Each year Australian uni’s, colleges and private providers graduate literally hundreds of designers. They’re skilled at designing within a learning framework but have little exposure to the design industry. Does it matter?

Imagine being a client who has birthed and nurtured an idea only to lose control of how it looks and feels by handing it over to a designer.

You finally get a face-to-face meeting with a client you’ve been stalking. You don’t want to blow it. What should you do; say; pitch?

Many designers aren’t taught how to run a meeting efficiently and effectively and that’s a problem when you need to demonstrate confident management of a project. This article might help.

Managing a creative business is about constant change of direction, overcoming obstacles and reinvention. The skills is keeping clients and employees onside.

When expectations are managed, designers can add value managing a client’s social media presence – but it’s not to be under-estimated or under-serviced. Much reputational harm can come from inactivity or the wrong activity.

We all know it’s easier to get more work from existing clients than find new clients. Here are three great examples of creatives doing just that…

Recently I was a guest on a Streamtime Webinar talking about DIY business healthchecks.
We discussed the reports you can pull from project management software to check valuable profits aren’t leaking.
This is the stuff I wish I had have said…

So, this is our life now – working remotely and meeting virtually. So much seems to have changed but in reality most designers still have the same services to offer the same clients.

It is unprecedented times and it’s easy to feel overawed by the scale of this pandemic. But the same way you eat an elephant – bite-by-bite, is the same way that design studio owners can survive.

Everything a designer does has impact – our work has financial, social, environmental and value-based impacts on society. It’s up to individuals whether than impact is positive, or negative.

It is part of a designer’s role to give clients a framework in which to give their feedback. A framework helps moves the feedback from the subjective ‘I don’t like orange’ to a more appropriate, and useful objective responses.