graphic designer

Ways to stay sane when working from home

Working from home can be a complete luxury and also a total buzz kill, depending on how you go about it. Unfortunately, in the current time, we are all being encouraged or dictated to work from home for a significant period of time. For some people, this conjures ideas of “staying home” all day and working in your PJ’s with Netflix on in the background. For others, it conjures ideas of complete and utter social isolation and uncomfortableness. Both can be true, but what you do really need to focus on is how to best stay sane when working from home.

For one reason or another, there has been plenty of talk online lately about brand guidelines – what you should include, why they’re important and what they offer your business. I’m not going to rehash that here, it doesn’t add any value to a conversation that is already happening. What I have observed though is the tendancy for brand guidelines to be a beautiful document that sits in a drawer and doesn’t get applied to all parts of your business, the way it should be. And that’s something worth tackling.

I spoke last week about how important it is to be blogging for your brand, but it’s important to note that no one wants to be putting in all the effort of blogging without sharing it with the intended audience. While content being live on your website is a good thing for increasing your search results or giving you kudos in the eyes of Google, ultimately what we should be trying to do with any blog post is to deliver value for your customers – so we have to get the content to the people! What are you doing to amplify your blog posts? Firstly, you need to consider the lifecycle of your blog post when writing it. Is it a piece of evergreen or cornerstone content – a blog post on a topic that will continue to be relevant for an extended period of time? Or is it really topical and will only be relevant for a little while? If your content is evergreen, share it a little bit now, but anticipate that you will be able to share and promote that content for as much as years afterwards. If your content is only going to be relevant for a short period, share and amplify it quickly and regularly over a shorter space of time to get maximum mileage out of your posts. Then consider your amplification platforms. Where does your blog go once it’s live on your website? Pick and mix from the list, depending on what your marketing strategy looks like right now: Email newsletter | Affiliate or partner websites | Social media | As an article on LinkedIn | as part of a campaign promoting another piece of content | via direct email to customers (usually in an email signature) | As a printed fact sheet | Now consider the piece of content itself – what are the ways that we can get maximum mileage out of this one idea? Some of these I touched on earlier in the article. You can share a blog post with your suppliers or partners in the hope that they will share it with their audience. You can turn a brief (350 words or so for best results) blog post into a longer report or fact sheet. Turn quotes from the blog post into images to go onto your social media. Create an explainer video that…

I have always maintained that one of the biggest issues in small business is that you, the owner, almost shouldnt have time to work on your own business – because when you do, that means there’s not as much work coming through the door. Like the mechanic who’s car is always falling apart, or the hairdresser who hasn’t had a colour in forever. It happens to us all. While I make a really active effort to make sure that my content is being updated, my website is fresh and my socials are looking great, there’s usually something that gives in these situations. And for me, it was my branding. I had simply out grown it. But the challenge and time it was going to take to sit down and rework was daunting. Really daunting! The problem with creating your own design work is that everything you touch must be the epitome of your work. You have no client to bail up and fall back on and cry about because they chose the wrong concept or gave you too restrictive a brief. This must be the pinnacle of what you can do, the hallmark piece that represents your style, your aesthetic and your approach. I know my lovely friend Kate from Two Wild Hands struggled with the same pressure when working on her own wedding recently, although hot damn did she pull it off. The aim was to create something simple, a mark that would stand the test of time but show creativity, multiple streams of service and embody the simplicity and clean lines that I truly love in good design. There’s some cute nod’s to things like responsive design and feminism there, but ultimately I have aimed to create a logo that encapsulates where I want my design to be, and I am proud of this design. If you’re feeling daunted by the idea of doing the hard work to get your own stuff up to scratch, here’s a cheerleader in your camp saying just go and do it. You will feel 100% better than if you didn’t. If you’re ready to overhaul your logo, your brand, your marketing collateral, social media or your product, I want to help you. All you have to do is get in touch and I will help make you something that YOU love as much as I love my new logo.

We have all been there. Looming deadlines, taking on extra projects that end up blowing out to much more time, public holidays that shorten your week and double your workload. It’s tough, really tough when sitting down to look at your list fills you with a sense of dread because you feel like it simply can’t be done. I get you, I’ve been there. Having dug my way out of this hole more times than you can count, here are my tips on getting your workload back under control without losing your mind. Take a deep breath. Call it a little woo-woo if you like but I recommend this first, as it can often head off a full-blown crisis before it has a chance to take hold. Take one deep breath, as deep into your lungs as you can and let it out with an audible ‘wooosh’. This floods your brain with oxygen which gives you a mini high and the ‘wooosh’ sound makes you feel like you’re actively releasing something. By taking a minute to relax, instead of getting caught in a tornado, starting your day off on completely the wrong foot and with a poor attitude, start your day in control and a bit calmer. You’ll be surprised and how much more achievable that list looks now. Get your priorities in order Work out what you absolutely MUST do and what you can move out. Promised something to someone? Make sure you know what that deadline is and make it – your reputation is important. Probably should write a blog or schedule your own social media posts? That one you can let slide – this time. When you’re deep in the shit, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get back on top. Reschedule the task and come back to it when the air has cleared a little. Better to cut a few things off the list and achieve your goals than panic and not get to any of it. Make more time No, I’m not a magician, but we can all find a little more time in our day or working week, in the short term. Get to work an hour or two earlier and really dedicate that time to getting shit done. Work on a Saturday morning or stay back late. Post-pone your gym session or a long lunch with your bestie, anything to pull yourself…

If you have been hanging around these parts for a while now, you would know that I have worked with the team at Hair by Phd for the past 4 years, managing their social media accounts and blogging, growing their platforms to showcase their amazing colouring and style work. When Sarkis from Hair by Phd approached me about a complete overhaul of their website, I absolutely jumped at the chance to redesign their site and refresh their overall digital presence, bringing it more in line with the premium service that they provide to all customers.

People seem to have come down with a case of the “busy’s”. “How are you?” – “Busy”. “How is business?” – “Busy”. “How’s your Mum?” – “Busy”. See a pattern here?

A corporate re-brand is not something that happens overnight. Generally speaking, corporate rebrands come about because either there has been a significant change in thinking about the way that the business operates, where you are positioning your brand in the market or that there has been enough time that your branding is starting to look a bit dated.

A blog post is not like a firework, one spark and it’s done. Blog posts can (and should!) attract customers for months after you write them. All it takes is a little planning and motivation to keep them working for you all year round. 1. Comments. You can and should be commenting on other people’s posts all over the Internet. On Facebook, Instagram, other blogs, LinkedIn, whatever platforms your brand operates on, create the conversation that social is supposed to be about. Be more subtle than “hey read my post”, but use it as an opportunity to contribute your own story, your own learnings or perspective. 2. Backlinks within your own posts This is one of my most effective tools as a social media manager. They say it costs 10x as much to attract a new customer as it takes to retain one – so why doesn’t the same rule apply for your blog? If you have an interested reader there, bounce them between posts and keep them on your site. This can be done in a few ways, including widgets that preview content you might be interested based on the tags attached to the post you are currently reading; or literal links in your post when that topic is mentioned. Both work well. 3. Emailing them out to clients when the question arises This is a great one for more corporate companies. How often us your customer service writing the same stupid response to a common question? Write a blog post, and cut your work in half and ensure that consistent quality information is given every time. 4. Flashback Friday, Throwback Thursday etc. This is a very visible Internet trend but is also just good advice. No-one else is going to talk about your older content if you don’t – and you didn’t write it for it to be a one and done deal did you? The idea of social media is also that your follower base is continually growing – so an older post will always have a new audience, and that might be the perfect piece of advice for that audience, who in turn will share and move the content, encouraging new followers who haven’t seen your content… See the cycle yet? So establish a flashback system – whether it’s #flashbackfriday #throwbackthursday or posting content that is exactly one year old; remember to push and hustle your…

I have designed quite a few websites in my time and some of them I have even built and coded. The biggest trouble with being a designer working on web projects is undoubtedly working with developers. Good ones are hard to come by, and often you are working to completely different schedules – in my experience, they work nights and mornings to have their weekends off, while I need a little more sleep than that. Couple that with a designers need for perfection and a developers need for function and you have the potential for some sleepless nights and heavy frustration. In my experience, as with all things, it really comes down to good, open and honest communication. Similarly to briefing in a client, I’ve got some simple tips for briefing in a project to your dev team: 1. Always start with a face to face meeting. As a small and local business owner myself, I believe it’s incredibly important to support those Aussies who are working on their dream, so I strictly work with Australian developers. I have worked with a number of them over the past few years and the most successful projects have worked out when there was a face to face meeting, earlier in the design phase – once you’ve gotten an overall concept signed off by the client. Sit down, have a coffee and talk about what you expect from them; what you will do, where you go from here. Then take the time to explain how you think it will function, then get their expert input. If you don’t know about CMS’s or development languages because you’re newer to the game, that’s fine – but lean on your developer to make these recommendations so you don’t over promise to the client. 2. Project manage. At the end of the day, this is your client and it’s absolutely your ass if you can’t deliver. So work out a schedule (Gantt Chart for those in marketing), allow a buffer of time and start riding your developer a little. Anyone working on a far off freelance project is going to need a nudge, so drive the beast. 3. Content. Ultimately in website development nothing can be done by your developer without content. Text, images, graphic assets, the whole works. Get it together in web optimised .jpegs, sort it into page folders in your Dropbox, name everything using a…

OBJECTIVE CORPORATION REBRAND

How graphic designers can work with web developers for best results.

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