5 ways to cut costs in a design studio

Posted on January 13, 2011 by

In these rather austere times we are looking at ways of reducing costs across the business. I thought I would concentrate on the studio for now.

IT is expensive. It is the most costly part of our business and the most obvious area to start saving money in. This list is pretty Apple-biased but that’s our industry I’m afraid. I’d be interested to see your suggestions for a more PC-orientated office set up.

1. Use an iMac as your graphics workhorse

The design industry almost exclusively uses Apple products and when we last bought some kit, back in 2006, we went for G5 PowerMacs. These cost us over £3000 each. You can now buy a top of the range iMac for just under £2000. That includes the monstrous 27″ screen. The new i5 or i7 configurations are incredibly nifty. The only downside is the horribly glossy screen the iMac comes with. There is no matte option available at this time. For colour sensitive work you could buy a Mac Pro tower working with a decent screen, like this awesome Eizo ColorEdge with built-in calibrator, as a pre-press machine and share it. We’ve done away with that entirely for now but will consider it in the future.

2. Use a NAS for non-critical data storage

You can now take advantage of NAS (network attached storage) storage like the Netgear ReadyNAS or Drobo. These tiny boxes sit in the corner and do nothing but serve up files. They can be a bit slow (well, our ReadyNAS NV+ is), hence the fact we’ve added a server back into our studio. We worked for a year or so without one before resorting to a more robust file server for our day-to-day data.

3. Do away with servers or get a Mac mini

Servers and the software they came with are generally hugely expensive. Maintaining a server was also not only a pain in the butt but expensive too. You don’t need one if you are dealing with small files. If you need to shift images around over a network and use InDesign a lot then you might be better off getting a dedicated file server. Now you can buy a Mac mini server for just under £1000. It comes ready to go with twin 500Gb hard drives and unlimited licenses. Cha-ching.

3. Use Timemachine to backup your studio

Apple’s Timemachine has made backing up a breeze. All our Macs automatically backup to our 4tB ReadyNAS NV+, which then duplicates itself once a day onto a portable hard drive. Our server is RAID configured and backs up using TimeMachine to the ReadyNAS and uses Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate itself a portable hard drive which we take home every night. The costs? Nada.

Backing up was once so expensive. Over the years I’ve bought Syquests, Jazz and Zip disks, DAT tapes and no end of eye-wateringly expensive gizmos. None of them ever worked particularly well. It’s just easy now.

4. Move your office software to the cloud

One quick win is to move your business onto the cloud (and by that I mean online). Having email and calendar servers hosted elsewhere saves you a load of hassle. We use Google Apps. You get email, calendars, a basic office suite of online apps, all the Google services, up to 50 users and 7Gb per user too. If you configure your DNS correctly you can add several back up servers to make sure you have constant email delivery should one fail. Did I mention it was free?

We generate too much data to store it online but many businesses are turning to third-party storage providers. There is a downside to this – many prominent technology advocates are against this trend and see the handing over of sensitive information as a bad thing and, legally, a minefield. But we just store graphics and that isn’t so much of an issue for us.

We use Dropbox and Box.net for storing and distributing files. It saves us having to get particularly fast broadband (we’re at the end of an exchange and it’s quite slow) and takes away the cost of maintaining an FTP server too. Dropbox is incredibly handy for the roving designer and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. It essentially synchronises a folder on your work Mac and then any other machine you add to it, including your iPhone or iPad. You also get a versioning system built into it. Handy for those who are trigger happy on the old apple-s.

5. Reduce your reliance on BT!

This is a contentious one and something we haven’t done yet but, rather than spend horrible amounts of money on a PBX phone system, you should think about using IP phones, Skype or mobiles. You can get routers with VOIP exchange capabilities now like this Draytek. If you’ve got superfast broadband then you should look into it.

There are many ways to save money. Running a design studio is now a lot more easy on the pocket and I hope this post helps you start to cut your overheads even further. If you have any suggestions on how to save money, then please leave them in the comments.

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How to assess creative ideas and design

Posted on January 12, 2011 by

Assessing and responding to the work a creative agency proposes must be one of the most difficult things clients have to do. Below is the first of two blogs that could help manage this tricky process.

Be knowledgeable

To judge the work you need to be able to place it in context and compare it to ideas you have seen elsewhere and considered to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Be happy!

Come to the meeting hoping to enjoy it. When people are having fun, they pay more attention and are more likely to get involved.

Revisit the brief

Reminding yourself of the brief is essential, it provides you with a framework against which to evaluate the idea. Make sure the agency does this too before they present.

Put yourself in our shoes

Try to empathise with the people bringing the work to you, what will they be expecting, hoping for/dreading?

Be clear

Is it on brief? What exactly is the idea? What sort of execution is it? Is it clever and original? Is it distinctive? Is it relevant? Is it credible? Is it deliverable?

Think about it

The agency will want an immediate response. Tell them how you feel but don’t give them a definitive answer. Listen to the agency, make notes, then go away and think.

My next blog will talk about the process you should go through before giving the agency your response and how to deliver it.

This post is based on a recent study by the IPA. You can read the article in more depth on the IPA website.

Posted in Marketing Field Guide, Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

More on our new branding

Posted on November 17, 2010 by

I’ll try to avoid the usual post-rationalisation nonsense you often get from designers. My design is literally going down the drain. Or rather it was a drain cover near to our offices that inspired the new Soda logo.

Soda's logo

The new Soda logo was inspired by a drain cover!

More than that though, it was time we moved on from the original Soda logo. The old logo, as mentioned in my previous post, expresses different values of a company that no longer exists. Positioning the logo on a page was hard and the type looked out of date.

We wanted something with a stamp of authority. Something that could be scaled and step and repeated. The logotype is the symbol and vice versa. We wanted to express a sense of fun and exploration, like you get when you play with Lego as a child (or adult – watch this space). I’m pleased with the result. I think that the new logo serves all those purposes and will last us a very long time.

Soda website interim first draft

The early graphical version of our interim website.

While playing around with the new website, Glen was constantly challenging me, saying that it was still a bit cold, lacking a connection to the people we work with. When I produced a series of pages for our credentials document. I added quirky some little comments and typographical flourishes. The humour was now there but the flat colours still looked a little, well, flat.

We needed to add something with life to the mix. It was then that he pointed out that the stripes on the early web design looked a lot like a well loved iced lolly. Gears whirred, ratchets clicked and the lolly design popped into my head fully formed. We commissioned Aled Lewis to produce the illustrations and he hit the spot straightaway as always. I then invited him to come in and paint it onto one of our walls. It was fun doing it, it puts a smile on your face when you walk into the studio.

Soda fatheed mural 20

Aled painting a wall on Soda's mezzanine

We exist as a business not just to respond to our clients’ requests but also to challenge them and their audience with our way of thinking and our designs. We want to produce work that gets results and leaves everyone with a smile on their faces.

Posted in Design | 1 Comment

Brief encounter

Posted on November 17, 2010 by
Image showing Brief Encounter

Using a brief helps your agency understand you better

We’ve developed a brief template to make sure that I don’t waste clients’ limited marketing budgets and eat into lead times. We want to make sure we get to the bottom of what it is that our clients want, before we apply our creative thinking and head off in the wrong direction.

Marketing managers can get so caught up in the demands of a Sales Director, or the pressure of a deadline, that they don’t share all the information they have at their disposal. If they have a simple set of questions that asks them consider to what it is they want, before the meter starts ticking, then we will all be better off.

The simple fact is that the more information that we are given at the front end of the process, the better solution we can deliver at the end of it. If we know all there is to know about the background to a project then we can make informed decisions.  The questions we have developed are obviously nothing more than a common sense approach to an initial briefing. But it is crucial that we ensure we have a process to follow in order to facilitate the common sense approach.

What is it you want doing? As a client, it is easy to assume that your agency has the in-depth knowledge of your business than you do. This is often not the case. For example, the subject matter may be very technical.  The more background information you can give us, the better we will be equipped to produce a great response to the brief.

Describe the task in as much detail as possible. Leave no room for doubt or question.

Who is your target market? if you can give us a clear description of who you want to talk to, we’ll be able to understand what the audience wants or desires. What motivates them? What excites them? What scares them?

What is the message you want to convey? The principal purpose of the ad or web page must be clear. The better you can answer this question the more effective the the communication will be,

What is the schedule or the deadline for this project? Again this sounds like an obvious question. The time available can have a massive effect on the decisions we make to meet your deadline. We will always try and give our clients the best solution possible in the time we have available.

The brief sheet is now online so it can be downloaded and edited. Why not give it a go? Let us know your thoughts and comments using the leave a comment link below.

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Brand new Soda

Posted on October 29, 2010 by

It’s all go here at Soda. We’ve just updated our branding and are in the process of rolling it out across all our external and internal communications. It’s not the easiest task when we are so (happily) busy with client work. But we are ready to go from today. This blog is at a temporary home using a basic design – we’ll get it back on the main site, with lots more bells and whistles, some time soon.

Firstly it is important to note that we have moved domains. We are now using sodacreates.co.uk. Any emails sent to the old soda-art domain will automatically redirect to the new domain. It is just one of the conveniences of using the incredible Google Apps tool which we use to run most of our office communications. Hey, it’s free and runs in the cloud – keeping IT costs to a minimum. We love it.

Why have we changed our domain name? I have never felt comfortable with the word “art” in the title. It was fine when we did just that when I set Soda up – creating artwork and prints for a living. Soda is not that company anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. We have a different focus. We are a creative agency. We create ideas and plan successful campaigns for our clients. So “sodacreates” is a statement of our intent and how we plan to develop over the coming months and years to make our people, our work and our processes more effective for our clients.

While we just have a single holding page over at www.sodacreates.co.uk we have been busy putting ourselves all over the web. You can find samples of our work and other photos over at Flickr. Of course you can read regular articles here on our blog. You can find out more about our key people over at LinkedIn. If you like Twitter we’re there too. Finally we are trying out a new service over at Flavors.me. This new social media tool helps you easily builds a single web page using all your current online content, making it another great place for people to find you on the web. We think it is brilliant.

What we wanted to demonstrate is that it is easy to promote your business for very little money. It is typical of design companies to fail to promote themselves effectively when they spend most of their time helping others do exactly that! We thought it was high time to practice what we preach.

More about our rebrand process is coming soon. If you want to sign up to our mailing list then head over to our new website or sign up over at Mailchimp. Mailchimp offers a free account for up to 1000 subscribers and 6000 emails a month. The power of Mailchimp is immense. The newsletter will be a regular thing and contain advice and tips and occasional special offers.

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