Surviving the Recession With Your Reputation Intact

When we were running Saltmine and Lux, we never liked sending employees out to tech industry functions. There was rarely new business to be found there—the entire purpose is a different kind of commerce, oriented toward expanding personal networks. During the go-go dotcom days, the people who I met at those events were either trying to sell me their services (legal, accounting, investing, etc,) or recruiters trying to convince our attending managers to join competing organizations. I even got recruited myself a few times, until the person I was speaking with found out that I owned the business.

In the latest version of the economy, the networking event persists, but with a different spin. In an environment where people are told that their bonus for 2009 is “You get to keep your job,” and with the sophistication and spread of social media, the nature of networking and employment is changing significantly. I’ve attended a few events recently, and have seen and heard some things that bode ill for employees and employers alike.

At a recent business networking gathering at the W in San Francisco, I met the usual handful of vendors looking for new accounts, but the bulk of the folks I spoke with were looking for new jobs. Most were employed, but once it was established that I wasn’t hiring, the conversation turned to the perceived shortfalls of their current position. I’ve heard a lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about their jobs, but have been recently hearing some new twists.

The idea of ‘being lucky to have a job’ at all has gained traction with some organizations. While it’s generally better to be employed than not employed, the ‘lucky’ notion grown into an excuse and a tool for management and ownership to freeze and drop wages, and for companies to eliminate perks and benefits. In tight economic times, this is understandable and even essential for companies that are intent on surviving.

However, there seems to be callousness and opportunism on the part of some employers that hasn’t been as evident in the past—or at least not to this extent. I’m hearing a lot of stories (remember, this is all anecdotal!) of junior staff or interns put on major projects for major clients, of people required to work longer hours under the cover of non-exempt employee status, or, in a very common tactic, being required to cover positions formerly staffed by several people.  At the same time, wages and increases—even cost of living increases—are being suppressed, with the recession as the excuse. The churn that would normally result from these practices is held in check by the poor hiring environment—for now.

Although beneficial to the bottom line, and perhaps necessary in this economy, this is a short-sighted strategy. As the economy continues to recover, and as companies begin to rehire and revisit expansion plans, a great game of musical chairs will begin in the job market. Some savvy organizations ( like Accenture) recognize this, and have begun to strategically dole out double-digit-percentage salary increases to staff who have been bearing the burden of working a position and a half, or worse. That’s a smart thing to do, as it will go a long way to placate people who have been unhappy about frozen wages and overwork. The process of finding a new position is difficult and unpleasant, and most people would prefer to stay put if they feel that they’re compensated and appreciated. Even a modest gesture in that direction from an employer can do great things for employee retention.

Appreciation and respect are crucial for retaining people in times when cash for compensation is in short supply. Institutionalizing practices that don’t consider the global ramifications of employee retention will cause long-term organizational damage in clear and not so clear ways:  First, the obvious: companies that don’t treat their folks well (particularly while asking these people to make economic or professional concessions to the economy) are running the risk of unwanted employee attrition as the economy recovers.

The more unusual problem results from the easy information flow provided by social media. Policies that seem expedient, and can be explained or rationalized in one on one situations or in closed company meetings, can be viewed as transparent and self-serving in the light of day—and social media has made the light of day broader and more accessible than in any other era of business. Worse, senior management and ownership are often from a pre-internet era, and aren’t aware that tales of business practices can circulate on the internet almost before they’ve adjourned a staff meeting.

In the same way that high school freshmen must now think of their internet activity as a visible part of their permanent record, business owners and managers are operating in a more transparent, permanent, and distributed environment. For unhappy employees, sitting around with a couple of friends at the corner bar, complaining about your job has now gone global. Websites like jobvent.com (and I picked this one at random from among dozens) are publicly airing formerly private information, and at a minimum are a soap box for disgruntled employees.

Right or wrong, this information will go away slowly, if at all. Social media and the lateral motion of data are having a profound effect on the availability and permanence of information. For companies that have been bad actors in the employee relations area (or who have fairly or unfairly gotten a reputation for poor employee practices), the process of rehiring or expanding in good economic times may be hindered.

Of course, employers take a dim view of the public airing of dirty laundry. People have complained in their Facebook profile about their jobs or managers (and been fired for it), and in the same way that a company can leave a record of poor employee practices, an individual can leave a trail of being difficult to work with, a complainer, or worse, with just a few entries on Twitter.

In 2004 or so, I was speaking to a graduating class in Advertising at the University of Washington. When discussing the process of vetting applicants, I mentioned that part of our initial sorting of resumes involved doing a web search for the applicant, and taking a look at their social media sites. It seems hard to believe in 2010, but at the time, the idea that an employer would look at their MySpace pages and photos drew a collective gasp from the 70 or so students in the auditorium. (I enjoyed this, as it was one of the only times I’ve ever heard an actual collective gasp.) I’d like to think that this information was helpful to those folks as they headed out into the market. I’d also like to think that students and job applicants of all sorts are now taking care to monitor their online image and reputation (there was an article in this morning’s New York Times that dealt with teaching grade-school students about the permanence of their online activities).

Although large companies have been aware of this for some time, it’s important for small businesses to be aware of the same thing—that like it or not, their company has both a planned and and unplanned reputation on the internet that needs to be managed.  For people and companies, bad marks are harder than good ones to erase, ignore, or outgrow.

Coffee and a Newspaper, or Whatever

This morning, I stopped for coffee at my favorite spot in sleepy North Berkeley. The place was filled with folks enjoying coffee, breakfast, and conversation, and like any coffee shop, there were some people catching up on the news. I noticed that out of about 25 people in the place, there were only a couple of people looking at a newspaper. Several folks had laptops out, but even more people (I counted eight) were eating breakfast while reading stuff on iPhones.

I do the same thing, and it’s not easy. Reading and scrolling while sitting on a couch or on a bus is no problem, but reading and eating (which I learned to do about ten minutes after I learned to read) is problematic because screen size and distance isn’t ideal when your device is sitting on a table in front of you. Still, there they were, everybody reading away, moving a finger to scroll down on their tiny screens every few moments.

My guess is that next year, that room is going to look considerably different. The iPad came out yesterday, and before long, we’ll start seeing people brandishing them here and there. Like the iPhone, and the iPod before that, it’s hard to tell from here how people are going to integrate the product into their lives. One safe guess is that it’ll be a great hand-held reading device with a screen size comparable to a hardback book or small magazine. On top of that, the first content provision deals that have been signed have involved periodicals—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Marvel Comics—and if the pricing models meet with readers’ approval, those old-world publications might get a fresh breath of life.

The form factor is also impressive—thin, easy to handle, and beautifully designed, it immediately makes laptops, Amazon’s Kindle, and most other portable devices look clunky, clumsy, and old fashioned. The Apple product designers are really good at that. It’s also a mistake to apply previous paradigms to this device. I’ve read the complaint that it’s too big to use as a handheld, and too small to be an effective computer, but that’s missing the point. This is a new thing, and looking at it through the lens of previous technology will be limiting. The iPad’s also not the only game in town—there will be competing products, and upgrades to the iPad software and hardware (Where’s the multitasking? Where’s the camera?).

Lots of folks are going to be buying and using iPads, and the results are going to be limited by the imaginations of the users and application developers. It’s an easy guess that the folks who were squinting down at the tiny iPhone screens in the café today will be sitting up straighter and reading larger, better-formatted type on an iPad as they catch up with the news. It’ll be fun to watch how the iPad moves into peoples’ lives over the next year. I’ll write another story next Easter to report on what Café Roma patrons are using to read the news. I typed the first draft of this on my iPhone—and I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll be using to type the follow up post next year.

BANG! Just kidding.

In honor of the successful restartup of the Large Hadron Collidor, I’m re-posting an entry from the Lux blog, originally written on 9.10.08. Actual new blog content will be forthcoming.

We at Lux congratulate the scientists from the CERN Particle Physics center  in Europe for successfully erecting the Large Hadron Collider. At a cost of ten billion dollars, the LHC represents the most expensive and most ambitious attempt that mankind has made to peer into the origins and mechanisms of the universe. Over the next few years, look forward to a series of barely-comprehensible, yet fascinating stories to be dumbed-down and reported to us as a human interest story by astonished-sounding local news anchors.

People being people, though, not everyone is happy about this new peek into the fabric of reality. A contingent of The Concerned has become more and more vocal, insisting that this will lead to the end of the world. The naysayers are an interesting mix of folks—the usual handful of contrarian scientists who gather a bit of the spotlight by providing ‘opposing viewpoints,’ has been amplified by the Easily Scared…the same folks who have basements full of eight year old MREs left over from when the world ended on January 1, 2000.

Mix those folks in with the anti-science contingent (I’m talking to YOU, Kansas  and to YOU, Florida ) and you get an entertainingly vocal bunch of torch-bearing villagers who are up in arms about the “European Time Machine” and its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the Big Bang.

Will The Concerned and the Easily Scared stop the Large Hadron Collider? It’s doubtful. Are they right that it could spell the end of the universe (as we know it)? Also doubtful. Just in case, though, It’s probably a good idea to check in from time to time with a site called “Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?” which can easily be found at http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Good to Work With

What is it that makes you want to work with someone? If you’re a hiring manager, you look at qualifications, skills, and experience: all empirical information that lays a base for someone looking to fill a position. Past that, though, what I have always looked for is the person who will be good to work with. Particularly for key positions, this person will be someone who you’ll interact with every day, who you will count on to solve problems, who you’ll be brainstorming with as your team works to advance the work of the organization.

The person you’re looking for is someone who will solve a particular set of needs in your company. Sometimes you’re looking to balance weaknesses in your existing team, or to fill holes in your organization’s skill set. When you evaluate candidates, you’re looking at them with the outline of that position in mind. There’s no way that they can fully understand the set of problems that you’re looking to solve with your hire. There’s no perfect applicant, and it’s up to you as the hiring manager to measure and rank your needs against an applicant’s skills, and to make the best hire that you can given your budget and the available pool of applicants.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of job candidates over the years, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve interviewed good, bad, and mediocre candidates, made lots of good hires, a few great hires, and a few hires that I wish I’d thought harder about. I’ve spoken to a lot of candidates’ references, given a few references myself, and had a chance to evaluate many individuals’ job performance against their resume, interview skills, and references.

If there’s one common aspect of all of the good and great hires that I’ve made, it’s the phrase ‘good to work with.”

Talent, experience, and body of work mean a lot less if they’re not backed up by an ability to work and play well with others. I’ve worked with talented folks who, for whatever reason, were not able to get along with coworkers, who were difficult to collaborate with, or who just rubbed people the wrong way.

When it’s in the interest of the organization, it’s possible to tolerate a highly talented individual who’s a jerk—but not indefinitely. There’s always a cost: morale and productivity can be affected, and if the individual is toxic enough, their presence can open up questions of managements’ ability to hire well and to maintain a positive work environment.

When I talk with employees entering the workforce, my advice includes discussion of their field (usually design), advice about how to work with customers, how to work within an organization—the usual sort of thing. As design schools turn out more and more graduates, and as the ranks of design applicants swell with people who are able to use software (as opposed to being trained designers) I have seen the position of designer become more of a commodity.  Note that I’m not happy about this, but that other than running your own organization in a way that emphasizes the craft of design, there’s not a lot that can be done about it.

This leaves the aspiring designer to be evaluated on intangibles when interviewing. Assuming that they are showing a competent portfolio, the interviewer will be looking at hard skills brought to the table: technical competence and professional accomplishment, for instance. However, even those are commodities. There are lots of skilled builders around, and lots of experienced folks. So how is a designer able to make the leap from skilled technician to valued employee and collaborator?

The applicant can let the interviewer know that they will be someone who will be good to work with by demonstrating an understanding that the soft skills involved in design (or most other professions, for that matter) are understood and valued. Listening skills, a service orientation, and above all, empathy for what other people are experiencing as they go about their work will let an interviewer know that they are talking with someone who they’ll want to collaborate with, and work with every day.

Rising to the Challenge

 The more interesting and complex work becomes, the more interesting and complex problems there are that we’re called on to solve. The more people we deal with, the more difficult personalities we’re statistically bound to encounter and the more frustration can ensue.

Early-career folks sometimes mistake dealing with problems in workflow and dealing with demanding, and perhaps unreasonable clients as impediments to getting their work done. The longer I’m around in the design and technology service industry (coming up on 25 years now) the more it’s sinking in that dealing with those problems and those clients is the work that we’re called on to do.

If you’re managing a team of creative individuals, this is something to keep a close eye on. It’s human nature to complain about things, but when indulged or ignored, it will spread, and when unchecked lead to a culture of complaint in your organization. This doesn’t benefit anyone—your business, your employees, your clients, or your reputation as a manager.

Dealing with aggrieved people requires positive action and education—it’s one of the times where stepping up as a manager and displaying leadership in negotiating the difficulties can set a good example and make a difference for your team. Acknowledging difficulty in a project or with a client is important to do at the outset, followed by a reframing of the situation.

I am more and more becoming a fan of the word ‘challenging’ and the concept that it represents. When a project or a client is challenging (as opposed to ‘difficult’ or ‘wrong’) it leaves room for you to have an effect on the situation, to manufacture a positive outcome. This is a necessary viewpoint in order for your company or group to do good work—an understanding that they have the capability to meet the clients’ needs and at the end of the project, render the difficulties moot with a successful result.

There’s no perfect job, and no perfect client. I’ve spoken to many designers over the years who expressed variations on the notion that they just wanted to be left alone, to sit and design—to have someone slide work under the door, do their work, and slide the completed work back out again. Unfortunately, that position doesn’t exist. We’re all called upon to perform tasks that we might prefer not to do, or to perform tasks in a different way than we’d prefer.

For a designer, developer, or other creative worker, learning to deal with that reality in a graceful and productive way is one of the soft skills that will make you more valuable in your profession over time—and save you a lot of frustration in the long run.

Clear Design: Icons (Part Two)

Although the icon is capable of doing a great deal of heavy lifting in an interface, the more complex the action it represents is, the less effective it becomes. Moreover, the designer’s skill in representing and rendering the concept also affects its usefulness.

Let’s use the ‘delete’ function as an example.  If your ‘delete’ icon is a button with a big, clear ‘X’ on it, it will work as an excellent indicator of what will happen if you hit that button. Using the program or the website becomes easy—look for the big ‘X’ to delete a file. Nice and simple, right?

Now say that you work as a designer for the company across the road that makes a competing product. There needs to be a delete function into the interface, and what could be clearer than a big ‘X’?  The problem is, you can’t have the same icon as a competitor, so the big ‘X’ is out, and already the interface team is on the road away from standardization.

Someone on the team suggests a wastebasket, another person suggests a backwards arrow, another a pair of scissors. Even assuming that the team can settle on an illustratable object, the designer’s skill is tested as they attempt to render a realistic-looking item within the constraints of the icon (which, for uses like this, often need to be as tiny as 16 pixels square). Remember, we’re talking about a simple concept like ‘delete.’ There are far more complex ones that require a lot of ingenuity to design and sometimes a lot of puzzling to decode. Even looking at the WordPress menu to my left, I see that they gamely came up with icons for simple to illustrate concepts like ‘Media’ and ‘Links,’ but balked at ‘Ratings’ and ‘Polls,’ preferring to go with simple sphere images.

The problem is compounded when you move from the world of professional software interface design to the world of designing websites for clients. Because icons are ubiquitous, and because visual things are often easier to discuss and grasp when working in unfamiliar areas, many web design clients approach their projects with the idea that they would like to use icons as navigational elements in their site. This approach works for some concepts, but not for others. An easy-to-illustrate action like ‘mail’ will need to sit next to a more slippery conceptual action or area, like ‘learn,’ ‘investors,’ or ‘opportunities.’ This can not only affect usability (if you think of each website as a software application) but also skew the design and readability as the user interrupts their experience with the site to puzzle out what that little picture is supposed to mean.

Icon design is one of those things that looks and sounds easy, but which will challenge even the most experienced designer/illustrator. When an icon falls short of indicating its function to the user, it decreases effectiveness and functionality. Each step you take away from the easily recognizable and easily understood makes it more difficult for the end user to use your product. It is the responsibility of the designer and project manager to work carefully with the client to ensure that plans for icons in a web or software interface make sense. In other words, are you putting a little picture there because it serves the end user, or because you like little pictures?

Relating image to function becomes more difficult the more complex the concept becomes. When designing web interfaces, it’s always best to work with the client to help keep the end user in mind.

“If you work really hard, and you’re kind…”

There’s not a lot of time spent talking these days about virtuous speech. Not pretend virtue, like the stuff that you hear from the professionally religious, but honestly expressed talk about how certain types of behavior benefit society at large, as well as the individuals doing the behaving.

In the Olden Days, there was a sort of aspirational good behavior, basic civics and manners, that was popular in the era when major daily newspapers still had a society column. That’s been fading out slowly since the sixties, and the stubborn hangers-on to that tradition (like Miss Manners) have had to cloak themselves in ironic distance to get away with it. 

For years, public advocacy for civil behavior has been the nearly exclusive property of those with something to gain from controlling the behavior of others, whether in a reasonable and pragmatic sense (school teachers and administration, for instance) or in a cynical and calculating sense (televangelists whose bottom line depends on keeping the faithful in line and writing checks), or even more cynically, religious extremists who are promoting the idea that only people who believe in their particular god are equipped with a functional moral compass. The business of feigning shock at others’ speech or actions has become a mainstay for a certain type of public individual (an easy example of this is the outrage! over the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. There are dozens of others to choose from).

Just as any credence in global warming has become identified with the political Left, talking about Good Behavior, has become identified with certain other agendas—the political Right, the religious scold, or those of an authoritarian temperament. Those who quietly set a good example are by and large invisible, perhaps because they’re not as interesting to the media and society at large as those whose behavior is more transgressive.

Conversations about the benefits of behaving well have been taken over by public scolds for as long as I can remember. So much so, that even now I tend to tune out anyone speaking about good behavior, writing the messenger off as someone with an axe to grind. That’s why I was delighted when, following the foolish sideshow surrounding the future of the Tonight Show a few weeks ago, a beautifully spoken sentiment emerged when Conan O’Brien said, “I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

I don’t have a single thing to add to that. I’m just delighted that a high profile American entertainer enmeshed in what could have been a public pissing match with his rivals and erstwhile employers publicly advocated hard work and kindness as a path to success. Good for him.

The Business Plan Problem

I’m not a fan of business plans.

I’ve written a number of them, and I’ve reviewed many more. They’ve got their uses, of course—they’re good for getting your thoughts in order, to assemble needed steps and startup process, or for making a list of considerations as you begin or continue a new venture. They’re also useful for trying to get people to give you money or support. What they’re not good for is planning your business.

Every new venture is born of some combination of vision, optimism, and healthy avarice, and a typical business plan overflows with all three. The plan for a fledgling business predicts a rosy future, a perfect world filled with people lining up with handfuls of cash. I have seen some listing a risk factor of “not able to keep up with demand.”

Many business plans take place in a perfect world constructed in the author’s fondest hopes, using a calculation that I’ve seen so often that I’ve come to recognize it as standard business plan math: “Ten million people in the country enjoy (something broadly related to the offer at hand). If only one percent of those people sign up for (our offering) at $10 each, that’s a million dollars in revenue right off the bat.” Needless to say, this is not a strong argument for most savvy investors.

Another common feature of business plans that I’ve reviewed is naiveté. In the same way that experienced businessmen ‘discovered’ the internet in the late 1990s, would-be entrepreneurs of a certain age are now discovering social media. In some plans, I’ve seen phrases like “Statistics show that the fastest growing group of new internet users are between the ages of 45 and 60—and they want to use the internet to keep in touch with their friends and relatives!” In one case like this, I gently let the person know that their plan would have been prescient in 1999, but that they had just reinvented several components of Facebook—in 2010. You can never know too much about the environment where you will be operating.

The real danger of a business plan comes when you actually begin to put the plan into effect. It’s been my experience, learned through many years of observation of client companies and when doing operational planning for my own companies, that the foundation and details of business plans rarely survive contact with reality. If you are not very aware of the world around you as you build your business, if you refer to your plan more often than you refer to the environment, you run the risk of having your business plan becoming a road map that leads you off of a cliff.

What’s the answer? From experience in bringing businesses to market (and from having a ringside seat at many more) I would say that building flexibility and change into your plan as a feature is a good start. If you expect a certain amount of chaos, if you anticipate having to solve fundamental problems (perhaps even involving a change in the nature of the business) once you get going in the real world, you stand a better chance of survival. Having multiple Plan B options for different phases of operation, inserting reality check points into your plan, and above all, paying attention to how well reality is cooperating with your plan will put you on a more informed road to success.

Nobody starts a business without being an optimist—but I would add that no business will succeed unless you are also a realist.

Clear Design: Icons (part one)

The birth of the graphical user interface (GUI) also spawned the graphic icon. The ground-breaking move away from text-based systems was one of the prime differentiators between the Macintosh operating system and those that had come before it. The next year, Microsoft Windows 1.0 released, followed quickly by Word for Windows 1.0, and there was no looking back to text-based computing.

Icons at that time were 32 pixels square, rendered in no more than the sixteen system colors (when available), and these little darlings made the difference between a drab, workaday interface, and a more inviting, more intuitive work environment. My first icon project was in 1992, while working for Microsoft. The first version of the Microsoft Windows Sound System was being released with a bundled package of sounds, each of which needed a distinctive icon. I had fun putting together the sixteen tiny images in flat or isometric perspective showing bells, chimes, saws, jackhammers, and other noisy things.  I do feel compelled to confess that with eighteen years and hundreds of design projects in between me and those icons, my memory has faded, and I’m not clear on what all of them were intended to represent—the jackhammer is clear enough, but the smartly rendered foot coming down on a banana peel is mysterious to me. I’m hoping it was a slide whistle.

Over the years, operating systems, hardware, and information graphics became more sophisticated. Better designers than I am devoted hours to telling stories or giving direction in those 32×32 pixel squares. With each version of the Mac or Windows operating system (with contributions here and there from outliers like NEXT or OS2, the art of the icon got more sophisticated. Then in November 1993, a funny thing happened.

For designers like myself who were internet-savvy (and up until then, that meant that we were working with text-based USENET applications like Telnet, or FTP protocols for transferring files) and who’d worked on multimedia projects for proprietary systems up until then, the ability of a designer to present graphics on the Web opened a world of possibility for online design. Although the neutral gray background was a drawback at first, and the necessity for having text left justified (the ‘center’ tag was a year or two out at that time) was a limitation, we designers could put artwork up, have control over headline fonts, and offer interactivity with a relatively simple bit of coding.

Of course there were other limitations: in 1994, everybody looked at the web through phone line modems of varying slowness. Worse for designers, there were still a lot of really lousy monitors around. Around that time, I remember going in to talk to someone about some freelance work and seeing my online portfolio up on a sixteen-color monitor. All of the lovely continuous-tone scans that I’d included had dithered into the sixteen system colors. Horrifying.

Fortunately, that state of affairs didn’t last long. Paragraph justification options, background colors and photos, frames, tables, streaming media, and cascading style sheets were soon to come, and the graphic web environment has just gotten richer and richer. There’s still one thing that connects contemporary Web design projects to the earliest days of computer interface graphics: the icon.

(Part Two to follow sometime soon…)

MAKE THE LOGO smaller

One of the design bullpens at Saltmine had a sign on the office wall that said “MAKE THE LOGO smaller.” This is a great sentiment for most designers, and there are lessons there for design customers, as well as some interesting conclusions that can be drawn from a company’s choice of logo and its applications.

It used to be that early stage companies sported awkward, amateur logotypes (usually sketched out by the founder on the back of a napkin). Thanks in part to the easy availability of design software and in part to a flood of eager art school graduates with access to same, few companies make it to the business card stage without having a logo of reasonably professional quality developed. How the company goes about applying that logo tells a lot about the organization and its ownership.

Look at a business card for a Fortune 500-sized organization. Most feature the company’s logo as a relatively small design element. Among large organizations, the farther from the entertainment industry, the smaller the logo appears, usually taking up an eight of the card, or less. With maturity comes confidence: an understanding that although the logo represents the company, it does not make the company.

Now look at the business cards for small businesses: hairdressers, restaurants, one-person businesses, or startups. You’ll find that far more often, businesses of that sort who have logos are proud of them. Very proud. The logos for businesses of this size (and typographic representations of the company’s name) often take up 1/3 to 1/2 of the card’s real estate. This speaks of the businesses’ pride in identity, but even more often, as the designer of the first logo is also the first designer of the first business cards, it speaks of the designer’s pride in their own creation. At worst, it speaks of amateur design, or a rushed project. As time goes on, and as card redesigns happen, the logo size will reduce.

At the far end of the spectrum, 3D design tools and effects plug-ins have made gratuitous augmentation of design elements as easy as clicking a mouse, and some companies, CEOs, and designers are unable to resist making that click. From a design standpoint, it’s not dealing squarely with your logo customers—an unsophisticated client can be impressed by three dimensional effects and miss the fact that the fundamental design is unsound, or that the effect will be irreproducible in some of it’s end-use applications.

Image is important, essential for a company operating in the public square. Take a moment to think of how your image (or your clients’ image, if you’re a designer) will be perceived upon first encounter. Substituting effects plug ins for real design will date your work. Design that’s dependent on Photoshop effects will become dated fast—as easily identifiable with these times as the swooshy, orbity cookie cutter logos are with the early 2000s.