And so today, I make a stand against papyrus.

I have joined the picket line. I have signed the petition. It’s a matter of pride, integrity and a cry to maintain my values as a designer, as a person. As of today, this 31st day of January in the year two-thousand twelve, I am boycotting everything Papyrus. That’s right, I hate the font Papyrus. In fact, from now on, “Papyrus” will be written “papyrus”, without the formal capitalization of the first letter. Here is my pledge:

• Thou shalt not step foot in any store boasting papyrus in it’s signage whether lit or unlit.
• Thou shalt no longer buy an product with any papyrus contained on the packaging.
• Thou shalt remove all items from thy household and workplace utilizing papyrus.
• Thou shalt pledge never to consider using papyrus in an marketing material, ever.

My most hated papyrus offenders:

What am I trying to say?

I’m saying that interactions with paper based purely on feel and smell create an emotional experience that cannot be replaced and is stronger than most digital experiences with the same information. That means I’m stoked for really effing sexy business cards that give me more than just a name and address. I’m interacting with the person and the company represented on those cards because they thought about those touchy-feely emotions some of us have forgotten. It’s why we have cats as pets and not hedgehogs, which are arguably more cute.

We’ve only touched the surface and I am sexually aroused at the prospect of clients being open to creating an experience for their contacts through something as common as a 2-inch by 3.5-inch business card. Hang on, it’s gonna be a fun ride. Here’s a few cards other designers have made to wet your lips:

From the first day of working for myself, I had a very structured routine of being out of bed and commuting the 20 steps to the office across the hall, checking email, reading the news and planning my day by 7:30AM. It was the rest of my day that was never really structured. I would do work whenever I could, I would schedule meetings whenever someone wanted to meet and I would allow myself to be distracted by Twitter, Facebook and all that social media jazz. In addition, what happens if your sister, who knows you are home, calls and needs you to watch your nephews for a couple hours after lunch? You stop what you’re doing and go help the family. It’s all good until that sister of yours realizes that you won’t say no and this “random happenstance” occurs once or twice a week without warning.

Whatever the interruption, as a freelancer, I think we feel entitled and almost required to break our desired routine to address whatever and prove to everyone else that we are better than them. We make our own schedule. We are our own boss. Speaking from experience, this attitude will screw you over.

So how do I avoid the shenanigans of the day and finish each day with things crossed of the list? I’ve tried to organize the day in hourly blocks, I’ve tried to turn off the Twitter, the phone and the email distractions for periods of time, I’ve even tried changing my music selections to classical. All of these helped some but I found that I am most successful when I do this:

First off, on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper, I have Monday-Friday listed in a single week with boxes underneath them. I put two weeks to a sheet, number them according to the calendar day and leave room between the two for notes. Under each box I write my tasks for the day like this:

THURSDAY 12

• FixMedia blog post
• Post office
• Call client AAAA
• Call client GGGG
• Client CCCC flyer to printer
• Deliver Client BBBB business cards
• Client PPPP get newsletter info
• Oil change
• Gather portfolio for YYYY meeting 2PM
• Gym

Additionally, I’ve broken my week down to have “themed” days.

• Monday is for marketing. I need to promote myself and I need to follow up with people. This is writing blog posts, getting business cards printed for myself and playing on my website.
• Tuesday and Wednesday are production days and in reality, I do maybe 80% of all my design work on these days.
• Thursday is a meetings day. I try to schedule the contacts I communicated with on Monday for Thursday and setup blocks of time for everyone in a single day. Leftover time goes back to marketing some more and doing blog posts like this one today.
• Friday always seems like a deadline day so I devote Friday to production and bang out as much as I can so clients can proof things over the weekend. I want small business owners to have a couple days they can look at things and I want everyone else to have stuff in their inbox to proof first thing Monday… Which happens to be my marketing day so I’m not interrupted when they call to make changes.

This routine has helped me become more focused, more productive and more able to deliver the goods. There are always exceptions on any given day but having some structure has helped immensely. However, my still sister calls to watch my nephews, I rarely say no and this continues to hurt my business. Clearly I haven’t figured that part out yet and maybe I’m not trying too hard to fix it. It’s nice to be there when family calls.

Chad Peterson – Matawan, NJ

Having a creative outlet is really important to everyone. It’s something that is natural to us and can be seen when kids meet crayons and when we go back and look at the Caves of Lascaux, France. For some people, it’s as elaborate as a special space, tubes of paint, particular brushes waiting for a perfect sunset. For others it can be as simple as organizing the canned food in the pantry or cutting the lawn in fun diagonal patterns. Whatever it is, we need it. Most of you would assume that I get this designing a website, business card or logo and to some extent, you’re right. There is a creative process in place however, it’s not what you think. I would prefer to call that process “visual problem solving”. In reality graphic designers and web designers are further from the artist than they are the mathematician, the economist, the journalist and the restaurant waiter.

As a designer it is my job to take your current situation and build the tools that will help your company reach it’s goals. This could be sales, this could be PR. You are asking me to write a formula for your success and I do this visually. Sometimes I bring in problem solvers that use words, sometimes I bring in problem solvers that use code. So yeah, “visual problem solver”, that’s me.

With that cleared up now, we can go back to talking about creativity. The day-to-day drive has taken my time to be creative away from. When you add the hours in making a living as a freelance designer balanced with family, friends and added to the hours volunteering and training to be a firefighter/emt, it makes you wonder when I have time for myself. So now we go back to those outlets… Mowing the lawn and organizing the pantry don’t sound so weird. No one is gonna help, you are by yourself being creative and though they may be chores, you are being creative.

So how have I been sneaking it in? Take a look in my fridge one day. The array of colors arranged in such a way with labels and shapes moving your eye from one area to another. It’s not by accident that there is symmetry happening in there. It’s a canvas and maybe one day, I’ll post some pictures. But for now, the time I have to be creative is just for me. How do you sneak creativity into your life?

Facebook ads are similar to Google advertising, you can target very specific types of people in very specific areas. This is important because if you ares elling geriatric walkers and want to make a Facebook ad to help with sales and marketing, you don’t want to spend your money reaching out to the college market. This is part of the beauty of online advertising. For short money you can get your message to exact demographic you want. No spending $500 on a quarter page ad in a magazine that runs only once a month and can’t, in return, prove that 1,000 people even opened the darned thing.

With Facebook advertising, there are two ways of paying. You can pay for each of your ads that gets clicked on or you can pay for the number of your times your ad gets loaded to the page of a person who fits your demographic criteria. Price changes regularly but you can set a cap of say $30/mo and after that amount’s worth of ads was used, you would get cut off until the following month. So $30/mo with Facebook might be the equivalent of $500/mo in a monthly publication.

Here’s a video that explains it all really well:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150228703690484

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pho-Beef-Noodles-2008.jpg

It’s safe to say that my undeniable, subconscious desire to be all things and do all things can get in the way sometimes. It’s hard to specialize when there are so many things that interest me. For a while there I thought that this was a major flaw in my personality but I realize that I am in a unique position where this is a major plus. Rather than be the guy who does one thing, I have a really “big picture” view of what I am doing.

I can look at a business, the marketing they use, the customers they have and the business owner involved and I can craft a plan for growth and teach the them how to implement it. Sure that means that I don’t sign clients up for monthly maintenance contracts and sure that probably means I don’t make as much money. But what I am doing is empowering the business owners to do what they do best, which is run their business the way they want. For many of them, it’s gotten them local success and most have no desire to be the next Burger King.

So I’ve installed a new website, that literally only took me a day. I’ve cleared the random, unscheduled thoughts of my previous blog attempt and I’ve regained my focus  heading into 2012. Here are my personal goals for the new year:

1. Make my fiance’s life easier and filled with more smiles at all costs
2. Draw, paint, photograph and design the things I’ve been talking about for the last five years
3. Continue to volunteer and give back to my community
4. Remember where I came from and appreciate the opportunities I have each day
5. Learn my mother’s recipe for egg rolls and pho