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PROFESSIONAL VISUAL STORYTELLING & CREATIVE DESIGN

My Wife's New 'Do': Pt. 5 – Customization

January 11, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

In the beginning, my wife’s new hairdo wasn’t a perfect fit. As she was getting used to it, she identified trouble areas that she needed touched up so that it would work better for her needs. She went back to the salon once a week for the first 3 weeks until it worked for her. While it certainly seemed excessive to me (and to be honest, I warned her that her hairdresser might shave her just to keep her from coming back a 4th time) her willingness to keep at it until it was exactly what she wanted has saved her time in trying to make things work and retraining down the road since it eliminated incremental changes at every visit over the next 4 months.

Time and use will eventually expose problems in even the most customized solution, and certainly for stock out-of-the-box products. We may find that we need either custom work or additional parts/pieces/plugins to fully integrate a new solution to our business. Keeping our eyes open for early adjustments, and being ready to take the time to make the ones we deem necessary early on will help eliminated poor workflows and habits and reduce the pain of retraining. No one likes giving up one poor solution for another poor solution.

My Wife's New 'Do': Pt. 4 – The Cost of Reeducation

January 8, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

Often, growth and change requires training. Whether implementing new equipment, software, techniques or workflows, re-training is inevitable. When my wife got her new hairdo, she had to learn a new way of styling her hair. Mistakes cost her, and even at this personal level, these weren’t small costs. Especially at the outset, mistakes have led to hours of lost time from her life and wasted hair product, especially when she has to resort to re-washings and restarts. She has learned that, at least for now, she needs to give herself more time to prepare to go out.

Most of us who have implemented new solutions or upgraded to ‘new and improved’ have had to deal with this learning curve. Whether we choose to purchase training from an expert or do it on our own thru books, videos or other means, we realize that we WILL lose both time and money after implementing new solutions or upgrades to existing solutions. Also we realize that mistakes, sometimes many mistakes, will be made. Upgrading is almost assuredly a speed bump in our otherwise smooth workflow. Until we work out these kinks, we may need to pad our timelines a bit to keep from overworking ourselves or delivering sub-par work to our clients, and expect to lose a bit in revenue when time is lost to education and mistakes.

When we upgrade, we need to prepare ourselves and our businesses to deal with the costs of reeducation in both time and money.

My Wife's New 'Do': Pt. 3 – Maintenance Costs

January 7, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

Some solutions are implemented simply because they save money or time, decrease maintenance, or increase efficiencies. In the case of my wife’s new hairdo, the solution actually requires additional recurring costs in both time and money. This particular hairdo requires more frequent visits to the salon to keep the hair short, recurring costs in hair styling product (something she never had to worry about before), and also more attention at home. Her hair, which used to be wash-and-go, now has to be styled. It also has to be tended to more often. For instance, before, if Louanna got caught in a rain shower, she simply combed it out and kept going. Now, such a situation requires a full once-over. And actions such as changing a pullover hoodie or sweater, driving with the window down, or putting on a baseball cap now require touch ups.

While seemingly counter-intuitive, many solutions in business also require increased maintenance costs. For instance, social media marketing often requires hours of time for someone to implement and maintain, while old marketing efforts such as throwing an ad in a paper or magazine or on television were relatively quick in comparison. Or entire IT teams may be devoted to the constant upkeep of enterprise software solutions and to keep their servers, PCs and networks up-to-date. These efforts, while costly in money and time, are made because of the potentially high payoff.

For my wife, the hope is that the benefits she receives from the new hairstyle will be enough to outweigh the amount of time it takes her to maintain her hair, especially as she gets more proficient at making the hairdo work. For us, we need to make sure that solutions that will cost us more than we currently spend in time and money will pay off in other ways. Otherwise, rethink implementing them.

My Wife's New 'Do': Pt. 2 – The Costs of Implementation

January 5, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

One of the first things we noticed with my wife’s new hairdo is that making it work costs money and time. My wife, who never used any type of ‘after shower’ hair products now has 3 new ‘goops’. She’s also purchased 2 new brushes (we started with only one, but we have an 9 year old daughter and items such as brushes tend to go missing on a regular basis). And she now regularly uses my hair dryer. No immediate out-of-pocket expense for that, since she was able to leverage resources already on hand, but seeing as how I generally have to buy a new one for myself every 18-24 months, I’m guessing this rate will increase.

[Read more…]

My Wife's New 'Do': Pt. 1 – Identifying Problems and Deciding on a Solution.

January 4, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

This past month, my wife of 12 years got a new hairdo. With the exception of our wedding day when our friend, Nikki Zurell, worked her craft on my wife-to-be, this is the first time in the 20 years that I’ve known her that she’s changed it. In fact, according to her, its the first change she remembers in the 40 years that she’s been alive that she’s changed her hair. Still, change happens, and it was finally time for her feminine but also very utilitarian hair to go.

The aftermath of this new hairdo has left us with a fair amount of turmoil to contend with, and oddly enough, I realized today that what we’ve gone thru this past month follows the same pattern of growing pains that many companies, large and small, go through on a regular basis as they grow and upgrade.

[Read more…]

Brain Power

January 1, 2010 by Christopher Wilson

This is a silly one suitable for this time of year while many of us are on vacation. You might have already gotten this in your email; apparently its been kicking around the intertubes for a while. If not, enjoy. I’ve found it a very interesting example of not just the power of our brains, but also the idea that things don’t have to fit into the nice little rules we live by to actually work. Sometimes its worth experimenting.

Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deo’snt mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

If you can raed tihs psas it on.

Its OK to Fail. Maybe…

December 30, 2009 by Christopher Wilson

Is it OK to fail?

Wise men will tell you that it is OK to fail. That you will learn a lot from failure. That you can grow from failure.

Realists will tell you that failure will cost you, sometimes dearly.

Everyone will tell you that failure is inevitable.

Who’s right?

[Read more…]

Borders Bookstores: Love Gone Cold

December 29, 2009 by Christopher Wilson

I love Borders Bookstores. They’re a brand I’m passionate about. When I think about picking up a book, the first thing that comes to mind is taking a trip to Borders. I love to walk their aisles and browse the shelves. I love to pull the books, look at the covers and read the descriptions. I love to sit in a chair for a few minutes and flip through the pages of a book I’m going to buy while I wait for my wife to finish looking for her books. I love Borders Bookstores. Or as least, I want to love Borders.

[Read more…]

Welcome to My Blog

September 4, 2009 by Christopher Wilson

I’m an artist who has held a number of creative positions, from doing character animation, character design, prop design, interface design and background paintings for children’s educational software, to multimedia and web design for various clients while working for other companies as well as working for myself. What I will do next has not been determined, though I do have some ideas and would love to return to my roots doing design and painting, but for a more adult crowd. Sci-fi would be nice. I’ll let you know when I make up my mind.

Anyway, while I was working for myself, I ended up with a nasty case of the ‘obviouses’, and realized I knew nothing about business; I knew nothing about starting, building, running, or marketing one. Even so, I did OK. However, once I decided that I’d better learn, I was amazed at how much is out there, how much I’d taken for granted, and how much we are never taught in school about how to turn our creative gifts into a career that we are happy with.

That’s pretty much the stuff that this blog will focus on, I think. I see stuff every day now. Stuff that I would never have noticed before about how Creatives build businesses. I experiment a lot. Some things work, some done. I’ll share it all here as I go. If you are a Creative, and if you want to see what else lies out there besides the two obvious choices (work for someone else, or hire yourself out freelance), then you should find this blog at least mildly interesting.

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