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fronteers15
Primate – Walking the Tightrope Between Mediocrity and Bankruptcy #fronteers15
- Create a company that is not a web dev dactories
- Challenge: How to do creative work and still get paid.
- Clients & 💩
- Getting work: If you don’t have clients, there’s no business.
- You need to find good clients.
- Really challenging. How to find good clients?
- You need to balance two things:
- Build relationships
- Tedious pitching
- Love all(most) all clients, fired one client – this is tough
- You have certain views of how your clients should be.
- But sometimes you wake up and the client is not as easy to work with as you imagine.
- Pitching is fun, but the idea is crazy.
- You have to stand in front of someone and present your work, often unpaid.
- You need to balance the time.
- You don’t want to be under or over prepared.
- Example: Pitched for hotel chain in brussels, had good feeling, well prepared. Budget 130.000€
- About 6 or 7 other agencies did also pitch, didn’t win. Client went with a agency they have had a personal connection with.
- Best client that just wanted to have a talk about the project approach.
- Only payed once for a pitch.
- Project management
- Working in agile way: not directly building the car, but building a bike first and then a motorcycle
- People don’t read specs, don’t do too much of them.
- Agile is tricky.
- Bad experience, clients don’t understand what the concept of agile is.
- Clients often do not prioritize their features properly.
- They use sprintr + basecamp together with transparency and communication. Do more work and less management.
- Be honest.
- Design & 💩
- Design is about communicating an idea, the user journey.
- Not talking about implementation.
- Design should be brief but an idea needs to be conveyed.
- Struggle with “content” and “best practice”
- Content
- Really, really important
- Designers and content creators working together in print to deliver a proper design for the content.
- Nowadays templates are designed without knowing what the actual content is, the content is added later.
- This idea of designing distracts from what the developer should actually think about.
- Atomic design is the idea to start with the small things. But that is just design assets, there is no real creativity in there.
- Of course having a designer for every article is too expensive for most projects.
- Content needs to play a central role in the design.
- Avoid the handshake of death.
- Copywriting can make it better: “We don’t do secret handshakes”
- This is missing from online at the moment.
- Copy text can be very simple and dull, for example Synergy. An image of a bee and a flower could help to enforce the message.
- Sometimes things are like rules – Don’t define line-height in pixels, don’t do this and that.
- But some times you need to do that stuff anyway, it depends on your context.
- For example the smartphone is like a huge carousel.
- F**k the rules. Responsibly.
- If you think something is best for the audience, do it.
- Create for content.
- Development & 💩
- Design – Developing relationship “interesting”.
- We need to deliver projects in time and budget and – like architects – need to work in the boundaries of what is necessary.
- Client’s don‘t care about a certain frontend tech.
- With technology, you have to move fast to keep up with the quick evolving technology.
- Massive explosion of new tools in the last year.
- To survive in an ever-changing environment you have to move faster than everyone else.
- Developers have to think and understand everything: designers, the business and clients.
- Balancing between being “Jack of all trades” and being “the master of one”
- Tech is disposable after a few years. Have the courage to dump things that don’t work anymore.
- Everyone fails at something.
- Embrace progress
- Stakes are getting higher, projects get bigger.
- What’s the point to keep that balance.
- The journey is more important than the destination.
- Aim: To have not a factory but a family.
- Work affects our families and the other way around. So a good work environment is really needed to be happy.