Working in the creative industry can be very stressful. There are deadlines, long meetings, endless e-mails, pressure to be unique and original, and that can lead to creative block. You know the feeling—you’ve done that before, you’ve seen that design in a million different places, that color palette leaves you feeling blah.

It feels impossible to get those creative juices running, so what can you do to find that spark again? Here’s my top three ways to get inspired.

Examples
Looking at others’ work is a great way to get inspired. The Internet makes it so easy to find great stuff. Some of my favorite sites to browse are Lovely Package, From Up North, and Pinterest (it’s not just for baking, folks.) Get motivated by seeing what other designers are doing, and figure out how you can make it better.

Take Breaks
I have a tendency to sit at my desk and pick at a project until I think it looks right. In that process I don’t really accomplish anything, and I just get more frustrated in the process. Instead of stressing out, and getting wrinkles—take breaks. Go for a walk, sit outside, grab some coffee. Take time to refresh your creative process.

Music
Music is one of my favorite ways to get motivated. Sometimes all you need is a good beat to get moving. Use Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc. and find a playlist that speaks to you to help you create work that you’re excited about.

There are lots of other ways to get your creative juices flowing, but these methods have always helped me get over my creative hurdles.

Goin’ Courtin’

Many times we walk into a potential or current client’s office and just sit down and chat. We like to keep it casual… that’s how we roll. Lately, we have been discovering that many companies have put off marketing themselves during the “Great Recession” and are now in dire need of many tactics.

Inevitably, the conversation turns to budget and we see the client’s eyes fill with fear and little flaming dollar signs. Then comes the question, “How much is this going to cost me?” We calmly explain options and, when their needs are extensive, bring up the concept of implementing a retainer. Then, like in that Julia Roberts bride movie, they are putting on their sneakers and high-tailing it out of there.

Retainers shouldn’t be scary

Let us explain how our retainers work and you’ll see there isn’t much to be phobic about. We use retainers as a way to help businesses be able to attain all of the projects they need done without a large outlaying of cash up front. We like to call it “interest-free financing.”

Most of our retainers run 12 – 18 months (Not bad right? You’ve probably had most of your underwear longer than that). To determine a retainer amount, we will propose on all the projects needing to be done using our standard formula – which consists of figuring up total labor hours and multiplying by our hourly rate for the work being performed (here’s a secret… most agencies do it the same way). Then we look at the percentage of time that would need to go towards administrative work…billing, account coordination, time tracking, etc … and subtract that figure from our à la carte total. We then take that discounted rate and evenly split it over the length of the retainer.

Easy Cheesy! So now the client can get all of the projects they need done without severely impacting cash flow.

So how much should you expect to pay?

Well, that depends on the amount of work needed. Let’s say needs are extensive – rebranding, sales collateral, website, the works. You can usually expect to pay the annual salary cost for an entry- to mid-level marketing person. Now you may be asking, “Then why not just hire another marketing person or even a designer?” You could, but the chances of finding someone that can do it all – strategy, design, coding, etc. – are minute at best. By hiring a firm, you get a team of experts tackling your challenges. Additionally, while you may pay close to an annual salary for our services, you don’t have to provide benefits, training, equipment, etc., thus saving you money in the long run.

“WE CAN BUILD WORDPRESS IN DRUPAL.
WE CAN’T BUILD DRUPAL IN WORDPRESS.”

Just to be clear, the purpose of this post is to explain why we feel a Drupal-based website has advantages over WordPress for many larger web sites we design and develop . Don’t get us wrong. We use WordPress for many sites (in fact you are on one right now) that don’t require advanced functionality and are truly just meant as an electronic brochure. In fact, we agree that WordPress has a much more user friendly interface than Drupal does when it comes out of the box. The difference comes in with our ability to customize the experience for you…

With WordPress, what you get is what you get. The interface is the same for all users and is in no way customized to how your company works. Think of it as a prefab house. You go to the builder, pick out your house and any customization to the plan is all superficial and not structural. If you want to drastically change the house later on to fit your lifestyle and growth, an addition will be required. In WordPress, any customization to the CMS’ capabilities are handled by plug-ins. In many instances, you will need several plug-ins to perform advanced features needed for your site. These plug-ins are maintained, for the most part, by a community of developers. However there is no guarantee that each developer will continue to support their plug-in. So, it is very possible that a plug-in could have to be replaced in order to work with the latest release of WordPress software.

Drupal is less of an out-of-the box solution and more of a custom designed and built home. The user experience will be tailored to your needs and your terminology. Think of Drupal being more like the exterior framework of the house before any interior plan has been laid out. We know the footprint, but we now need to design the interior to what suits you. Drupal would act as a shell for what ever custom CMS we would build for your company. Essentially, in the end, the CMS we end up with could be titled “Your Company CMS,” rather than Drupal because it will look nothing like it did when we started the process.

Another thing to keep in mind, the WordPress model calls for a major new release of its software every few months. Since it relies heavily on outside plug-ins, one release could break your whole site due to incompatibility with a plug-in. Drupal comes out with a major release every couple of years and all releases are guaranteed to be backwards compatible. In fact, we don’t even upgrade our websites to the latest version because we completely customize the code to the point where we have already coded in any new functionality the new releases may bring to the table.

We understand many people have had a bad experience with Drupal or another CMS (such as Joomla) and have been turned off by it. In our experience, this is typically due to the programmer’s and the user interface designer’s lack of knowledge. Sadly many firms stop at the website itself and don’t take into account the needs of the administrator to easily access, create and publish content. We develop a customized experience in the back-end to help prevent frustration and make the administrator’s job as easy and intuitive as possible.

One of the arguments we have heard for WordPress is the fact that they have a large community developing plug-ins to extend its capabilities. We agree, there are a lot of people trying to improve WordPress. Drupal also has an active developer community, however they are not working on items to extend Drupal’s capabilities, because that is typically handled by each developer in order to customize the site’s functionality for the client’s needs. They have been hard at work improving the user interface.

The latest release of Drupal was several years in the making and they listened to many of the complaints heard around the world about Drupal’s out of the box “developer focus”. The latest release (Drupal 7) has taken quite a few hints from WordPress. If we WERE to use it as it ships, the experience would be vastly different than it was just six months ago.

SEO is another topic we hear quite often. Both systems handle basic tasks similarly, however to get some of the advanced options that Drupal has built in, WordPress requires yet another plug in. Important SEO features in Drupal include:

• Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives us precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal can be given a custom URL. In WordPress you are generally limited to predefined formats.
• Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content.
• Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal’s Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages’ individual meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it’s easy with Drupal.

WHAT MAKES A SITE VALUABLE IS NOT WHAT IT DOES THAT’S EXACTLY THE SAME AS EVERY OTHER WEBSITE, BUT WHAT MAKES IT USEFUL FOR YOUR NEEDS.

When Tripp Co. Creative was formed, we did so with three priorities in mind — doing great work, treating people really well, and exceeding client expectations. I also made a decision early on that we would never work for bad people. They run rampid in our business and we all know them. We aren’t talking about clients that many agencies bitch about. Tight deadlines are part of the biz. Weird requests come with the job. We are talking about abusive, nasty people. Let me give you a real-life example.

We had a freelancer working with us on a pretty major account (for a small firm). The client contact started out much like any client does – eager, fun, chatty, etc. Everything was going swimmingly.

The freelancer was conversing direct with the client and I was allowed to focus on other projects. Little by little the demands of the client were getting more and more aggressive. She was sending pages of extensive changes (including redesigns and additions)  and demanding them back in shorter and shorter time frames. Her treatment of people here was becoming more and more loathsome. It was getting to the point where we were going to fail no matter how hard we tried.

The final straw came when the freelancer had to rush to the hospital due to one of her parents having a stroke. The client called the freelancer at 8 a.m. that morning and emailed four new designs and massive changes that she wanted back by noon (the work was easily 9 to 10 hours of work). Of course the freelancer did not call her back right away due to the situation with her parent. The freelancer got the message around 10 a.m., called her back and explained the circumstances. The client proceeded to ream her for not answering her call that morning and then told her “next time you need to find someone else go to the hospital so you can be there when I need you.”

WHAT? How dare you tell someone the life of a parent is less important than changes to some marketing materials. I will say it here and say it now… WHAT WE DO IS NOT LIFE AND DEATH! No one is going to die if an ad goes out an hour late. No one will lose their life if a brochure goes to the printer a day late. Don’t get me wrong. We make every effort to meet deadlines, but when someone’s life literally hangs in the balance, how dare she lessen that life and rank its importance below a brochure. The parent died a few weeks later.

That’s what WE mean by bad people. Needless to say, I demanded she apologize to the freelancer (which she refused to do) and we resigned the account. It is never  easy to let an account go, but I knew in my heart that a continued relationship with her was not possible. I no longer respected her and she obviously didn’t respect us. Sadly, this client is not unusual. There are many out there and there are many agency leaders that would let their team be abused and mistreated— all in the name of getting that check… hell I’ve worked for those agencies!

I firmly believe in sticking to the principles on which this company was founded and I will go to bat to defend them… and my team. I sincerely believe that it was a good decision to resign the business and that we will gain more work by staying true to our core beliefs than we will if we had just swept them under the rug.

And, just to go on record, all of our other clients are truly a joy to work with and are the epitome of the type of clients I hoped to have when we started out.

As I sat here at my desk today, I looked at my iCal and realized we had forgotten to celebrate our one year anniversary. The company has successfully weathered our first year and we are well into year two. We have been so busy that the milestone just came and went, luckily.

It’s funny to remember how nervous and unsure I was about my choice to start this business. I remember those first few months of just worrying… constantly worrying (thank you Tums for your unofficial sponsorship of Tripp Co. Creative, Inc.). Don’t get me wrong, I still worry (a lot), but now it is more about keeping clients happy and getting new clients to help grow the business. It is less about “can I feed my dogs or myself”.

My business partner and I still struggle with the balance of doing the work and getting more work and I think we are on the right track. I would like to eliminate the peaks and valleys in the work flow, but for now I can’t complain. I know many more companies out there that are struggling and laying people off. Some of that comes from bad choices made before this economy crisis, but some is just luck of the draw. I am confident our smaller size and flexible business model will help us expand at an appropriate rate and we will grow as projected over the next year (well, 9 months now).

And to our valued clients, thank you. Thank you for trusting us. Thank you for referring us to your colleagues. And thank you for being the best clients on the face of this earth. I have worked for several agencies where that wasn’t the case. When I first started this business, I vowed I would not  do any work for anyone that did not respect us and whom we did not respect. Case in point: we had a designer who’s father was rushed to the hospital. She was not able to answer a client’s call at 8am. Later (once our designer got the message and called her back) that client asked her why she was not available when she wanted her to be. After our designer explained the situation, the clients response was “Couldn’t you have had your sister deal with it?”  Needless to say, the designer was very upset and told me what happened. Long story short, we will not be doing work for that client ever again. She refused to apologize for her remarks and I refuse to work with someone so callous and cold. We don’t need that kind of business… no one does.

So here’s to another year and more. I hope you’ll stay on the ride with us.