Disclaimer: This episode contains blatant stereotypes and generalizations of both "math people" and "art people." You know, math people are the technical staff in an AEC firm who love Excel pivot tables and work through mathematical story problems just for fun. On the flip side, you can find art people sketching out a logo, swiping through Instagram stories for home garden inspiration, all while blogging about last weekend's music fest.
In this week's episode, Middle of Six graphic designers Becky Ellison and Abigail Clark chat about simple and sometimes unconventional ways of bridging communications gaps between these two (equally amazing) subject matter experts.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we have back in the podcast studio, aka our closets, Abigail Clark and Becky Ellison, and they're gonna talk to us a bit about being a creative or a graphic designer in a technical firm or with technical people, and how to work together and collaborate and communicate and make wonderful things happen.
Did I capture that, Abigail?
Definitely.
Totally.
Yeah, I mean, I believed you.
Yes.
That was spot on.
Well, I mean, I think this is a cool subject because as a creative person who's trying to translate very technical content for sometimes non-technical audiences or a combination of such, you've got a hard job in front of you.
So where do you want to start?
What do you want to kick us off with in thinking about this?
Well, one thing about being a creative person working in a technical field is that you can provide an outside perspective to the people who may not be aware of their use of jargon or terms that non-industry people may not understand.
To have somebody doing that crucial step in the marketing process, putting together their proposals, the pursues, interview, graphics, that sort of thing, who understands where the non-technical people are coming from, you can make sure that you're not speaking to them in construction jargon, for example.
My background is in graphic design.
I am a graphic designer by trade, but I have been working in AEC marketing for 11 years now.
I was with a large general contractor for most of that time, and I did a lot of proposals and I worked with so many different people, construction people for the most part, a lot of engineers, architects, clients even, developers.
You get to sort of understand all these different work styles of those people.
And a lot of times, those people are very analytical, linear thinkers.
They're good at math, they're good at science.
And I came into the field being absolutely just indescribably terrible at math and being a very artistic, creative, outside the box person who had no knowledge of the construction industry, engineering, any of that.
And I got up to speed with working with people who I like to say, the division in my mind is math people versus art people.
And people have different styles of thinking and processing and communicating.
And for me, it was a great learning process figuring out how to communicate successfully with math people and meet in the middle so that we could find a common language that works for what both of us want to get out of the process and then create a great product for the potential clients or whoever is the outside recipient of our work.
What have you found to be most helpful when you have those math people coming to you, when they're trying to explain their vision or the data that they have in their head?
How have you received that the best so that you can do your work?
One thing that has evolved from that for me is I have worked with a lot of those people when they're trying to explain to me, we want to show something in a response.
Let's say they've got a graphic in mind or a diagram, a process chart, a table of information, and they would explain it to me in words.
Can you put together something that says this and communicates that?
I will a lot of times just say, hey, can you please just sketch this out on a piece of paper, draw it in blue beam, whatever you have to do.
It doesn't have to be beautiful.
Listeners, if you are a math person, that is not a bad thing, that is a great thing.
We need math people, we need more math people.
Do not be ashamed of your sketches and your rough artwork, even if it looks like a kindergartner did it.
If you can provide any sort of visual clues to your graphic designer as to what you are thinking, it's going to help, for sure.
Put that together.
Some of the greatest ideas in history have come from napkin sketches.
It is true that actually the first Ferris wheel that was ever designed in the world came from a napkin sketch that a guy, an engineer drew on a napkin at an engineering banquet, it's crazy.
If there's any way you can create even just a terrible visual representation of what you're talking about, it's going to help the creative you're working with understand what you want.
And they can take it up a million notches.
And I think that will for sure speed the process between analytical thinkers and visual thinkers.
A good best practice for those folks who are doing the napkin sketch or trying to quickly put something up on the whiteboard to explain, they actually go through that process of thinking it through themselves and think, hmm, well, I thought I was trying to say this or this is how it would work.
But I realized I need something here to help further explain that.
And they kind of give you more detail in that process.
So it actually is really helpful for us as the creative side and then helpful for them to to think through their process entirely and make sure that we're capturing the full story.
Yeah.
And another really lovely homework assignment to give out if a client's feeling like they can't sketch that out on a napkin themselves is to go gather some examples, go look at your competitors work, see what they did that you really liked.
If they had like some awesome signage that you were jealous of, bring that to the table and then we can pull what we like from that together.
From both sides even, I'd like to bring examples of what I'm trying to create and present that to them too.
Then, Becky, on the flip side, do you have any anecdotes or tips that are relevant to the designer then communicating back to your math people?
For art people, as I call it, communicating with math people.
One thing that the analytical, linear math thinkers tend to enjoy is data.
Information presented in a logical way.
Tables, process charts, diagrams, infographics, maps.
Fortunately, that is a great way to present information in a pursuit, in a proposal.
You have clients reading 10 to 20 maybe responses that are all going to be very similar and you have to do anything you can to stand out from the pack.
And one of the best ways to do that is by taking larger amounts of information and condensing them into smaller amounts of information, such as tables, infographics, charts, and diagrams.
So this is one area where the art people and the math people can really come together and synergize, for lack of a better word, their disparate skills to create something that is better than probably what you started with.
So when you're presenting information to an analytical math person thinker, try to provide facts and figures, give them a chart.
This is what we did, this is what it cost, this is the return on investment that we got.
That is usually a good way to succeed when you're arguing a case for a marketing budget, let's say, or projects that you want to pursue.
That is a good thing to think about.
Present the facts and give them some time to look at it and process it and think about it.
I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to create an infographic.
And then I say, absolutely.
Can you give me the info for this graphic?
And that seems to be the biggest hurdle.
And I mean, I get it.
I'm laughing here because it's just something we've dealt with before.
But if you do really have a team that are very technical and data driven, we're planning ahead because if you want to show things and you want to show reports on numbers and statistics, well, you have to gather that.
I think marketing and your creatives can be awesome about presenting it, but not just with made up information.
We need some meat there.
Let's talk about some considerations about your creative team that may not always be super obvious to the technical team.
If you are someone who is more of a math person, analytical thinker, and you've got somebody on the team who's very creative, probably a graphic designer working in your marketing department, maybe they are your marketing department, they will likely have a very different work style than you.
We tend to be the sort of outside the box creative thinkers, obviously, because we're doing a creative job.
And we sort of need that time and space to recharge, to think, to process, to sketch and try things.
And it is always better to do that process without someone standing over your shoulder, watching what you're doing as you're doing it.
There might be one or two people out there who enjoy that sort of thing, but I think most of us, it makes us stressed out.
We suddenly forget how to design.
So when it, especially when it comes down to crunch time, you know, when you're putting together a proposal and minutes and seconds count, you definitely want the best thing you can do is get out of the way and give your creative some space to try things, to experiment, to do whatever they have to do to make it come together and reduce that sort of pressure.
I think that's probably true of everyone though, not necessarily creatives.
No one wants to work under pressure, right?
But especially when you're in the idea phase, like if you're working on designing a logo or coming up with branding changes or something that requires a lot of really precise thought and sketches and mistakes and tries and experiments, it's good to give that person the space to do that and some time and understand that that does take time.
It's not something that can be done quickly and just sort of provide that encouragement, that safety to try something and have it be terrible.
If your designer feels safe to take those risks and try something, you're going to get better work out of them in the long run.
Yeah, and I think something that non-designers may think is that us designers are designing from 8 a.m.
to 5 p.m.
Like we're using that entire workday to design, but that is just impossible, at least for me.
I'm not superwoman.
I can crank out maybe like four hours of actual designing, and the rest, if I kept designing all day, it would be not quality stuff.
I have to have the discovery.
I have to have the mental break, the time to be actually creative, and not to just be dragging my pen tool across Illustrator.
That is something that you have to communicate.
You have to say in order to be a great designer, I need an hour in the middle of the day to have lunch not be designing, or I need to have this stuff to be really productive.
Let's continue on this topic of considerations that are not super obvious.
What else you got for us, Becky?
I personally love and thrive on deadlines.
I need deadlines for everything.
So there are a lot of things going on in a creative AEC marketing person's world at any one time.
We're doing 100 different things.
So to keep your creative person on track, they may need deadlines for everything, even projects that don't have deadlines.
I feel like for me anyway, as a designer, the worst thing you can do is tell me that this can be done whenever.
You know, whenever you get a chance, we don't have a deadline.
Like make one up.
For me, it's very helpful if you can give me even just, I mean, don't don't say tomorrow if it really could be next month.
I mean, but but pick a date, pick a time.
And I think that will definitely help somebody stay on track who tends to think in circles and outside the box so that they can keep track of what's due when and budget their time accordingly.
Because as Abby said, it does take time not only to execute the design work, but to think about it, to process, to make mistakes, to try new things, to have a dream and wake up in the middle of the night and go, Oh, this is what I need to do.
I don't know about you, but I literally truly have like woken up at 3, 4 a.m.
and thought about a project that I was working on and thought, Oh, I should try this, you know, for a brand design that I was doing or whatever.
And that does happen.
So being able to build in time for that, but know when it's due, you can sort of schedule your mind to stay on track, I think.
Yeah.
And if you really, truly care about the project you're working on and you don't have a deadline, you will continually improve it forever.
True.
Like the deadline is the reason to stop.
And we need that.
That is a great point.
Yeah.
I mean, some of my best work happens in that very last phase.
And it's not procrastination.
It's not about not caring, but there's something magical.
I don't know, like the pressure that makes a diamond.
It feels like that as a creative person.
And so having a deadline in the interim deadlines, I think helps us push that little bit extra and you make really good progress.
I want a T-shirt.
I heart deadlines even for projects that don't have deadlines.
Tell me when you need it back.
Could you design that for me?
I will do it.
I really do want that.
Yeah.
All right.
Tomorrow.
Okay.
Your next consideration has to do with ownership of the organizational structure.
Can you share with us what you're thinking there?
Especially for people who are working on a lot of proposals and pursuits, organization and file structure and where you save things, how you save things is so important to maximizing the time that is being spent on a project.
If you know exactly where something is and right where to get to it, it's going to save you so much time and agony.
So if at all possible, if you can let those creative folks on your staff who are doing a million different things all over the place have ownership over their own folder structure, maybe even a separate drive from the rest of the company, if you can afford that sort of thing, that's fantastic, because then those creative people can get in the groove of knowing exactly where everything is, how to get to it, knowing that no one's going to inadvertently change something, because when in graphic design, you work a lot with linked files, which means that you have maybe a main in-design file for your proposal, but every photo, logo, other file that's put into that document stays somewhere on the server.
It's not actually pasted in, it lives in your folder structure.
So if something changes, you know, somebody goes in and edits a photo, that is going to throw off your whole document if you're not aware of that.
So because you have all those live links and whatever, and a million other reasons, it's awesome if the marketing department, the creatives who are doing this work hands on, can have ownership and management over that folder structure.
And that's why you'll see most firms, or at least most that we work with, actually have a restricted access marketing drive.
And it's really not because things are confidential or can't be looked at by other people.
It's all about, you know, maintaining quality of the files and that your team knows exactly where everything is and they can resource it.
It's kind of an important part of the workflow.
I think it's important to have the freedom to think about the process, to go through the process, to refine the process, and then complete a project in whatever way makes you the most efficient and produces the best work.
And for creatives, which again, admittedly, we're a weird bunch, we tend to be unusual people.
We're always looking at art and thinking about making things different and better.
And we just, the work that we do is strange.
It's not turning a crank.
It's not crunching numbers.
It's not something that you can see.
This is what someone's doing.
There's the result, measurement, data.
We're really thinking outside the box.
So in order to make sure that the work that we're producing is of a good quality and something that is meaningful, being able to have that freedom to work in whatever style suits the individual person as much as reasonable.
I mean, obviously, we've all got to connect with each other and respond to deadlines and whatever, but some people need more time for a particular task than others.
Some people like to take notes in a different way.
The more freedom you can provide and the less structure that you can legislate on the creative team, I think the better work product you're going to get.
I was going to ask you a question, Becky.
What about working with other creatives?
So when you're either partnering, I don't know, on a design build project, you've got other creatives or maybe an agency.
I'm sure there's lots of scenarios where that's happened.
Yeah, I have been everything from a one person department to part of a team of several graphic designers and everything in between.
I've worked with outside personnel.
But again, I personally tend towards the lone wolf method of working.
I like to focus on my own thing.
I am a control freak.
This is just one of many types of creative people.
Some people love to work in teams.
I don't hate it.
It's just I tend to want to just put pen to paper, do it myself, get it done, hit the gas.
And that's just my work style.
So for me, actually coming to Middle of Six was quite a big change, because although I have definitely worked in a department with several other graphic designers who are great at what they do and all have different ways of doing things, I rarely, if ever, truly collaborated together with another designer on a project.
That was just something we would divide up and kind of do it our own way and then come together and share what we had done.
So working with Abby, who is our other graphic designer at Middle of Six, has been wonderful because she is A, great at what she does, but also very supportive, willing to help.
We have that safety to talk things out with each other, to sort of just kind of laugh and release stress about what we're working on.
Are we worried about how this is going to go?
Trade little tips and tricks.
I mean, there's so many positives to being able to work with another designer that it has absolutely outweighed my anxiety over collaborating with another designer, for sure.
And it's just nice to have somebody who sort of has your back and knows that you don't have to explain what you're going through, too.
She gets it.
That's another challenge with working with people who don't.
I mean, like, if you're trying to explain something really complicated about, you know, we have to do it this way just because, trust me, I can't, you know, I don't have time to explain to you how InDesign works or whatever the issue is.
It can be helpful to kind of take a second to just think, okay, this person has no idea what I'm talking about.
I need to explain it to them in layman's terms.
Make it fun, you know.
I mean, on the last episode, I mentioned, you know, paragraph styles are similar to having an army and giving them all a haircut.
I mean, that sounds wacky and insane, but it's a good way to connect to someone who may feel a little left out or may get that kind of, I'm going to say inferiority complex, but someone who feels weird because you know something they don't, and it can make them feel not only left out of the process, but like they can't contribute to the outcome if they don't know what's going on.
So if you can take that time to kind of explain to them even a little bit why this is happening, why we need to decide on this, why it has to be this way, it'll help them feel included and part of the process.
Another nice thing about working together with another graphic designer is just that commiseration that you can have that develops between the two of you because no one else is going to fully understand what you're going through.
In my past experience, if I've had trouble with a particular project or difficult interaction with a client or whatever, I was totally on my own in that.
I mean, there was no one I could talk to who would understand.
If you go through enough of those experiences, you get to the point where you feel like, I'm so alone in this.
But to have another person that you can kind of blow off steam with and say, what are we going to do and just support each other and say, hey, you're good at what you do, how's your day?
That sort of check-in that you can have is a great, great thing that can come from collaborating.
So those out there who may be worried about working with other designers for the first time, don't be.
It's probably going to be great.
It's going to be great.
It's so nice to have, like when Becky's like, I saw you took like all those edits of the client, keep sending back like, thanks so much.
I'm like, thank you.
Like that means a lot because, I mean, maybe it's not like the toughest work, but it is a lot to keep returning to this project, to have someone totally understand what that's like and to appreciate that as it's huge.
I think a real common complaint or issue or things that lead to burnout when you're a department of one is not having that other person who knows what you're dealing with and you can commiserate with, and it doesn't have to be in a negative way at all, but just having that level of support.
We've recommended being part of a roundtable or creating that network, even within your company, bringing some marketing advocates on your side.
But I think it gets even more finely tuned when you're on the design side, because again, your island is a little bit smaller, and you can feel a little bit more alone.
I'm really glad you have each other and that the rest of us foe designers at Middle of Six.
She's being way too modest.
Well, you guys are amazing.
And it sounds like it's good.
And I think that I'm sure that even if you're a single designer in your firm, there's probably resources and groups and other ways to connect with people, so you can have a sounding board and folks to show things to and get some feedback.
Who do speak your design language?
Just going back to the math versus art minds, something I always struggle to communicate is like, the audience will like this better.
Like this is just better in terms of visually communicating something and finding a way to back that up when you don't have the data or the technical reasons to back it up, when you're just like, people will enjoy the information being presented this way better.
I don't know.
How do you put that in the words?
I would say start with why you like it better, and just explain it to them, and just say, I prefer this because look at the symmetry between the spacing of these two things, or do you see how much bigger we can make the logo if we save space in this area, and that will make this part of it stand out.
Also, another thing that is always good to do is to offer choices when you're working on design projects for what I would call internal clients, or external clients even, if you can present a couple of ideas that you like.
This is crucial.
Never put something forward that you don't love because they will choose it every time.
That was great advice that I got from somebody here that I can't remember.
Maybe Wendy.
I think so, yeah.
They'll pick it and then you have to work with it.
That was solid.
So always pitch them things that you love, but give them a choice, even if it's not much of a choice.
And then they can feel like they're analyzing what you're putting in front of them, and they can see why people would prefer this.
And you can use that as a tool to explain, this is why this is better, because look at this one over here and how it's different.
You know, describe the flaws, and then they can see where you're coming from.
And a lot of times even the math people will say, I don't know, I just like this one better.
It just feels right.
That happens so often.
They will surprise you.
That's always a fun, magical moment when a math person comes at you with an emotional response to your artwork.
It just says, this is the one.
Love at first sight.
That's beautiful when that happens.
But yeah, presenting choices is a good way to get to that result.
I agree.
I don't think there will ever be a negative response.
And I don't want to look at two versions of this.
It's always awesome to have.
And in a lot of ways, they may be the target audience.
Their data and their presenting it to folks who are interested in that information.
So it's good to listen to what their feedback is, because they actually understand what you're showing there.
So it's got to be a little give and take both ways.
For sure.
Also think about the client.
Center the end user when you're putting together something, especially with pursuit work.
Think about that person who's going to be reading the proposal, and you can explain from the angle of, hey, you know, whoever, you know, Suzy Sunshine, who works at a hospital, is not going to understand this huge technical diagram of concrete.
Maybe if we boil it down into a catchy statement that explains, that sort of thing can help, because now it's not just coming from you, it's coming from the person who's going to be responsible for giving that money.
Well, I love this conversation about working as a creative with non-creative, or to use Becky's term, art people versus math people.
This is fantastic, and I also think that it's not going away in our industry.
This will be here forever, and I hope even just more and more designers are here to help communicate the technical aspects of AEC.
So thanks for sharing your insights today.
I really appreciate you both being here.
Will you come back?
Come back and join us another time?
Yes.
I would love that.
Thank you so much for having us back.
Awesome.
Thanks, Wendy.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing and graphic design by the team at Middle of Six.
We want to hear from you.
If you have a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.