Over that same time, Bridge Creative began to implement the inbound marketing principles laid out in the book. We started rolling out landing pages and email marketing campaigns for our clients. We added conversion forms to sites and even brought marketing automation elements into our service with auto-responders.

The new techniques were working exceptionally, but the process was painful and intolerably slow. In order to get a clean “loop”, we were using a minimum of three different products (WordPress, WuFoo, Campaign Monitor) to make it work. Plus each landing page and campaign was custom designed, and hand coded. Our product was effective, but the process was unsustainable.

In the midst of all this, I got my 491st email from HubSpot. Frustrated with where we were, I decided to check back in with them and see if it made more sense now. The 2012 sales call was almost identical to the one from 2010 but now everything seemed to click. By using their tool, we could do four campaigns in the same time it took to create one. Plus it was all under one login, and the analytics were unbelievable. Then, about 45 minutes into the demo, the big lightbulb went off & I finally got it.

Hubspot is about leads.

That may seem easy, but it’s what did it for me. In our previous efforts, the tools were causing the leads to get lost in the shuffle. Not literally lost, but we had leads come in as regular emails, housed in email blast lists, stored in WuFoo. They were all over the place. The system was “working” but it was not genuinely working.

HubSpot is centered around leads. Everything in the system is designed to create leads. The software itself is designed to nurture the lead. Landing pages, emails, calls-to-action are not ends unto themselves. They are tools to create leads. My clients do not need landing pages; they need leads.

So there you go. We made the jump to HubSpot and are one month into the process with our client, Freeland Systems. I’ll be writing more about the process, but I thought it would be best to start with the “why” before getting into the mechanics.

Additionally, we will be taking the brand elements and applying them to their sister company, Digirad Imaging Solutions. Digirad Imaging Solutions is a partnership between UltraScan and Digirad to provide mobile nuclear and diagnostic testing across the country.

After working with the existing elements for such a long time, we are finding it to be a fun and challenging assignment. We’ll post the results of the work this December as the new brand launches.

If done right, the hand-off of the actual brand is the beginning of the relationship. The sad fact is that a logo by itself will do nothing. The tool without any further action provides no value. A hammer needs nails and someone to swing it in order to build things. You have to do something with it in order for the piece you paid for to generate value. So, you can pay $5,000 or $50,000 for a “brand” but without a team or a strategy that creates action you might as well forget it.

As designers, I think we should focus more on what happens with the tools we create as opposed to spending all our effort on the creation of the tool. It’s not as sexy, it is measurable (which is scary) and it’s much easier to fail but this is where things are really won or lost. By checking out after the initial design we miss the real-life data as to what works, what does not and we fail to see where things need to adapt.

It’s much cleaner to create a mark, design a standards guide and establish this as gospel. The thing is, standards and examples are of little benefit when you run into the complexities of real world implementation. These situations present themselves over months or even years. If all a client has is a standards guide that does not answer a specific question they are the ones who then shape the evolution of the brand. I think it’s much better for the designer / group that created the piece to stay engaged and shepherd it over the long run.

It’s messier and the methods of working like this are still evolving but it is without question more effective. If we are going to survive and grow we need to follow what is effective and design around that.

We were having HTTP 500 server errors and there was seemlingly nothing that could fix it. The solution to this turned out to be crazy simple and this could save you a lot of chasing around. Here’s how to fix it.

For some reason when you use custom permalinks like /%postname%/ it throws the server off when you move or restore the database. All you need to do to correct the problem is to set the permalinks back to their default state and save the settings. Once you do that test the pages to make sure they are working. Once you confirm that it is connecting you can switch right back to the custom permalink structure.

It’s a weird little bug with a simple fix.

A quick overview of the section “juggling us about throwing, not catching” is that as an employee or business owner you need to focus starting things (throwing) vs. dealing with emergencies (catching.) Godin is saying that the tyranny of the urgent may keep us “busy” but that in the end it can cause fundamental failure.

Part of our role as designers is to put out fires. Tasks like re-sizing an ad, editing a logo design or uploading a new page to a site are all valid, billable items to do. Clients need these kind of items and typically they need them urgently. The problem with this is that if your sole focus on is handling what comes in it’s impossible to be proactive and make a difference at a deeper level.

There is another set of issues that designers face which goes even deeper than the juggling vs. catching concern. Let’s say the requests stop coming in for a day or a week and you actually do have an hour to sit down and think. What, if anything, would you propose or create for a client to implement? Do you know your client, their clients, their industry well enough to propose a marketing plan, product or campaign that would make a difference?

I think our entire industry (as designers) is centered around catching and that is an issue for us. We are natural problem solvers and by using that creativity for more than a clever headline we can truly help out clients. Client need MORE than their ads submitted on time. We swim in an industry of ideas, creativity and newness and can bring that energy and freshness into their businesses as well as their collateral. If we step up and become more a part of our clients business we can impart a value that transcends the ability to run Illustrator or InDesign.

In 2002, 2007 and 2008 I was fortunate enough to have an entry in the final five that are selected to be voted on by the public. Two of those years I had two entries selected so in total I’ve had five different shirts be in the finals. And I’ve lost every single time. They even called me the “Susan Lucci” of the Peachtree Road Race T-Shirt contest. That hurt (albeit in a humorous way.)

After losing the 2008 contest by less that .5% I told myself that if I was ever lucky enough to be back in the finals I would be more vocal and let everyone know. So, this year I turned three different designs in and had one of them chosen for the 2011 finals. And I need your help to win this thing. Here’s what to do.

Click this link and then vote for NUMBER 2. You can either use your Facebook login or create a new one for the contest. I’m pretty sure you can vote every day so if you can, take a couple of minutes and help me win the contest this year.

At this point it’s not about the money (the winner receives $1,000 but I plan on giving it away if I win.) It’s like a challenge that I must face and win at some point. It’s turned into a metaphor of not giving up or getting back up when you get kicked down. It’s just a T-Shirt but for me it’s about not letting go of something you really, badly want.

So, thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for voting – I GREATLY appreciate it.

This is a curse of project work. Most designers just accept this as the way things are in our field but that’s not the case. The insourced approach we take at Bridge allows us the luxury of not having to constantly worry or panic about what is coming next. That is a benefit for Bridge but my whole reasoning behind this was not about the internal benefits to our firm.

Think about the time, energy and expense you put into landing the next project. Now, what if you could re-direct that energy to your client instead of your business? What if you put as much effort into landing work and building their business as you do chasing down the next web site or logo? And to take it a step further – is that not what you are supposed to do in the first place? Design, marketing and advertising is about generating new work for the client. We get it when it comes to our own firm because in order to stay alive we have to feed the funnel. But, if you apply those same skills COMBINED WITH your design skills to the benefit of your clients the equation changes.

Placing a business generation framework around your design expertise will help your clients grow, prosper and in the end will result in you needing fewer projects because clients that benefit from your skills will want more of what you are doing.

We had to mix live action video and stop motion work to achieve the final product. What you see in the final piece is actually a combination of three different shoots all composited into a single thirty-second piece. We shot it over two days at a studio in Atlanta and then did the final piece at the Georgia’s Own branch in Alpahretta.

Matt Pope from Summerset Productions did an amazing job of bringing our idea to life. When I asked Matt how hard it would be to mix the live action video with stop motion off his response was “Well, I know it’s possible. I’ve just never seen it done.” A big thanks to him and his crew for making it happen.

Here is how it all turned out…

Any WordPress code snippet that calls or sorts content based on categories will use a unique Category ID. Unlike almost everything else in WordPress, the system actually generates these codes and there is no obvious place to locate them. To find the Category ID for your site go to to the main Categories page and hover over your list of categories. Here I have hovered over the category “The Work” in our site:

With your mouse over the category name, you should see a URL string at the bottom of your browser in the status area. At the end of that string you will see text that says “tag_ID=” and then a number, like this:

You can see that when I hover over “The Work” the URL displays that it’s Category ID is 11. The number at the end of the string is the category ID that WordPress has given your specific category.

To call the posts using the Category ID you would simply use that number. The snippet below, from the Bridge site, shows how we display our work by calling Category 11.

So, that is the basics on Category ID’s. Sometimes it’s the simple things that drive you crazy and I hope this helps you make progress.

So we went back to the drawing board and re-worked it. I was a little skeptical at first to see what I could do to improve it but after about 15 minutes it was clear there was a lot we could do. Removing their full logo, switching to a much heavier font and also using a condensed version were all changes we made to make the message pop.

Updated PT Solutions Billboard

The new design reduced their brand presence and is a little clunkier but the changes will make it much more effective. If someone is driving up I-75, in pain from some injury, they could care less about the PT Solutions logo but they might be interested in physical therapy.

The real way we could tell that the new design would be more legible was to look at the design at a very small size. It’s easy with a 30″ monitor to focus on the details but from the road there is not a lot of room for subtlety. Take a look at how to two read at a reduced size:

As you can see, the original design is very hard to read at the thumbnail size.  Hopefully the new changes, which go up next week, will result in more call and new patients for PT Solutions. As much as I love design, the results of what we do are what it is all about and if the phone is not ringing the design may be good but not effective.