I Can't Hear You, You're Mumbling

Step Inside Design, Nov/Dec 2008 by Ilyin, Natalia

WHY EVEN A WHIFF OF SELF-PROMOTION MAKES DESIGNERS QUEASY

Like you, I am good at many business things. I can read a balance sheet. I can devise a three-year financial plan. I can do the work I promise, and when I do flush a prospect, I'll chase that prospect down 'til it drops. But when it comes to devising and implementing a well-thought-out, orderly plan to promote my company-well, I can't do it. Since I am in the brand and identity business, and spend many of my days devising and implementing well-thought-out, orderly plans to promote other people's companies, this is an embarrassing admission. The cobbler's children, we have all heard many times over, have no shoes. But the fact that they are barefoot does not directly affect the cobbler's cash flow in the way not promoting my own firm affects mine.

Although the first to seek publicity when I have a new book coming out or to speak up about a topic that interests me, when it comes to actually talking about my business, I dry up. For over 20 years, IVe been bad at self-promotion. And if you were trained as a graphic designer, I'll bet you're bad at it too.

Oh, yes. You decided to do some postcards once. You planned to send them out monthly. They were going to all relate to each other in interesting and random sorts of ways and slowly create a variable poster-thing through the months and it really looked great and the idea was cheap and everything except you sent one postcard out and then that was it for mailings. You never got around to the second one. A client needed something. A paying client. And your mailing list recipients were left holding a small postcard that meant nothing, its incompleteness never explained by another.

BEST OF INTENTIONS

It's not that you don't want to promote your business. It's that thinking about promoting it causes you an anxiety you would not feel if you were in, say, the cobbling business. You want to tell the world how great your work can be-but something holds you back. Actually, two things hold you back.

The first thing that keeps you from slipping that second postcard in the mail is the fear of dying in an embarrassing way in front of a large group of onlookers. This is a common fear, trumped only by fear of public speaking. Well I remember that time in New York that a guy got hit by a portable toilet that fell off the high floor of a construction site. Well I remember people trying not to laugh as the ambulance drove off, siren silenced.

For those not blessed with super-inflated design egos, the thought of sending something out or putting something up that we have designed for our own selves-something that embodies all our design skill, appreciation of nuance, ironic distance, educated use of type, framing of image-can be hard to contemplate. Deep down, the insecure among us know that somewhere, someone is going to get that postcard or look at that site and laugh a quiet, derisive laugh while showing it to office mates. One of them will stick your postcard on a bulletin board as a piece of goofy ephemera, next to his collection of naïf toilet paper roll packaging.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Except for a relative few, designers are an insecure bunch, seeing themselves as only as good as the last project, only as respected as their best efforts. This is not the case with, say, insurance salesmen. Designers are out there on the edge all the time, but when they design for themselves, they're out there naked.

Every time I do a workshop at a design school, at least one instructor will say he'd love to work with my company and can I throw some work his way? I say, "Send me something!" The perfect opportunity for that person to send me a postcard or give me a URL. And yet the weeks go by and I hear nothing. Every time.

Am I so frightening? I doubt it. It's the thought of encapsulating all they are, all they design, all they have created, all they dream of creating-of spelling out an identity in one fell swoop on the page or on the web. That's what puts the response on the back burner. Forever.

And there's that other reason that self-promotion is so hard for designers to actually get themselves to do-aside from the pressures of business and paying clients. No matter how many design magazines run attractively illustrated theme issues about the joys and creativity of telling the world about one's business, designers deep-down consider blunt self-promotion to be ambulancechasing. They consider it a slippery slope. For where is the line between the mailing of an ironic little postcard and the ad on page three of the current VistaPrint catalog?

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Like the old joke about the woman who wouldn't sell her virtue for $10 but thought for a moment about doing so for $1 million, designers don't want to find themselves in the position of quibbling about price.

It's the old "European professional" attitude that comes down to us from the Bauhaus. In Weimar Germany, in the old days when design was just starting out, professionals like doctors and lawyers and architects and graphic designers did not advertise, because the men involved in those professions were from a different social class from those in "commerce."