some conclusions about how we have changed as culture and where we are going.

The Original Viewscreen

In Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek TV Show, the view screen was primarily a giant screen showing the outside. Very rarely, the screen would be used to show scientific data.

At the time, in the late 60’s, that concept was enough to seem futuristic. TV’s were still a relatively young technology. A screen that size providing live pictures with the ability to show content from the ship’s computer… That was the future. Computers were room-sized devices with limited capabilities. The whole concept would have seemed very advanced.

The expectation was that interaction with a large viewscreen would be passive. It was something to watch, more like a TV than a computer interface.

To the big screen and back to the small screen

When the Star Trek series moved to the big screen in the late 70’s and into the 80’s, the viewscreen concept was only slightly refined. The expectation was still that the viewscreen provided a passive experience. Some odd touches were added, like a digital clock over the screen.

With the success of the movie franchise, Star Trek: The Next Generation launched into syndicated television. Because the series took place even further in the future, they took the established concepts and “enhanced” the technology. The viewscreen evolved, but only from a technical level. The screen was now “holographic.” (Note: I’m assuming this means the images were more realistic.)

The way the crew actually used and interacted with the screen was still passive and static. And through the three series that followed, the viewscreen never really did much more than provide pretty pictures.

Reimagining the Viewscreen

When Abrams and crew started work on the reboot, they faced a challenge of honoring the style of the past and while projecting a modern, futuristic feel:

We had the weird challenge of having to take a 43 year old vision of the future and make it a current vision of the future. I wanted the movie to feel as tactile and tangible and as real as possible, but given what our computer interfaces are like now, its preposterous to assume that hundreds of years from now there won’t be some version of holographic screens and things that seem almost ubiquitous now in science fiction.

-Abrams in an interview with Memory Alpha

We as a culture have evolved to expect more from our “viewscreens.” Many of our TV channels have crawls and information graphics. Look at what CNN produced during the elections or what ESPN News does on a daily basis. Our computers provide constant updates. Even our cars and phones have interactive interfaces. We expect modern screens to do more than just show us pictures. We expect them to inform us.

That old concept of a passive viewscreen has been discarded in the new Star Trek movie. The giant viewscreen acts as a heads up display for the ship. Warnings, current speed, the health of the away team, status of the ship and more appear over the top of the screen. And the information that is provided is contextual, only appearing when needed or applicable.

We have become a viewscreen culture

Looking at the new Star Trek viewscreen, it feels futuristic. And what that really means is that it feels like a radically advanced version of where we are now.

I think that we have become a viewscreen culture. We have become comfortable interacting with screens in a way that wasn’t comprehended in the late 60’s and wasn’t fully understood even in the 80’s and 90’s. In fact, we are more than just comfortable. We now expect our screens to provide us information and feedback.

As the web, digital television, phones and computers evolve, our cultural expectations of the screens and surfaces around us with continue to change and evolve. We as designers are already starting to see this. People expect more from their web sites and other digital interfaces. They expect these tools to interact with them. To provide the information they need when they need it.

What designers need to remember is that this is just the beginning. People will continue to become more and more comfortable with screen-based content. And we must continue to push the limits of the medium to provide the interaction and capabilities that our society is beginning to expect.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.