When you buy a car, you can be pretty sure of what you're getting. You can read expert reviews, look up the manufacturer's specs, research government safety ratings, visit owner forums online—you can even take it for a test drive and experience the sound of the engine and the smell of the Corinthian leather. You have many ways to evaluate the quality of the car before you make a purchase decision. And as soon as you write the check, you can drive the car right off the lot. 

In service marketing language, car buying is high in "search" qualities. That is, it's relatively easy to find the information you need to confidently make a purchase. 

If you're running a creative business or consultancy, sooner or later work is going to slow down. But that doesn't mean you should, too. Slow times should be viewed not as a curse, but as an opportunity to do all the housekeeping, strategy, planning, and personal development that you always wish you had time for when you're busy.

Making effective use of slow business periods is one of the tactics that keeps small businesses competitive. Instead of playing Angry Birds and waiting for the phone to ring, use this time to sharpen your skills and business practices, streamline your processes, add new competencies, and lay the groundwork for long-term success.

I had ten years of piano lessons when I was a kid and in all that time I went to only two recitals. Both times I strictly forbade my parents from attending (to their relief, I sensed) because I was deathly afraid of performing in public and was convinced that I would buckle under the pressure and make a total mess of my piece.

Needless to say, that pessimistic attitude ensured that I did indeed make an embarrassing mess of it, thus cementing my fear of public performance.

We recently created a full-page chart for an Education Sector report about 529 education savings plans and thought it would make a good case study for designing successful information graphics. 

There are two problems that most graphs, especially those generated automatically from Excel and similar programs, suffer from:

Commoditization (early 1990s, origins Business theory) is the process by which goods that have economic value and are distinguishable in terms of attributes (uniqueness or brand) end up becoming simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers. —wikipedia

So that’s the textbook definition, anyway. In the graphic design world, it means the rise of unrealistically cheap design that trades on clients’ inability or unwillingness to find a worthwhile qualitative difference between “done with professional tools” and “done professionally.” This cheap design makes things harder for design professionals.

If you’re in a service business like design or programming, you know what “the hard conversation” is. You have to ask the client for more money, or more time, or tell them they can’t have something you promised. The need to have this kind of conversation is so endemic that when seeking a project management job, I heard this in every interview: “We’re looking for someone who’s not afraid to sit down and have ‘the hard conversation’ with clients.”

I’ll tell you now what I told those interviewers: There is never a good reason to be having the hard conversation. If you are hiring people who have a lot of experience with it, you’re probably hiring poor project managers. Likewise, if you are intimately familiar with the hard conversation, you are probably a poor project manager yourself.

By now, you've probably heard of content management systems or CMSs. It used to be that they were reserved for big, complex sites with lots of pages. These days, CMSs are used to build even small, "brochure" sites with minimal content.

Why the change? For one thing, free or low-cost CMS software has put content management within reach of smaller-budget projects. But a bigger reason, and one that we encounter with growing frequency, is that clients want the ability to update the website themselves. People are becoming more comfortable on the web and are willing to trade the convenience of outsourcing for the speed and cost-saving of doing updates themselves.

Does this sound familiar? “Our corporate logo is stodgy and out of date. It looks like it was designed in the 1950s. By monkeys. My friends tell me if they cross their eyes, the mark looks like a five-pointed swastika. I hate purple! Look at Walmart’s new logo—it’s so friendly! We need one just like that. But different. Our logo should perfectly express Who We Are.” 

I feel your pain. Really. Everyone gets sick of their own logo and branding after a while, and the urge to throw everything out and start over with something new, fresh, and exciting can be overwhelming. There’s a tendency to think that a new logo will somehow rejuvenate your company, inspire your employees, engage your customers, create glorious new markets, solve world hunger...

For the first, oh, ten years I was a consultant, I never went to conferences—I always felt they were too expensive and probably not a good use of resources. In the last few years, however, I’ve done a one-eighty on the subject. I love conferences. By attending industry conferences I’ve met dozens of fascinating and energetic people who inspire and challenge me; I’ve made great connections that have led to paying work; and I’ve become a tiny but meaningful part of the conversation about what design is good for and where we’re taking it.

This past week, I spent three rewarding and exhausting days at the IDEA 2010 conference, put on by the Information Architecture Institute and various sponsors. I’m still recovering from the information overload, but here are a few standout impressions:

Sometimes I forget how glamorous the life of a designer looks from the outside: I get to be my own boss, explore my creativity, work on exciting projects for high-profile organizations, hang out with other cool designers, use a sexy Macintosh computer with all the latest software...

Obviously, no career is all glamour all the time, but impressionable people who don't have any experience with the industry could easily fall for a pitch like this. And if you told them "visual creativity drives the global economy," [1] or “you could make over $1,000,000 more in lifetime earnings,” [2] or “employment of graphic designers is expected to grow 10% each year through 2016," [3] you might really have them hooked.