COMMENTS
Mike:
Love the format of your response to my presentation. Thank you for taking the time.
A few additional thoughts from me, since you sparked them:
1. I agree that PPT can sometimes be best to get the bullets down, as we do this as much as we go "all out" in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, for larger presentations, and certainly speeches, tapping an illustrator can take an additional 24 hours or less, I promise.
3. Absolutely. As the old adage says: "the customer is always right." That said, it is a dance between customer service and design service... they certainly do not always align. At the end of the day, we are selfless in service, but warn clients when we think the "bread is being overworked" per #9.
8. Would love to know what HubSpot's founder roster looked like, designer among the "founding fathers"? Because the visual and the UX are so critical for brands these days, I can't imagine starting without an expert riding shotgun from the get go.
10. I hear you. Will need to flesh this one out a little more. We are finding that our high end creative resources are being asked to do more production like tasks that are (1) an expensive use of their time and (2) not something in which they specialize. Rare is the bird that is good at both, likes both and is affordable for both. Will think on it some more!
Leslie -
Thanks for your thoughts and for stopping by the blog. I enjoyed your presentation, it gives us all a lot to think about and there are some great tips!
I guess my point about #1 is that it used to take marketing folks days or weeks to change their website because you needed a designer and/or programmer. Now with blogs and CMS and other tools, folks like me can update the website in seconds. This is HUGELY powerful. The tradeoff of sacrificing a little bit of design for a lot more speed and control is totally worth it and is a big benefit to the business.
I present at 20-50 events per year, and I am constantly tweaking and adding to my presentations. While I would love to have even more attractive presentations, I settle for less attractive presentations (photos and simple text) because it give me so much more power, speed and flexibility and it saves me a ton of $ (important at a startup). I guess I would love it if someone were able to create a way for me to still control the content and change the content, but raise the attractiveness of my presentations. But for me at least, I don't think custom design for each change or each presentation would work well (I often am tweaking the night before or on the plane to the event).
For your question re: #8... We did not have a designer for a while at HubSpot. It would have been nice to have, some things would have gone better. But I guess when I look at how far we have come (200 employees, 3,400 customers) without having a designer in our first 20-30 employees, that I can't say it is an absolute requirement for success. But, if I start a company will I hire a designer early? Yes! (Provided I can find a good one... it has to be a person, not a firm, to be effective for a startup IMHO.)
I think a new business owner should look for a strong design studio early on, most offer a free 30 min consultation. Ask questions about how to budget brand and marketing effectively in the first year. We advise our new business owners on getting a logo professionally designed and then getting a logo disk with all the file formats. We also offer our clients "templates" or working files they can use for files they want to maintain and manage themselves. For example templates for power point or event trifold brochures. New businesses frequently change and mature their marketing messaging in the first year, we focus on giving them the tools to do that easily. So in other words, ask the design consultant, what brand elements should be built for an iterative process and which ones should you get done professionally from the start. Also for web sites, look at alternatives like CMS or template sites or even a custom wordpress themes. Web sites are meant to be modified by the end user, so build it to facilitate that purpose.
Great conversation... thanks for starting it!