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You are here: Home / Blog / Featured Articles / It’s Not About YOUR Work – It’s About THEIR Results

It’s Not About YOUR Work – It’s About THEIR Results

Posted by on August 31, 2010 · 16 Comments 

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Designer Lugging His Useless Portfolio

This is a message I find myself struggling to get through the heads of my many talented creative friends on pretty much a weekly basis. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of great creative and realize how important producing great work is to talented designers.

But you can take your Flash and stuff it if it doesn’t do what I need to do – which is produce definitive results for the clients who hire me. Those clients don’t hire me so that you can do great work, have something new for your portfolio, reel or website and win awards. Those clients have businesses to run, employees to pay, products or services to sell. And they need results. And that’s why they hire me. My job: R.E.S.U.L.T.S.

There was an amazing piece in today’s AdAge, written by Mike Wolfshon, a creative, who totally nails this concept. Please do yourself a favor and read it. Especially you, my creative friends.

As Wolfshon so aptly puts it, portfolio pieces don’t matter. Results do. And these days, if you’re a creative type and you want a job – whether it’s for an agency or working for someone like me who outsources the bulk of my creative needs – I hope you’re prepared to come to a meeting and discuss results. Things like how you designed a website with the user experience in mind rather than what you thought was hip and cool. And how you factored in the importance of conversions, when designing various pages of the client’s website and landing pages. Or how the newsletter campaign you designed was specifically crafted to reach across social platforms and allow shareability – that oh-so-important factor in today’s world of content creation. Oh, and speaking of content, if you think you can whip up some web copy and stuff it with keywords (even though you barely know what those are) – because your other designer friends told you it wasn’t all that hard – and that would suffice. Well, you’re smoking some massively impressive weed.

And so, my brilliant and talented creative friends, here’s my plea. I don’t want you to do crap work. I want you to do GREAT work. But I’m looking for great work that WORKS for the one person that matters – the client. And that means results. Come to our meetings talking about results, and you’ve got yourself a gig. And if you don’t yet know about things like user experience, conversions, shareability and the importance of SEO optimized keywords, it’s not too late. Get out there and do what the rest of us have done — learn.

And your brilliance when it comes to design, coupled with strategies that focus on results will do what all really awesome creative is supposed to do – it’ll WORK!! That means that together we can manage to help our clients build strong businesses, sell more stuff to more people and, in the process, produce great work. And that, my friends, is a portfolio that you can be proud of.

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Filed under Featured Articles, Online Marketing, Strategies and Tactics, Traditional Marketing · Tagged with , , , ,

  • http://www.AlexGPR.com AlexanderG

    Well said. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go score some results for a client.

  • Nick

    That is what I have worked on for so many years. I could create websites just as stunning as any you have seen out there, but that is never my goal. My goal is user interface, clear call to actions, no clutter and performance. This is why Facebook is HUGE and MySpace, wait, are they still around?

    A website should have a clear goal, be an SEO machine and sell. Whether it is e-comm or service oriented. It should have a precise goal and should be designed around that strategy.

  • http://joshuatitsworth.com joshuatitsworth

    Well put Shelly. Getting the top spot in the search results doesn't mean anything if you can't convert visitors into customers. I heard this quote at a conference, which is all to true, “If you want a high amount of traffic, put porn on your site, if you want customers craft the site around them.”

  • Tahira

    Thanks for this always great reminder Shelley. In my world, we create events and full incentive and meeting programs with our clients and when we win the business it is often a client comment that “you thought about what our participants would experience and what it would mean to them”. This thinking has to translate through every touch point of a plan from the website to the f2f planning!

  • http://www.redheadwriting.com The Redhead

    But Nick, I think you're ahead of many of the pop-up web designers out there. You THINK in UI's and user experience, not just what “looks cool.” I couldn't have said it better than:

    “A website should have a clear goal, be an SEO machine and sell. Whether it is e-comm or service oriented. It should have a precise goal and should be designed around that strategy.”

    W00t.

  • givinguponperfect

    I love this! Great work that works – exactly! I loved working with brilliant creatives when I was at an ad agency, but this was a constant struggle. Clean, compelling visuals that communicate clearly should NEVER be crap work. It should be your BEST work!!

  • http://ernohannink.com ernohannink

    Woot like. Agree very much with you Shelly. Working with WordPress and beautiful standard premium themes that work are the best for most of my clients. Too many Designers and coders focus too much on their work, the beauty of it. Focus on the client and the results.
    It is not easy, I know, because then you have to get out there. Get out of that comfort zone and learn about what works for the client.

  • ShellyKramer

    You said it, Nick. You are a pioneer – a creative one – in the online space. So nice to work with people who get it. And you do.

  • ShellyKramer

    Double w00t. He nailed it. I knew that post would resonate with you – after our many conversations on this topic, E.

  • ShellyKramer

    Hi Erno,

    Thanks for coming by. It is not easy – you're right. But learning what works for the client is what it's all about, isn't it? Love your brain!!

  • ShellyKramer

    I, too, have lived that constant struggle and have great respect for brilliant creatives – and many are some of my dearest friends. It's been an ongoing battle between agency account people and creatives for years — and I don't see that ending any time soon. The best I can do is say that for MY clients, the creatives we work with must know the difference between simply beautiful design and beautiful design that produces results.

    Thanks, sweets, for coming by!

  • ShellyKramer

    “Love”

  • ShellyKramer

    Amen! And love your quote — I'll use it in the future :) ))

  • ShellyKramer

    Excellent thoughts, Tahira! Imagine that — thinking about what a client or a participant actually needs. A novel idea :) ))

    Glad you're having such success with that – sounds like your business is doing good things!

  • http://www.veritate-et-virtute.com BurgessCT

    Shelly,
    As one who loves the concept of bluesky thought and creativity, you are spot-on – at some point the rubber has to hit the road and move the client's needs forward.

    Many moons ago, I was involved in a really creative endeavor, we had a great idea and it was becoming reality – going to save $$ and lives – everytime we tried to get our tool(s) out the door, the designers & engineers wanted to tweak one more thing. Frustration sets in, and efforts aren't advanced – we dumped the designer and engineers and went on to save $$ and lives – we evolved a saying: “Sometimes you have to declare design finished and shoot the designer and move on to results”

    Thanks for this reminder for all artisians supporting clients.
    -
    Christopher
    @burgessct

  • ShellyKramer

    “shoot the designer” I love it. Good thoughts, Christopher. I am fond of the “launch it NOW, tweak it later” strategy …. because so often you don't know what to tweak until you launch the darn thing! Thanks for stopping by – as always.

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