Featured Post
Your Client is Not Simple, Stupid
To call your client stupid is a self-fulfilling prophesy. After all, they hired you.
Your clients don’t know as much about design and technology as you do. Some may be completely befuddled. The disparity between what you know and what they know will always exist. Instead of looking at this gap as a comical gulf of ignorance, view it as a reminder of why your services are valuable to them. Then consider how valuable they are to you. If you’re in the business of selling design or development services, you need clients. The checks they write pay your salary so you can afford cool typefaces, legal copies of Adobe software, and oh yeah…things like food, utilities and shelter. It’s on their behalf that we’re commissioned to architect the digital world.
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Other Recent Posts
On Paying Your Dues
Advancing your career will take time and hard work, but exploitation should not be a prerequisite for success.
If you ask a lot of the people running companies what their employees want, they’ll probably say they want more money, more time off, and a cushy promotion. So that’s how a lot of jobs are structured: you’ve got to start at the bottom, and work your way up. You’re expected to pay your dues. This may be fine if you’re driven by the desire to get a corner office and raise, but what if you have different goals? Perhaps you’re motivated by the potential to continue learning, the pursuit of mastery in your craft, or the yearning to contribute to a greater vision. Opportunities like these abound, but you need to have them in your sights. In other words, if you were on a ship rowing oars all day, wouldn’t you insist on knowing where it’s headed? The same goes for the work you do. You can pound out design and code, and put in 80 hour weeks, but to what end? Paying your dues and paddling away day after day doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get any closer to your goals.
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Respect Your Colleagues
Even though we know better than to throw each other under the bus, trash talking among web designers is common. What are the repercussions of this bad behavior, and why are we so compelled to do it?
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