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Summer is knocking on your front door, begging you for attention. Living in New England, where summer never lasts long enough, it’s hard for me to say no. But with a full-time job and my freelancing work, saying no means procrastinating. It’s hard to enjoy yourself in the summer sun when you know there is a heap of work waiting for you.

I have recently told my boss that I will be going from full-time to part-time starting in October. It was a hard decision but one that, ultimately, I had to make if I wanted to stay sane.

It’s a risk—leaving your full-time job for freelancing. But this is a risk I was comfortable taking. I had two big reasons for deciding to make the leap: I am now the co-owner/publisher of a twice-annual publication and my husband and I are expecting our first child this summer. Cutting back my hours at my full-time job just made sense for us.

I started wondering how other people came to the conclusion that it was time to back out of their full-time jobs and focus on their freelance careers or small businesses. I found two women who have made the switch and thought I would share their stories. Perhaps they’ll inspire you to think about taking the leap.

Hailey Tash

Hailey Tash was asked by a friend of a friend to take some engagement photos of her and her fiancé in November 2010. Photography had been a hobby and passion of Tash’s for years, but up until that point she only took photos on the weekends of her friends, family, and nature. She had no idea that accepting this portrait job would change her life.

“I started a Facebook fan page and started posting some of the stuff I had been shooting on the weekends, along with those first engagement photos,” she says. One of her mother’s friends saw her page and hired her to take photos of a wedding, even though she knew Tash had never photographed one before.

Through word of mouth, Tash started picking up more wedding and engagement portrait work. She started a website and started building a portfolio.

During this time, Tash was working 30 as a behavioral health professional. “I longed to do photography full-time, but I was in a panic,” she says. “I graduated college in August 2011 and knew that I’d have student loans soon.” Along with all her other bills like her car payment and rent, Tash was planning her own wedding. “I had a lot of expenses, and while my business was growing, I knew it couldn’t support me.”

So she stayed at her job. “It was incredibly tough,” she says. “I’d work most of the day and then stay up late editing photos. I took longer than I should, which wasn’t fair to my clients.” When she started booking weddings for the 2013 summer season, as well as engagement sessions and senior portraits, Tash saw a light at the end of the tunnel. “I followed an international wedding photographer’s advice on how to keep your prices competitive based on your number of bookings, and eventually raised my prices enough to survive.”

When her boss asked her to increase her hours for the summer, she knew there was no possible way she could work as a behavioral health professional and handle all her photography work. “I knew those hours at home working on marketing and answering emails would benefit my business and help me grow—so I took the jump,” Tash says. “I knew if I didn’t, I would just keep waiting and waiting and it would never seem like the right time.”

This was last month, and Tash is now working full-time at her business, Hailey Tash Photography.

Courtney Balestier

Courtney Balestier has been a full-time freelancer for just over a year, hopping on the freelance bandwagon in April 2011.

“I had been on the editor track for about five years and had always wanted to eventually freelance full time and focus on writing,” she says.

Soon after graduating with her master’s in journalism, Balestier took a full-time job at Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine and soon realized that a full-time gig usually meant leaving the best writing assignments to someone else.

“I started to get frustrated assigning out fun stories that I wanted to do myself. It was still quite early in my career, I hadn’t risen far enough up the ranks to get invested in a high-stakes editorship, and I wasn’t making so much that the temporary hit in income would affect my lifestyle.”

Balestier still writes regularly for Every Day with Rachael Ray and is still on the books part-time while they make some new hiring decisions. She’s 100% happy with her decision and can’t imagine her life any other way. “Making the leap, cheesy though that expression is, is the biggest mental hurdle to get over,” she says. “After that, it comes together. Of course you have to work hard to make it come together, but it’s the most satisfying work.”

For Tash, it was the desire to open her own business and follow her passion. For Balestier, it was the desire to write the kinds of stories she was interested in writing. For me, it’s a new business and a new baby. What are the reasons for you to ditch the full-time job and go freelance?

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by xilius.

Freelancers often underestimate how they can use LinkedIn to build relationships with clients and colleagues. As a global professional network, boasting over 135 million people, LinkedIn becomes a virtual Rolodex of contacts making it a great way for freelancers to exchange information, ideas, and share and explore relevant issues.

As a business networking tool, it’s a natural social network for freelancers to explore. While you may associate social networks with time wasting sessions on Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn’s value as a business generating tool is worth exploring.

Here are four ways to tap into LinkedIn for your freelancing business:

1. Engage your “Connections” for help.

LinkedIn can be useful for freelancers looking to outsource aspects of their business or seeking collaborators for projects. If you’re seeking someone with special skills, the first place to look for experts is on LinkedIn.

The site provides a trusted way to find the right people who fit your needs– a kind of digital word-of-mouth when you’re doing a search.

The site provides a trusted way to find the right people who fit your needs– a kind of digital word-of-mouth when you’re doing a search. For example, if you’re looking for someone with social marketing skills to help you market your freelance services, run a search of profiles on LinkedIn in a zip code or location near you. Narrow down your search with keywords and professional affiliations. LinkedIn’s advance search feature lets you filter searches by group affiliations, companies, location, seniority, company size, and so forth.

LinkedIn is also an excellent way to do a quick background check of your clients and other freelancers you work with. You can track what people have done and corroborate material on resumes that cross your desk.

2. Give clients a “big picture” view of your professional background.

A LinkedIn profile offers more substance than the usual brief bio that’s on your website. Letting you build a searchable and comprehensive professional profile is where LinkedIn really excels as a tool for freelancers. I use it as a central place that has links to my website, portfolio, blog, and Twitter account. It also has my full CV in case curious prospective clients want to see a more extensive profile of my work experience.

Remember that human resources, head hunters, and other businesses frequently browse LinkedIn, too. Depending on your industry, you may find yourself being “checked out” by larger companies looking to hire contractors.

3. Expand your clientele.

When engaging with clients, even if you don’t end up doing a project together, add them to your network. If there’s someone you’ve been meaning to contact, check your “‘Connections” and see if your existing network shares a link to that person. LinkedIn can be a great way to make inroads to future clients.

If you’re looking to score a contract with a company, find out who the key decision makers are and check out what LinkedIn groups they may belong to. If you join one of them, send them an invitation to be your Connection and cite your common membership in the group. Establish a professional rapport this way and build up your relationship until you’re ready to pitch your services.

4. Build and show off your expertise.

Under the “More” tab, you can view and browse through topics that people are interested in. Just select a Category that’s most relevant to your industry and work interests, then see if there are questions that you can answer to show off your expertise. Answering questions is a great way to position your freelance business as an authoritative resource. Consider the free advice you give out as a marketing tactic.

Learn more about how to use LinkedIn to grow your freelance business.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by demention.

Step One Download Single Post Template Plugin

In order to use WordPress as a way to produce and archive email newsletters you’ll need a WordPress plugin called Single Post Template. This plugin allows theme authors to include single post templates, much like a theme author can use page template files. Notice we’ll be making a post template, not a page template, because this is how we’ll automatically display the online version of the archived newsletters for the posts that are in the category “Newsletter”, instead of manually putting in each hyperlink on a page.

Step Two Creating the Category

Let’s begin with creating the category “Newsletter”.

In your WordPress admin settings under posts (version 3.3.1) click categories. The name will be “Newsletter”, which is how it shows on the site and the slug will be “newsletter”, which is the URL-friendly version of the name. Parent will be “none” unless you plan to have multiple newsletters. For example, if you have multiple email newsletters like technology, science and sports or daily, weekly and monthly then you’ll want to organize differently. By organize I mean make a category “Newsletter” and under that have your children categories Technology, Science and Sports or Daily, Weekly and Monthly.

Step Three Building the Post Template

Download the newsletter post template provided with this tutorial and open it in your favorite editor.

Inside the code you’ll see some PHP code, this is where the magic happens. Each PHP code serves as a different purpose to provide you with options to create a successful newsletter.

First PHP Code Snippet

<?php the_title(); ?>

This code displays the title of the post. So to make use of it you’ll want to title your post to the according month or day. Meaning if you send out a newsletter everyday then you’ll want to name it something like “April 7th, 2012 Newsletter”, or if you send out a monthly newsletter then you’ll want to name it something like “April Newsletter”.

Second PHP Code Snippet

<?php the_post(); ?><?php the_content(); ?>

This code displays whatever content you type into the WYSIWYG editor. This would be the main content section to your newsletter. Instead of using basic text or styles from the kitchen sink I suggest to use HTML to spice up the design. Make “read more” buttons, distinguish a story’s end and a story’s beginning with a horizontal line. Use CSS to make the headline more noticeable, but remember when you use CSS you cannot link to an external CSS stylesheet file or have a style tag in your header, because it will not work for all email clients, so be sure to use inline styles.

Third PHP Code Snippet

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=in_depth_local_news&showposts=3'); ?>
<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
	<a style="color:#ee2125; font-family: Cambria, serif;font-size: 15px;font-style: normal;font-weight: normal;text-transform: normal;letter-spacing: normal;" target="_blank" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
	<p style="line-height:15px; padding: 0pt; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal; color: rgb(49, 49, 49);"><?php truncate_post(15); ?></p>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

• showposts=3 displays the most recent 3 posts.
• category_name=in_depth_local_news determines what category to use to show the posts.
• <?php the_title(); ?> displays the headline of the post.
• <?php truncate_post(15); ?> displays the 15 character description.

Determine what category posts you’d like to display and simply change the category_name=. If you like to only show 1 post then change the PHP code to showposts=1.

If you’re looking to make another section displaying posts from another category then copy the above code and paste it where you’d like it. <?php wp_reset_query(); ?> is important to have, because the code resets the query so it is possible to have multiple sections of category posts.

Fourth PHP Code Snippet

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'contesttext', true); ?>

This code will display the text (value) that is in the contesttext (name) custom fields section. This gives you opportunity to put anything you’d like in the sidebar, like contests, ads, images, etc… In order for the above code to work the name of the custom field must be contesttext, so if you’d like to use it for ads, then change the id to ID, ‘ads’.

Whatever you put in the value box is what will show up on the newsletter. What’s nice is you can use HMTL.

Fifth PHP Code Snippet

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'business-sponsors', true); ?>

This code will display the text (value) that is in the business-sponsors (name) custom fields section. Exactly the same as the above code, but uses a different id and shows up in the third column instead of the second column.

For those users that are wanting to unsubscribe there are two ways to handle this. What’s coded in the above template, which will open up the users email client sending an email to joevandal@gmail.com with the title “Unsubscribe Me”. The other way is to link them to a page with an unsubscribe me form that they can fill out. If you’re looking for a solution of a one click unsubscribe button this is available with newsletter software such as Constant Contact.

Final PHP Code Snippet

<?php the_permalink() ?>

This code is used to provide the URL to the online version of the newsletter. It is important to give your users an alternative incase the newsletter does not work properly in their email client.

Step Four Uploading the Newsletter Post Template

Now that you understand how the template works and have changed the code to fit your needs, upload the newsletter template to your theme folder using FTP software like Filezilla. It’s named single-newsletter.php for a purpose and that is for organizational reasons. Since your FTP sorts your files in alphabetical order it will help you not confuse a post template with a page template.

Step Five Making a Post for the Newsletter

Make a new post in WordPress and remember to do everything that was in the prior instructions. Such as naming the headline to the according month or day, choosing the correct category, adding your newsletter content in the WYSIWYG editor, and adding your custom fields name and value. Most importantly select the newsletter template in the single post template drop down menu so it will show the newsletter template instead of the normal post template.

Step Six Sending Out the Newsletter

Now that you have finished your post and have published it online we can began the next step.

Open your email newsletter software; I’m using GroupMail, but you can use almost any newsletter software to complete this tutorial; all the software needs to provide is the import web URL option. Create a new message (newsletter) and instead of entering any code and/or content look for the option to important a web URL. The idea is to make use of the work you have already done, so when you import the URL to your online newsletter that you made in WordPress it will cut down the work load. Know that it may not import everything correctly, so you may need to make some tweaks. When it imports it will display the posts, customs field, permalink to your online version and everything else. Now your newsletter will be archived online!

As a journalist, I sometimes write columns and blogs that people don’t agree with. Sometimes I feel so lambasted when people leave comments about what I’ve written that I literally can’t read them. I have a pretty tough skin, and I am aware that I’m not always right—but still, sometimes I get angry and hurt.

My goal in writing something controversial is to never regret writing it. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, and I try to be as explicative as I can when I know I’m writing about a touchy topic. I don’t have all the answers to everything, but I know that posing the question to readers is usually the most important thing.

I feel really good when something I have written gets a ton of comments and shares—even if most of them are from people who completely disagree with what I have said. That’s what blogging is all about! Creating a dialogue with my ideas is the ultimate goal, whether I am praised or shunned. It’s good to have strong opinions, and having an outlet to share them is a wonderful thing.

I bring this up because of the recent TIME magazine cover with the young mother breastfeeding her 3-year-old son. You’ve probably heard about it as bloggers and columnists and mothers around the world are speaking out about it. And most of the stuff I have read is not praise.

This is most definitely a case where a photo is worth 1,000 words. And from now on, photographer Martin Schoeller is going to be known as the photographer who took the controversial cover photo for TIME magazine where Jamie Lynne Grumet, a gorgeous California mom, is breastfeeding her son who is standing on a chair.

“When you think of breast-feeding, you think of mothers holding their children, which was impossible with some of these older kids,” Schoeller said in an interview on TIME.com. “I liked the idea of having the kids standing up to underline the point that this was an uncommon situation.” —Time.com

Breastfeeding is a controversial topic in the United States. It’s much less so in other nations. Here’s the kicker—the article doesn’t even feature Jamie Lynne Grumet. It’s a piece written by Time staff writer Kate Pickert about Dr. William (Bill) Sears and his book about attachment parenting.

TIME knew exactly the effect this cover would have on the nation and it succeeded beautifully. News shows are all over it, Twitter is abuzz and it’s the top story in every paper. Mothers verses mothers, once again. Well played, TIME, this will surely be one of the best selling issues of the year. —TheHuffingtonPost.com

Here are some snippets from other news outlets about the cover photo:

Time magazine’s breastfeeding cover story asks: “Are You Mom Enough?” But it might as well ask: “Who Says Print Is Dead?”

The magazine is the talk of the nation this morning, dominating the morning talk shows, the radio shows, social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, and that gold standard of relevancy, Google. It’s the No. 1 search term there today. —LATimes.com

Time clearly picked this provocative cover image to sell magazines and attract media attention. The actual story inside the magazine is titled The Man Who Remade Motherhood and it’s about Dr. Bill Sears, an internationally recognized pediatrician who’s known as the leader behind the attachment parenting movement that calls for extended breastfeeding (as well as co-sleeping and baby-wearing).

But the grey-haired doctor isn’t pictured on the cover. Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year-old California mom, and her breast-sucking son made the cover instead.

Makes sense from a need-to-sell-magazines standpoint. A mother nursing a preschooler is more arresting—and bound to spark a heated debate around the topic of extended breastfeeding. —SFGate.com

So, clearly, controversy is good for business—especially in this case.

Whether you agree with the topic or think a mom breastfeeding a preschooler is weird, it’s selling magazines. What has it done for TIME’s reputation? Good question. What has it done for the reputations of the photographer and writer? Well, they’re a heck of a lot more well-known now.

What I am happy to see is that the photographer isn’t getting thrown under the bus in anything I have read pertaining to the cover photo. Which is good, since Schoeller was just completing the assignment. I would say this cover photo is a feather in his cap and has clearly gotten him tons of press and publicity.

So being controversial isn’t always a bad thing, as long as you can stand by your decisions and live with them. If you are going to take a stand, like Time did by publishing this cover shot, you can’t waiver. You have to stick to your guns and take whatever flack comes your way. Apologies will just make you look weak. Stand by your decisions!

  

In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns. All types of organizations are guilty: large government agencies, Fortune 500s, not-for-profits and (especially) institutions of higher education.

Worst of all, these offending organizations are prone to repeating the redesign process every few years like spendthrift amnesiacs. Remember what Einstein said about insanity? (It’s this, if you don’t know.) It’s as if they enjoy the sensation of failing spectacularly, publicly and expensively. Sadly, redesigns rarely solve actual problems faced by end users.

I’m frustrated because it really doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s look at why redesigns happen, and some straightforward and inexpensive ways we might avoid them.

The Diagnostic Void

Your users complain about your website’s confounding navigation, stale content, poor usability and other user experience failures. You bring up their gripes with the website’s owners. They listen and decide to take action. Their hearts are in the right place. But the wheels quickly come off.

Most website owners don’t know how to diagnose the problems of a large complex website. It’s just not something they were ever taught to do. So, they’re put in the unfortunate, uncomfortable position of operating like country doctors who’ve suddenly been tasked to save their patients from a virulent new pandemic. It is their responsibility, but they’re simply unprepared.

Sadly, many website owners fill this diagnostic void — or, more typically, allow it to be filled — with whatever solution sounds best. Naturally, many less-than-ethical vendors are glad to dress up their offerings as solutions to anyone with a problem — and a budget. The tools themselves (search engines, CMS’, social apps) are wonderful, but they’re still just tools — very expensive ones, at that — and not solutions to the very specific problems that an organization faces. Without proper diagnostics to guide the configuration of tools, any resulting improvements to the user experience will be almost accidental.

Sometimes design agencies are brought in to fill the diagnostic void. And while not all agencies are evil, a great many follow a business model that depends on getting their teams to bill as many hours as they can and as soon as possible. Diagnostics can slow the work down (which is why clients rarely include a diagnostic phase in their RFPs). So, many agencies move to make a quick, tangible impression (and make their clients happy) by delivering redesigns that are mostly cosmetic.

A pretty face can last only a few years, but by then the agency is long gone. Invariably, the new owner wishes to make their mark by freshening or updating the website’s look. And another agency will be more than happy to oblige. Repeat ad nauseam, and then some.

Oh, and sometimes these redesigns can be pricey. Like $18 million pricey.

See why I’m so grouchy?

Forget the Long Tail: The Short Head Is Where It’s At

Whether you’re a designer, researcher or website owner, I’ve got some good news for you: diagnostics aren’t necessarily difficult or expensive. Better yet, you’ll often find that addressing the problems you’ve diagnosed isn’t that hard.

And the best news? Small simple fixes can accomplish far more than expensive redesigns. The reason? People just care about some stuff more than they care about other stuff. A lot more. Check this out and you’ll see:

This hockey-stick-shaped curve is called a Zipf curve. (It comes from linguistics: Zipf was a linguist who liked to count words… but don’t worry about that.) Here it is in dragon form, displaying the frequency of search queries on a website. The most frequently searched queries (starting on the left) are very, very frequent. They make up the “short head.” As you move to the right (to the esoteric one-off queries in the “long tail”), query frequency drops off. A lot. And it’s a really long tail.

This is absolutely the most important thing in the universe. So, to make sure it’s absolutely clear, let’s make the same point using text:

In this case, tens of thousands of unique queries are being searched for on this university website, but the first one accounts for 1.4% of all search traffic. That’s massive, considering that it’s just one query out of tens of thousands. How many short-head queries would it take to get to 10% of all search traffic? Only 14 — out of tens of thousands. The 42 most frequent queries cover over 20% of the website’s entire search traffic. About a hundred gets us to 30%. And so on.

It’s Zipf’s World; We Just Live in It

This is very good news.

Want to improve your website’s search performance? Don’t rip out the search engine and buy a new one! Start by testing and improving the performance of the 100 most frequent queries. Or, if you don’t have the time, just the top 50. Or 10. Or 1 — test out “campus map” by actually searching for it. Does something useful and relevant come up? No? Why not? Is the content missing or mistitled or mistagged or jargony or broken? Is there some other problem? That, folks, is diagnostics. And when you do that with your website’s short head, your diagnostic efforts will go a very long way.

The news gets better: Zipf is a rule. The search queries for all websites follow a Zipf distribution.

And the news gets even jump-up-and-down-and-scream-your-head-off better: Zipf is true not only for your website’s search queries. Your content works the same way! A small subset of your website’s content does the heavy lifting. Much of the rest has little or no practical value at all. (In fact, I’ve heard a rumor that 90% of Microsoft.com’s content has never, ever been accessed. Not once. But it’s a just a rumor. And you didn’t hear it here.) Bottom line: don’t redesign all of your content — focus on the stuff that people actually need.

You’ll also see a short head when it comes to your website’s features. People need just a few of them; the rest are gravy.

And there’s more. Of all the audience types that your website serves, one or two matter far more than the others. What tasks do those audience types wish to accomplish on your website? A few are short-head tasks; the rest just aren’t that important.

As you can see, the Zipf curve is everywhere. And fortunately, the phenomenon is helpful: you can use it to prioritize your efforts to tweak and tune your website’s content, functionality, searchability, navigation and overall performance.

Your Website Is Not A Democracy

When you examine the short head — of your documents, your users’ tasks, their search behavior and so forth — you’ll know where to find the most important problems to solve. In effect, you can stop boiling the ocean…

… and start prioritizing your efforts to diagnose and truly solve your website’s problems.

Now, let’s put these short-head ideas together. Below is a report card for an academic website that starts with the short head of its audience:

In other words, of all the audience types this university website has, the three most important are people who might pay money to the university (applicants,) people who are paying money now (students) and people who will hopefully pay money for the rest of their lives (alumni). How do we know they’re the most important audiences? We could go by user research; for example, the analytics might suggest that these audiences generate more traffic than anyone else. Or perhaps the university’s stakeholders believe that these are the most important ones in their influence and revenue. Or some combination of both. Whatever the case, these three audiences likely swamp all other segments in importance.

Then, we would want to know the short-head tasks and information needs of each audience type. We might interview stakeholders to see what they think (column 2). And we might perform research — user interviews and search analytics, for example — to find out what users say is most important to them (column 3).

Of course, as the good folks at xkcd demonstrate, stakeholders and users don’t always see things the same way:

That’s why talking to both stakeholders and users is important. And once you’ve figured out the short head for each, you’ll need to earn your salary and, through some careful negotiation, combine your takes on each audience type’s needs. That’s what we’ve done in column 4.

Finally, in column 5, we’ve tested each task or need and evaluated how well it works. (Because it’s a university-related example, letter grades seemed appropriate.) You can do this evaluation in an expensive, statistically significant way; but really, enough research is out there to suggest that you don’t need to spend a lot of time and money on such testing. More importantly, these needs and tasks are often fairly narrow and, therefore, easy to test.

So, after testing, we can see what’s not going well. Finding information on “mentoring” is hard for applicants. And current students have a devil of a time when they “look up grades.”

Now we’re done diagnosing the problems and can begin making fixes. We can change the title of the “Paired Guidance Program” page to “Mentoring.” We can create a better landing page for the transcript application. The hard part, diagnostics, is out of the way, and we can now fix and tune our website’s performance as much as our resources allow.

From Project To Process To Payoff

These fixes are typically and wonderfully small and concrete, but because they live in the short head, they make a huge and lovely impact on the user experience — at a fraction of the cost of a typical redesign.

The tuning process itself is quite simple. It’s what we used to arrive at the report card below:

If you repeat this simple process on a regular basis — say, every month or quarter — then you can head off the entropy that causes fresh designs and fresher content to go rotten. Thus, the redesign that your organization has scheduled for two years from now can officially be canceled.

Your website’s owners ought to be happy about all this. And you should be, too: rather than tackling the project of getting your website “right” — which is impossible — you can now focus on tweaking and tuning it from here on out. So, forget redesigns, and start owning and benefiting from a process of continual improvement.

Special Thanks – Illustrations

Eva-Lotta is a UX Designer and Illustrator based in London, UK where she currently works as an interaction designer at Google. Besides her daytime mission of making the web a more understandable, usable and delightful place, she regularly takes sketchnotes at all sorts of talks and conferences and recently self-published her second book. Eva-Lotta also teaches sketching workshops and is interested in (something she calls) visual improvisation. Exploring the parallels between sketching and improvisation, she experiments with the principles from her theater improvisation practice to inspire visual work.

(al)

© Louis Rosenfeld for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Signage, stationary and forms, oh my! Businesses can easily create enough visual material to fill up an ark. There’s a logo, of course, and everything it gets applied to, such as: brochures, catalogs, websites, print and e-newsletters, Facebook pages, ads, uniforms, vehicle graphics, and more.

When a company is successful, it grows and expands. As it moves from infancy to adulthood, its visual armaments grow as well. One location becomes three, then twenty and so on. Each one brings with it more of everything. More signs. More stationery. More forms. This can avalanche out of control. Hopefully, someone is keeping an eye on things. But, that’s often not quite the case.

Enter the design audit. “Audit” might be a word that puts the fear of the taxman into you, but don’t sweat it. This kind of audit is a good thing. And it’s an opportunity for freelance designers to expand their service offering.

What is a Design Audit?

A design audit is nothing more than a peek and perusal of all the visual materials used by a company, along with its core message to its customers, clients, vendors and other audiences. Okay, it should be a bit more than a peek and perusal; that’s what this article is all about.

A design audit is an analysis of all the visual elements used by a company. Beyond its visuals, also central to an audit is the company’s core message, sometimes called a slogan, value or branding statement. You can think of a design audit as something like psychotherapy – a type of headshrinking, but for a business. Without a process in place to monitor a business audiences’ touch points they run the very real risk of projecting an unfocused personality.

A design audit reviews visual style and message with a concern for uniformity.

A company’s visuals are indispensable. They play a key part in how a company’s audience and market view it’s brand. The public sees the face of the company as the logo and the clothes as its visual style. Quality customer service, ethical decisions, and other business issues work together with visual style to create a corporate identity.

While big businesses need design audits, so do small business. Successful companies, of any size, need to strategically align their business culture with their brand. It’s essential that companies manage their materials and message, so they control their identity, which is crucial in a competitive marketplace.

A design audit reviews visual style and message with a concern for uniformity. What does the overall identity look like? Are the design, color palette and typography consistent throughout all materials? What do the visuals communicate and are they reliably on target? Is the level of design and production quality where it should be? Does everything make sense or is it jumbled and confusing?

When a company’s brand fragments, there is an opportunity here for freelance designers to provide a much needed service. Let’s look deeper into this problem.

So, What is the Problem?

As companies expand, they often find the need to have materials created and printed in remote locations, rather than its main location. The next thing you know, a company has 15 or 20 versions of its letterhead and business card. It’s similar for other design elements. For the owner of a small business a mistake often occurs, though at a smaller scale. They may have business cards reprinted with the wrong font or not carefully apply colors consistently across their marketing materials.

Is this a problem? Definitely. When visual style is lost, so is branding, positioning, as well as mindshare and sales. Clients will get nervous if things keep changing. As this problem slides downward, they may not recognize the business as its brand cohesion slips.

An effective brand needs a consistent visual style. When you go into a Starbucks in Seattle, it’s looks the same as one in New York. The colors are consistent and the typestyles are the same (within the confines of its, signage, menus, etc). That’s comforting to people.

Research suggests that we humans communicate very little by spoken word — about ten percent. Most communication is made through body language, which accounts for roughly sixty percent. The rest is made up of our posture, clothing and such. For a company, it’s the same. What they say with words can often amount to little. What usually sticks in the customers’ minds is its logo, colors, sounds and sometimes even aromas.

If one part of the company has one message, while another is communicating something else, you’re left with discord. It’s the same if visuals don’t match the message, or if visuals aren’t consistent. Companies create anxiety in their target market when they stray from their message and drift from their dependable visual style.

Design Audit Deliverables

How does a design audit begin? It’s starts by gathering all the visual and brand elements a company creates. Then the designer, writer, or marketing consultant (often all three) study these and an analysis report is created.

The reports, along with the materials, are then presented to the client’s management. Many businesses are shocked when they see the visual elements together, as one fragmented, Frankenstein-like monster.

The point is to document it all and never, ever, under any circumstances, stray from it.

After all these inconsistencies are out in the open, it’s time to structure a plan to ensure that the company, its visuals and its message are presented in harmony.

You should place this harmonious style plan into a Standards Manual. This document shows how a company’s logo is designed and how to use it in different contexts. The manual documents the brand’s color system with exact RGB and Pantone colors. It gives specifics about the typefaces to use and often much more.

A Standards Manual can be just a few of pages for a small company or a large volume for a multinational. The size of the document depends on how large the company is and the number of variations in the style application involved. And frankly, it can depend a lot on money. A large company will need to show literature; stationery; website; Facebook; signage applications; uniforms; vehicle applications and several others. A small business may only need to show its logo, colors, stationary and a few forms. The point is to document it all and never, ever, under any circumstances, stray from it.

And, yes, when logo redesign time rolls around the process starts all over again.

Design Audit Opportunity

So, now that we know about design audits, what’s the benefit for the freelancer? It gives you one more service, a valuable one at that, to sell or use as a promotional tool. Many designers, both graphic and web, offer audits as a stand-alone service. As a matter of fact, larger firms and consultancies provide them as stand-alones, can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars, and take months to conduct them. Implementing changes, developing a Standards Manual and fixing what was found are usually extra. Do I hear a “cha-ching”?

The freelancer who offers design or communication materials audits can quickly move up the ranks from being a provider of hands on a keyboard to that of a highly valued consultant –- a partner, in many ways, with their client. That is, naturally, if they do them well and provide sensible recommendations.

As a freelancer, you might not realistically land a multinational in need of an audit to the tune of a half million or more. But, one never knows. Freelance teams can be as effective, if not more so, than an expensive — and sometimes sluggish — consultancy group. Nonetheless, odds are, you can find a few small and medium-sized businesses whose visual identity and message are in chaos. It just takes a bit of looking around.

If you’re a designer, you might consider teaming up with a writer and vice versa. The designer handles the visuals. The writer handles the words. Both work together to craft a sound strategy and set of recommendations for the client. You both make money and the client saves itself from potentially losing sales and share of mind. Plus, when it’s all over and done well, the client will likely enjoy a stronger market position.

Another approach is to use a limited audit as a complimentary promotional tool. Sure, you’ll need to invest some time, but you also would for any other marketing tool. For example, how much time is social media sucking up? Or, designing that promo brochure that never seems quite finished? An audit for a small company of, say, fewer than ten employees, could probably be knocked out in an hour or two, once you have the process down.

At the complete of a design audit, your client will have a set of standards in hand, they will be armed with a consistent identity, and be able to meet the market with a stronger brand. You’ll be in an ideal position to work with them. Having a strong standards manual will save you time and aggravation when you prepare additional designs for that client in the future.

Graphic credit: Some rights reserved by Reclameworks.