“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.

So-so marketing lies to your face.
It fudges the numbers and preaches tall-tales. It hungers to buy the adspace around us. It invites us to hope for a better tomorrow and trust that our problems will be solved. When we unwrap the packaging and see the truth we know we’ve been betrayed.

Good marketing lies behind your back.
It never promises the world, and instead uses hired help to guide your hand. Here you see paid actors, athletes, or esteemed CEOs speaking a corporate message. We’re invited to trust in an individual’s endorsement. When we unwrap the packaging and see the truth we know we’ve been sold out.

Exceptional marketing doesn’t need to lie.
It is honest. It is clear. It is inspiring. When we get home we find that it is better then we’d hoped, and we learn to trust.

Marketing is the art of cultivating trust.
For every lie you tell, imagine you lose ten customers. For a small business a lie would be deadly, and so we find successful small businesses cultivate honesty. In large businesses the consumer can be so far removed from marketing that honesty is not always required. Lying is seen as a necessary evil. In many cases exaggerating benefits is encouraged.

The “One Rule of Exceptional Marketing” Test.

1. Are there more potential customers in your sales team ’s pipeline then being referred by your existing customers?
2. Was the website traffic from paid advertising greater then your organic search traffic last year?
3. Does your company avoid using its own product/service?

If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above you’re seeing the clear gap between your marketing and reality. But the truly scary thought is: your customers see this view each day.

“When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dinosaurs live in your office. They stomp in packs mudding up the foyer, grazing lightly in the kitchen, and sleeping with one eye open in the boardroom. These are career business animals.

We can imagine they woke up on college graduation day with such hope for their future. What couldn’t they conquer then? And how long was it before the hopelessness set in? Now they are moving office scenery, following their daily paths with no passion and infecting the workplace with the warm comfort of apathy.

You can resist. You can wake up each day and make your unique impact. You can be true to the person inside of you who still hopes and dreams. Dinosaurs be damned.

Have you ever walked into a building for the first time and fumbled while trying to enter?
Maybe you pushed when you should’ve pulled and the people around you all politely stare. You’re a smart person with a degree and a fancy job, who knew you’re downfall would be an office door?

Well, I’m here to blame the door.

You see most office doors are so badly engineered they trick us into using them wrong. For example:

• A bar that you are required to pull
• A handle that you’re required to push
• Glass doors with handles on both sides with no sign whether to push or pull
• Door handles on automatic doors

It so human to blame ourselves when it feels like we’ve failed. But design plays a bigger part then we’d hope to believe. We see it each day from our wacky bathroom sinks to the rollout of our biggest brand campaigns. The line has been crossed though. It is no longer good enough to be unclear. If a consumer doesn’t understand something, of any size or shape, it your job to make it easily understandable. Simplicity always wins.

A system that communicates information clearly in little time is elegant design. Now can you imagine how many doors that might open?

Thanks to our new friends at Hongkiat for featuring our web design for Water Media Publishing in their article “100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Designs”. We’re honored to be included among such exceptional designers.