Have you ever asked a graphic designer to bedazzle an email template? I have (jokingly, of course). The designer’s response was several seconds of silence followed by, “You’re kidding, right?”

It’s good to use colorful language when communicating with our creative genius friends. It can definitely add levity to a stressful project. More importantly, through good communication, you and the designer can collaborate to create something that makes you both proud, delights your client, and secures a relatively stress-free existence for yourself as a project manager. As Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite says, “All of your wildest dreams will come true.”

I’m a visual person, so design is something I enjoy. You could call me a graphic designer in training, so I can empathize with those folks learning the ropes. When providing creative direction and evaluating creative work, I try to keep it simple. I break a long checklist down to three essentials:

1. Concept: What does it mean? What message should the visual convey?

Take the design in as your intended audience would. What story is being told with the visuals? This may be a stretch for simpler deliverables like an email template, but there can be a story in the most basic of design projects. Take a look at the imagery, photos, and other design elements. What does the design say to you about the product, company, or program it represents?

2. Layout: Where does your eye go? What do you notice first, second, and third?

The goal of good design is to communicate a message. Simpler is definitely better, and you want to avoid burying your key message in artistic clutter. Ultimately, it comes down to priority. Identify the hierarchy of elements/messages and ensure that this hierarchy comes through in the layout. You can check this by closing your eyes for 10 seconds and then looking at the piece. Where do your eyes go first, second, third? That’s the hierarchy. Is that the order in which you want your audience to view those items? If not, some tweaks are in order.

3. Emotion: What is the attitude or mood of the piece? Is it appropriate for the message?

How does it make you feel? Sounds like a session with a psychiatrist, but it’s an important question to ask. When giving feedback on creative work, I try to be clear and describe edits in a way that plays upon the senses. Rather than saying “I want more color” or “Let’s add some yellow to that,” you should describe the emotion you want to evoke. For example, you can say that you want a design to be “brighter, more cheerful, and lighthearted.” Then let the designer do her thing to represent that in the work. Though we all have a different mental image of bright, cheerful, or lighthearted, you are getting at the true essence of the design in an attempt to clearly define and express the emotion behind it.

A couple of days after finishing our project, that same designer I kidded with about glitter and a glue gun showed me a very funny video called Make My Logo Bigger. We both had a good laugh. I guess that video can serve as a lesson of what NOT to do when working with designers.

Good communication is definitely a two-way street. I’m waiting for a video from the project manager’s perspective to be released. I wonder what it would be called. “We Need More White Space,” perhaps?

This is a guest post by Eric Burgess. A grad student at the UW, Eric is studying for his Masters of Communication in Digital Media. Eric is a Social Media geek and recovering skateboarder, having spent the last few years blogging and building up communities in the action sports industry. When he’s not blogging about being a fashionable dad, he can be found spending time with his family, shopping, and tweeting.

What are Infographics?

From Wikipedia: ‘Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.’ They are a great resource for solving communication problems. Truthfully, the best way to describe their purpose is that they allow us to graphically digest large amounts of data that we’d otherwise have to read and sift through to learn.

Infographics not only help readers quickly digest lots of information in a visual way, they can also serve to help drive traffic to a website. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even the most basic infographic can drive new visitors to your site. The use of infographics in newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs, white papers and other pages throughout your site won’t only help drive additional traffic but it also helps with brand awareness and organic search rankings.

For a recent client infographic, we really looked hard at the data that was presented to us in this case study. Microsoft’s Windows Azure had helped Lockheed Martin scale their business in a fast, flexible way. Additionally, Lockheed Martin gave their customers cost-effective access to IT resources. We took a very simple theme of “cloud computing” and built the graphic around that. We also used a “word cloud” to call out the benefits of Windows Azure and drew a plane to symbolize Lockheed Martin. In the end it worked out really well and we were pleased with its simplicity.

Since the image file was saved as a .jpeg, we were able to email it to our clients for distribution on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. It’s the perfect medium to have them link back to the original case study which was ultimately our goal.

For more information on infographics, check out Alltop’s infographics section.

Many companies are self-producing video shorts these days. The lower cost of high quality cameras, even in HD, makes this more practical than ever. Companies post videos on their own website as well as using YouTube channels so clients and employees can stay plugged in.

Self-producing video is all well and good, but it’s easy to end up frustrated with the resulting audio quality. After all, even the most visually-appealing video isn’t going to do the job if people can’t hear your message. Poor audio also leaves a negative impression about the quality of results your company strives to achieve. Getting good quality audio involves two steps: capture and post-processing. Let’s consider audio capture first and we’ll follow up with post-processing tips next week.

First: Capturing good workable audio.

Very little can be done with audio that’s captured badly, so we need to make sure we get good stuff up-front.

Really, it’s all about the microphone! The type and placement of the mic are the critical factors in capturing decent audio. Consider the standard camera-mounted mic. The on-camera mic is as far away from the subject as can be. Even though it’s “directional,” meaning it tries to be more sensitive to sound coming from where the camera is pointing, there’s still too much sound coming from other sources, bouncing off walls and ceilings, and even coming from the camera operator, to capture decent audio. We need a better mic–and we need it closer to the subject.

Many cameras have a “mic in” or “line in” jack. If yours does, life just got a lot easier. If not, better audio isn’t impossible, it’s just more complicated. Let’s cover the “mic in” case first.

The “mic in” jack allows you to connect an external mic to the camera that will override the mic attached to the camera, i.e. a cable attached to a mic that your subject holds by hand like a news reporter. You’ve now moved the mic much closer to your subject—a good thing.

One step further is a lavalier, or “lav” mic. These are the small clip-on mics you see used on talk shows. Lav mics can be wired (i.e. plugged directly into your camera) or wireless. The wireless versions are particularly useful. Your subject wears the mic connected to a transmitter pack. A receiver pack attaches to your camera and plugs into your “mic in” jack, and voila! You get great audio, and your subject is free from wires and mic holding. You have a good quality mic literally attached to your subject.

The best audio requires another person. On film sets you’ll often see a person with headphones holding a long pole with a mic at the end called a “boom mic.” The mics used in this fashion can be very high quality (also high priced!), and having a person dedicated to capturing audio ensures the best result. But this technique isn’t practical for most self-produced projects. A good handheld or lav mic wired into your camera will do the trick.

Now to get back to those of you with a camera that has no “mic in” jack.
In this case, you’re stuck recording decent audio separately from the camera. This can get tricky, as you’ll need to make sure you can later join the video and audio together, and that can sometimes be difficult. In these cases, audio is usually captured into a computer-based audio system with “frame-accurate” capabilities that make matching the audio and video in post-production much easier. You’ll need the help of an audio professional to make sure you have the right equipment and software to record this way.

Okay, we’ve captured good audio. Excellent! Next week, we’ll cover how to manage audio during the editing process for a clear, quality final video.

Any tricks that work well for you? Any recommendations about what to try and what to avoid for really great audio results?