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“Ook ook ack! Eeeeeek! OOOK!” [Trans: "My God, it's full of apps... " ]

I usually don’t repeat subjects, and I JUST reviewed the iPad2. But sometimes a marketing campaign can trod over the same raw nerve so many times before one has to spout off on it.

I don’t want to get off on a rant here but…

Apple’s overuse of the word “magical” when promoting the iPad just gets under my skin. Actually it annoys the poop out of me. Probably because it’s patently horseshit. It’s a piece of TECHNOLOGY, people, not the gorram Philosopher’s stone. We’re not a bunch of knuckle dragging homo habilis hominids howling and flinging rocks, sticks and poop at the frakkin’ monolith. Sometimes I wonder what Apple’s marketing people think of their audience. I do realize what they’re getting at, the idea of an information appliance so immediate and intuitive to use, that the actual interface disappears and you become immersed in just using the thing.

Yes, iPads are damn clever little machines. Actually, they’re right proper little slabs of electric crack, they’re so fun. Despite the absence of Flash, (and in all fairness, Flash ain’t working too well on competing Android tablets yet) I am still quite impressed with Apple’s technical (and marketing) achievement with the device. It is the user interface advances of iOS that does it, and beats down the scrambling competition. You just pick the thing up, you get it, and it just bloody works. Which if you’ve ever had to deal with computers for any length of time, Mac or PC, that feat alone is almost Nobel prize worthy. And seriously folks, this comparatively ancient Power Mac G5, with Gigabytes of RAM, an LCD display, Intuos tablet, internal RAID and Terabyte external drive is pretty frakkin’ Star Trek tech compared to the 48K Atari 800 I first mucked about with in the 80s…

And Yes, it’s been rightly proclaimed that Apple did not make iPads for Power users, guys like me, tho’ I still like the things. Nor did they build them for Tech Geeks, who heap piles of abuse on Apple for all the geeky thinks that the iPad is not, and trumpet the raw specs and “open” platform of the Android powered Competition. Geeky types actually seem to prefer their technology to be complex and challenging and glory in getting in there and tinkering and customizing their tech to their liking. But the general consensus out there is that the three significant players, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Motorola Xoom, and the still-in-the-pipe RIM Playbook, all have their issues. The majority of the rest are still so much vaporware or decidedly crappy knock offs..

But for the most part, everyday folk, and a surprising number of professional people (outside the computer tech fields), couldn’t care less about the deep specs or getting under the hood to tinker with the OS, or manually install pirate apps (or Pr0n). Like owning a fast Italian sports car, unless you’re, as the Top Gear lot might say, a “complete motorhead”, you don’t want to spend all day “mucking about under the bonnet.” You just want to get in and DRIVE. Drive FAST. And I might add, without the motor dropping out or needing to re-build the gearbox every random 2 to 200 miles.

My son quite rightfully points out that most people haven’t the faintest idea how a semiconducting transistor works. A lot of folks don’t even know what they are, nor need to. True enough. I’m something of a technologist, as necessary being a design professional in this digital age, and my knowledge of the physics and details semiconductor technology is sketchy. But I DO have an appropriate general knowledge of how my computer works, and I am well aware that’s it’s a piece of technology. I might not be able to build one from scratch, but I probably could assemble one. I certainly maintain the one I am writing this rant on.

The iPad is a piece of technology, advanced, arguably cutting edge, but still technology. All due respect to Arthur C Clarke’s famous axiom, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” it’s not a magical black box. We’ve been out of the trees and caves for a while now, and can even use fire and tools. I’ll thank the people at Apple to consider that we’re grown-up’s and live in a technological society and stop insulting my intelligence. No one should expect to open up an iPad and find leprechauns and unicorns drawing on the back of the screen with rainbow crayons.

That’s just my opinion, and frak ‘em if they think I’m wrong.

OK, got that out of my system. I expect to have more constructive things to say next time. B4nz41.

Oh. Apologies to Stanley Kubrik and Apple, but hey…

Tweaking Bleeds in InDesign for the Tri-fold Cut Line. Yes, I'll explain...

For openers, I have been reminded that if I want to keep people’s attention with a blog, I actually have to POST, at least more regularly than I have been doing. The current occasion is the Hudson Valley Business Edge 2010 Conference, an event that I highly recommend if you’re in the region and work in a small to medium size business, especially as an Owner, Proprietor or Principal. The presenters are all very knowledgeable, and the content is presented in a very dense manner, in short, accessible sessions. Last year I presented on “When Do You Need a Design Pro?”, and hope to do so again on subjects graphic. But to the point, while I fairly recently posted back on June 7th, the one before was March 20th.

I have been busy, hence the lean posting. So this time around I’ll talk about a recent client experience.

This is a long term client that I have been working with for many years. I’ve built and rebuilt his website, will do it again soon. This time around I was updating his brochure. This is a fairly standard tri-fold brochure, a pretty common and useful staple of business marketing. This item is usually not a terrific chore if you have a focused client, and their graphic identity is already in place. Typically brochures are put together after logo design and identity projects are complete.  But what happens when your client is perhaps over focused

The short answer is: 63 design comps, seven candidate “final” versions. Three rounds of pre-press, PDFs and AAs. Hundreds of photo retouches and composites. 2.4 gigabytes of  data. And sent the press proofs back to press… twice. What on earth happened here?

I am not going to say what this project cost,  but it blew well past my initial estimate by several multiples. Suffice to say that the sum was either impressive or embarrassing, depending on which side of the checkbook you’re looking from. I accept installments. I am not railing against my client, who I actually think quite highly of, and is a stone cold expert , a top craftsman and designer in in the luxury fabrication market he makes his profession. But yes, the project was unusual in the scope, number and and detail of the multiple rounds of revisions.

I suspect some of the Design Pros out there might be wondering, when did I lose control of the Design Process? But I don’t think I did. I did keep him appraised that the meter was indeed running as the revisions mounted up, and tried to wave the yellow flag. I was working hourly, which most freelancers prefer, as it keeps us honest and clients only pay for work actually done. I do grok that most clients would rather have flat fees, to budget accurately. So I try to make my estimates and quotes reasonably accurate. But typically I expect to turn a brochure project around on 2-3 initial designs and 2-4 rounds of revisions and tweaks including proofreading. On a flat fee project, unless you detail revision charges, you can get killed here. This can become a nightmare on an open ended project like a web site were the design and production process is much more organic, and the final product can moprh a lot till the project is completed.

Of course, some say web sites are never actually finished, but that’s a separate rant.

But my client wanted, well, exactly what he wanted. After fine tuning many details of design and copy to create an extremely crisp and tight showcase for his products, it was on to the product photography.  It was critically important to him that his product photography be as close to perfect as humanly possible to image, process, color correct, clean, retouch and composite.

Most folk would confront the mounting hours and costs and get to a point where a project is “good enough” and sign off on it. After all, some details are so minute that most readers will not notice a lot of very tiny glitches. Obsessive revison is just not cost effective for the average small … or even moderately large business. Mind you, when Ferrari or Maseratti does a brochure, it’s a 16 page super glossy piece  with giant full bleed photos and tiny blocks of copy on stock just short of cardboard and every photo is glistening perfection. But when a single car costs more than my house, “price is no object” in selling them has a certain resonance.  A used car dealership will pour all that copy into a tri-fold with a stack of digicam photos one of their salesman took.

It’s all a matter of perceived value, versus the actual cost of the work.

So how much is enough?

Mind you, of the over 50 hours on the project, over half of it was spent in Photoshop doing photo work. This is in addition to the work the photographer did on most of the images as well. By the way, this was not Joe in the Mail Room with the boss’s pocket digicam; this is a very good pro photographer who’s work is very sharp. But every detail had to be perfect. But I did call him on cleaning up the color of a reflections on a detail no wider than four benday dots.  I also found myself nudging parallax errors picked up in a wide angle lens that I could not discern on a 20” monitor without a layer of guidelines.

To note the level of detail we persued, one tweak was both revising the cropping and placement of photos to account for the 1/16” of  additional trim (see image)  that some printers nick off the fold-in panel so that the borchure folds neatly.  (geek alert: not always the case, some printers use very slightly assymetrical folds to allow for a sightly narrower folk-in panel, depending on their machinery.) In most cases this would not a big deal, but there were details in the product photos that my client felt were critical to preserve, and worth the time and expense to address.  We also did some furher adjusting in the photos as well to allow for more bleed.

The Maserati web site. Crispy. Shiny...

A local area Used Car Dealer's web site - To the point.

To return to the car analogy. When Ferrari or Maseratti publish anything from brochures to bar napkins to their annual report, their entire brand and image rides on it, For that market, they make sure every bit of their marketing material measures up to the same lofty standards as their automobiles. For the Used Car Dealership, the owner’s image and reputation would be based on being a perceived as offering square deals and good value, especially considering he is selling products he was not involved in designing or producing. So very high end marketing materials might actually hurt, and cause the business to be perceived as overly expensive. Most Used Care Dealers want to been seen as trustworthy “regular guys”, literally “one of us.” You know, the folks who are not buying Ferraris or Maserattis.

Is all of this “apple polishing” worth it?

To my client, he expressed that it was. In fact he felt it was critical. At the level of his market and product, if the results of all this exacting refinement produce just ONE more customer for him, he will be ahead. In essence, he held me, the photographer and the printer to the same standard of demanding craftsmanship that he applies to his own work. And I’ll have to say that it’s very good work, among my very best this year.

Will that level of craftsmanship and exactitude be worth it for your project? I can only say that I approach every project with an open mind and a professional attitude, evaluating each project and then providing my best professional opinion on producing it. When a client has a clear idea of their needs and message, it makes my job a lot easier. Going high end on a job also raises my game to that higher level, and its often a pleasure to do really sharp work. Ideally, a project’s costs should match both the budget and the message. Some things might call for “fast and dirty” so long as things are neat and professional – and proofread, they’re ready to go. Other mission-critical projects might very well call for numerous and detailed review, revision, and tweaking to a high level of polish.

How far you want to go is entirely up to you.

This comes up from time to time with both clients, and friends who are trying to do an “email Blast”… i.e. send an email message to a list of folks. And this is more than a simple matter of clicking “Send All:” – which is fraught with it’s own peril. But when you try to create a lovely composed message, with graphics, fonts and formatting, it becomes another matter entirely…

For instance, I got this note with a invitation to a Gallery Show from a client:

The mystery is, that for some of the people I’ve sent it to (both on Mac and Windows Platforms) it opens right in the body of the email, for others, it comes as an attachment that they have to click on to open it. The only think I can guess is that it has to do with the email program – it seems to open in the body in hotmail and yahoo, but not Outlook Express…and who knows how many other email programs.

Is there a way around this that you know of – so that it opens in the email without having to then click on an attachment?”

This absolutely has to do with all the various email methods, clients, applications and platforms out there behaving differently. And in addition, how individual users have set up their email clients.

What she wanted to do is called HTML email, or… wait for it, Multipart/Alternative MIME format, and its a frakkin’ tech BEAR.

MailChimp – One of the Email Marketing Services I am exploring offers this explanation – their sage advice for do-it-yourselfers… [mild tech alert] :

“So how do you properly send an HTML email along with a plain-text alternative version? Simple. You send it in “Multipart/Alternative MIME” format. If you’re a programmer, this is where the gears in your brain start spinning. So go ahead and bookmark this web page, so you can come back to it later. Now, go on and Google “multipart alternative” and figure out how to send them from your own server. You may find some PHP or Coldfusion or ASP scripts out there. You may even find a way to rig Outlook or Thunderbird to send multipart messages. Go ahead and get it out of your system now. Then, when your ISP shuts you down for sending too many emails from your account and hogging up all their bandwidth, or when you realize that properly cleaning bounces and unsubscribes and tracking opens and clicks is a lot of work, or when you get blacklisted because your server wasn’t reputably configured, come back to this page.” More Cool stuff here: http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/

But in a word, YIKES. And I do some of this stuff for a living.

So if you are considering doing something like this on a moderately regular basis, you should very seriously want to consider using an Email Marketing Service to send to your list. What a service does is send out the messages in well composed and platform-agnostic HTML email format which is FAR superior to Rich Text you can compose in Outlook or using the Word Send to email feature.

I have been experimenting with MailChimp, and they seem to have their stuff rather together. Check out the demo web vids.

Another Major Player is Constant Contact If you’ve go an email account, you’ve probably seen their logo tagging some piece of small business, retail, or institutonal promo or another.

Email Marketing – a job for the pros. And frankly Scarlet, I’d rather design. My side of things would be be to design the HTML and graphics and prep them for the mails, then let the wireheads deal with the backend IT part.

Till next time! Banzai!

Resource Links
http://www.mailchimp.com | http://www.constantcontact.com