When a client asks us the question, “What options are there to host my website?” we usually lie. We say, “You should pay to host all of your own work. That is the only option. We’d be happy to set you up with a wonderful web host.”.  And then we quickly leave the room.

This is not the truth, and we are shame-filled ninjas. But we lie because we care.

Last week Journalspace was in the top 100,000 websites on each with over 14,000 visitors per month. With six years of experience under its belt there was no need to believe that would change…

Yesterday Journalspace announced they had lost all user data. Every single article, image, and user was gone. After trying to restore a corrupted server the owners officially threw in the towel, citing the end of the website.

And here is why we lie. I’m not concerned with the future of the owners of Journalspace. They’re talented programmers who made a big mistake in not backing up the website more securely, but they’ll move on. I am concerned about the thousands of people who built a writing audience that will never get these readers back. Honestly, how do you console an author that lost six years of writing? How can they connect with their readers again?

This is why digital ownership is important. When you trust others too much you can lose everything. Don’t take that chance with your business.

Leather Creations Furniture has a dozen locations across the US, though you’ve probably never heard of them before. I hadn’t. Sure, they’d received the Customer’s Choice Award for five years in a row, and even named one of the fastest growing privately-held companies by Entrepreneur Magazine, but they were still just another leather furniture store.

That was until a small ad in an Illinois newspaper changed everything. Last week this ad made its way onto the internet, where it has been mentioned over in over 350,000 blogs and websites. Take a look…

When businesses say promotion is hard, I can’t help but laugh. Promotion is easy. Mimicking your competitors is easy. Parroting business cliches is easy. But saying something humorous or unique when every aspect of your marketing is drained through a committee…now that is hard.

When people come to a creative company they don’t look for the latest editions of Photoshop or Illustrator. In spite of what schools may tell you, there is a surplus of talented software wizards. People pay creatives to think for them. We solve their problems by knowing how to implement ideas. We iterate potential directions until they find the one they can proudly stand behind. We exist to mediate bad decisions. In effect – we’re their outsourced brain.

If creating were as easy as using software proficiently, everyone who knew Word would have created novels in their spare time. Those who knew Excel would have balanced their budgets with aplomb, and skilled Outlook users could send Html emails to their family without batting an eye.

And so more important than learning the tools, a young designer must accept that their first job is rooted in psychology: How do you lead a team through a series of open-ended decisions?

We’ve found that the greatest obstacle to decision-making is fear. It crops up in emails, or in conference calls, veiled through feedback, or tucked away in a hurried voicemail. Giving up control even for a moment is hard. It takes trust and respect and asks you to forget the potential failures that could lie ahead. Most people invite fear in for dinner. And once inside your heart, fear doesn’t leave easily. It makes itself home and infects choices and undermines your ability to act. How can a project possibly move forward when filled with so much doubt?

“I’m afraid for my job.” “I’m afraid my board won’t like this.” “I’m afraid the president will hate that.” “I’m afraid customers will dislike it.” “I’m afraid we went too far.” “I’m afraid we didn’t go far enough.”

We’ve worked with hundreds of start-ups. Every single start-up that had a problem deciding on a design for a logo or business card has failed. Not one, not five, every single one.

And the reason is that small decisions are reflections of larger decisions. If you are filled with fear and doubt when it comes to pointing at a brand you admire, you’ll see this same fault amplified 100x when the important business decisions arrive. After all, the color of your logo won’t matter if you don’t satisfy your clients in time.

So a note to the young designers: When looking for good clients, find the fearless. They don’t have time to mull over doubt. You’ll see them by the trail of success they’ve left behind and the strength to trust over worry.

And a note to entrepreneurs: Your job is to stare fear in the face and keep moving forward.

A few weeks back we shared our excitement over our snazzy new business cards. Time has passed.

Since then our cards have been featured in the Ever-Real Marketing Blog’s article “The 75 Hottest Business Card Designs You’ve Ever Seen!” and were also discussed in the portuguese article “Business Card: Does yours need upgrading?” where they say (according to our trusted friend Babelfish):

Closing the list, a card that breaks practically all the rules [...] Cubicle Ninjas, uses a strong image and a creative name to pass a message, counting on the curiosity of that it does not know of what it is treated, to go until the site and to discover, since it has very little tracks: name, telephone, and an email for which we can discover the URL. But who to receive a card from these and not to know of what it is treated, with sufficient probability will have the curiosity to go to investigate what these ninjas walk making. ; -)

To round out the celebration hat-trick, we held the spot for the #1 business design card design in the history of the prestigious Fave-Up gallery.

And to think we’ve only given one physical card away…

“If you want to kill time, try working it to death.”
- Sam Levonson

To those people that tell you work isn’t life:

• You will spend at least 2,080 hours per year working a full-time job in the United States
• This equals 87 straight days working per year without a single break to eat, drink or sleep
• If you begin working full time at age 18 and stop at 65 you’ll spend 97,760 hours at work
• Or we can look at this as only 4,073 continuous days without a break
• To put this in perspective, at a child’s eleventh birthday they’ll have barely experienced 4,000 days
• Factoring out sleep, we only have 242 days per year to be awake
• This means you spend greater than 36% of your waking time working
• If we average 2 hours a day eating then we only have 212 days to call our own
• And this increases our time spent working to greater than 41%
• The average time spent behind the wheel each day for Americans is 87 minutes
• If we consider this part of your work day, then you are at work for 45% of your time

Each year you will work:

• 460 hours (57 work days) more then a peasant in 13th century England
• 716 hours (90 work days) more then an average worker in Germany
• 1456 hours (182 work days) more then the !Kung Bushman (a group of hunters and gatherers)

Anyone that says work is not life is asking you to waste half of your life. Make every minute on this planet valuable. Find what you love to do and share your passion with the world.

I was promoting my first novel at a book show a few years back when I received the greatest compliment…

When my novel launched I created a series of colorful masks showcasing the characters. Each mask was cut-out by hand and glued to a popsicle stick for easy use. By the end of a show I’d given out hundreds of these. The aisles were filled with adults and little kids running about as my fictional characters.

I’d been to this convention once before as a customer, but it felt so wonderfully different to be on the other side of the table. People judged you and your work as they walked by. When you smiled it gave them a chance to see if they liked either. And when they bought a book it was a sign of approval. It can be addicting to hear praise. Eventually the doors closed I packed up my bags, loaded up the boxes, and made my way to the exit.

On the doorway were my masks, taped to the door and defaced. My first reaction was pride.

The people that love what you do will always be filled with praise. But the people that don’t care for your work are filled with something even worse: indifference. Writing, design, branding – the goal is to build a piece that someone can’t feel indifferent about.

In the past month visitors have written scathing comments on our website. They’ve stolen articles and used them as their own. They’ve “borrowed” our designs and passed the work off as theirs.

The truth is these are the greatest compliments that your work has a voice. No one would take our designs if they didn’t feel they were quality. No one would steal our articles if they didn’t wish they were their own. And no one would take the time to make angry comments if they weren’t emotionally impacted by what we have to say.

1. SPEAK CLEARLY
Just as an actor is valued by how they deliver their lines, your logo speaks too. When potential customers see your new brand they should get a glimpse at your worldview. Logos are more then a name: they establish the flavor of the company. Does your company speak like a Brad Pitt or a Steve Buscemi?

2. ENGAGE EMOTION
People are addicted to stories. Frame your logo in a way that shares a bit of who and what you are. Walk them through the parts that make this business unique. Excite new customers before you’ve even said a word.

3. CHALLENGE YOUR COMPETITION
If your competition uses black, you should use white. If they position themselves as a global leader, then you should be the neighborhood helper. If they preach, you should listen. When the contrast between companies is clear then they have to really think to make a decision.

4. THINK IN SILHOUETTES
Would your logo be recognizable in silhouette? The best logos are. The more we depend on make-up instead of relying on form, the more lipstick we put on our pig.

5. THINK TEN YEARS OUT
Change happens quickly. Owning an outdated brand can be a big burden for a small business. Accept that building a brand is a long journey made better by ignoring current business design trends.

BONUS RULE: FEAR KILLS GOOD IDEAS
The shortest path to a safe logo is caving into fear. Safe doesn’t inspire or lead. It lets others know immediately you didn’t have the guts to be yourself.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”
- Ray Bradbury

Let’s be honest – you wonder about the true value of design, right? And as long as we’re speaking confidentially, every designer heavily wonders this exact question too.

The benefit of working with so many talented companies is that we’ve had a chance to watch brilliant minds at play. And over the years one can see a downright unsettling pattern among the experts of brand. It isn’t confined to giant budgets, or worldwide teams, but it does span the globe to reach every company with hopes to differentiate itself from the masses.

The secret is: People don’t consciously process design.

Marketing’s job is to cultivate trust and design breaks through barriers to speak to an individual on a personal and emotional level before they are even aware they are having a conversation. It works because in order to see how effective it is you have to really pay attention. Most people don’t take that time.

But what don’t believe us…we’re designers!

• Have you ever judged a business from their website?
• Does a mangled PowerPoint presentation reflect on the presenter?
• Is there a product you won’t buy at the Grocery Store because of the way it’s packaged?

Design works because we don’t believe it does. Simple as that.

While you may have been the world’s greatest Mom last summer or someone’s ideal role-model for a whole day, the problem with perfection is that it doesn’t stick around.

Let’s try a thought experiment: Look across your life and estimate how many minutes you’ve touched greatness in the eyes of others. Even if you’ve reached perfection for a few minutes a day, you’d see that all people are sub-perfect 99% of the time. Say I believe your company is above average. Instead of spending 99% of time being imperfect we only find 90% in your esteemed ranks. Even with this best case scenario, isn’t building trust an impossible goal with so much imperfection?

Cubicle Ninjas defines the goal of exceptional marketing as cultivating trust. This means every opportunity to build and strengthen trust is marketing’s responsibility.

Miraculously, you can build trust even faster when you make a mistake and correct it with dignity. Have a smile ready, some honest answers, and a clear plan of actions for when reality hits. A few years back this idea was shunned in global companies. Mistakes were made, hidden, and grew exponentially damaging. Today, transparency is the new marketing term for good ol’ honesty.

If your company obsesses over becoming perfect, you immediately plan to fail at this goal 99% of the time. What if you planned for both success and “less then perfection”? That sounds like a 100% improvement to me.

For years now you’ve unfairly been giving indecision the blame for mistakes. This was wrong. Go ahead and give your indecision a big hug. (Yes, right now. The blog and I will look the other way…)

Indecision is actually one of people’s greatest traits.
For you see, if humanity isn’t willing to weigh new ideas and goals against our current set, we’ll never learn to grow. Through indecisiveness we educate ourselves, find creative paths, and allow our worldview to be based purely on fact and not on arbitrary personal beliefs

Where most companies fail is fearing the free-fall of indecision and aiming immediately for consensus.
Giving up the appearance of control is too much for many sub-par leaders. An ambitious team’s ideas are neutered before they even had a chance in order to keep the company on track. These half-baked, “easy” approaches are destined for mediocrity even if applied with the highest level of skill.

Let’s live in a world where fresh ideas get equal weight and we champion individuals with the strength to embrace them.

Note: Embracing indecision does not mean to embrace inaction. Once you’ve completed weighing these facts you create a daring and detailed plan.