Strange that i should just happen upon this today, after joining the legions of agency redundants last month and joining the legions of freelance consultants , I spent an hour this morning talking to a recruitment consultant in a foreign land explaining what i did (former producer) and your comment that we spread ourselves too thinly is spot on , i do everything i said and i do , i write the proposals, run creative brainstorms, decide what ideas to develop, manage and work with the IA boys and girls, liaise with clients and project managers , talk brand identity, assess marketing goals, look at long term strategy ...bloody hell thats 10 peoples jobs in any other environment

i'd love to get the job of coming up with the ideas, but , thats part of my job along with all the other bits , do you really see a new media job for sole idea generation . the fabled imagineer (with share options) ?

Dave

On 18:26:26 29 August 2001 paul wrote:
>It was suggested to me the other day that web design is
>rapidly being replaced by ‘best practice’.
>"Good thing too" I said, "web designers
>have been all things to all people for too long, the
>sooner we add some ‘best practice’,
>‘proven methodologies’ and
>‘rules’, the sooner we can start thinking
>creatively again." Then we had a heated discussion.
>
>A contradiction in terms, perhaps, but in my experience
>restrictions often expand creativity. Orson Wells said,
>"The enemy of art is the absence of limitation".
>Process, organisation, rules and structures are precisely
>what is needed to allow creativity.
>
>The fact is that producing good digital design is
>surprisingly scientific and the past years have been a
>mess of a learning process with jack-of-all-trade
>designers an accepted part of the free-for-all. Much of
>what currently passes for design is a scientific process
>and can be handled by scientists. When this happens us
>creative types can concentrate on what we do best: ideas.
>
>Commercial realities dictate that we become more
>accountable, as creative, integrated agencies lose their
>retail clients to e-commerce specialists and traditional
>advertising agencies increase their digital presence,
>accounts are moving to those who can prove they’re
>the best for the job. And that means more than a
>subjective plea that we know best. It means targeted,
>relevant, in-depth skills, rigorous methodologies and
>objective proof of success and return on investment. It
>also means finally accepting that an Honours Degree in
>Graphic Design does not necessarily qualify us to build
>the architecture for an e-commerce-shopping cart. There
>are people more qualified than we are. There are proven
>‘best practice’ methodologies in place. We
>can’t justify it any longer.
>
>Much of our work is and will be based on standards with
>creativity becoming an additive rather than an origin.
>After all, supermarkets or cars are essentially the same,
>creativity is added-ideas that distinguish one brand from
>another, not a way to organise floor plans or build an
>engine. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel on every
>e-commerce project and for the first time in 10 years,
>clients sure as hell aren’t going to pay me to do
>so.
>
>When I started online, as companies realised that they
>needed a web presence the natural thinking was to see it
>as a computer issue and ask the IT department to manage
>the development of their website. The Technical director
>would pass it on, "that new boy Tony, he’s got
>his own website let him manage it". As a young,
>enthusiastic agency we would be brought in and would begin
>to discuss brand, interaction and many other areas that
>went straight over Tony’s head (and ours). In the
>end the product would reflect the jumbled process -
>traditionally trained designers trying to control HTML to
>the pixel, busy client stakeholders dismissing the site as
>a side issue, us getting paid for a learning process and
>Tony attempting to manage a project as an extension of a
>hobby.
>
>Eventually companies wised up to the damage that was being
>done to their brands through having a global presence that
>looked like it had been knocked up in a 6th former’s
>bedroom. They realised that the IT teams were not the
>correct department to run a website and that
>responsibility should fall on Marketing. Marketing
>allocated budgets and brought us in again, by now we were
>an ‘integrated agency’ - that meant that we
>could do it all, even tell you what your business really
>was…
>
>Marketing talked our language. Between us we gave you the
>brochure site, games for no reason, Java tickers with
>latest news that nobody read and FMCG portals that nobody
>went to: "I’ve bought your washing powder for
>10 years, why do you assume that means I want to hang out
>with you?"
>
>A few years on and us, those same teams, are now producing
>transactional sites, e-commerce, and online software
>applications – it’s big business.
>
>It was all one big learning experience and all the while
>we creatives were burdening ourselves with more and more
>responsibilities: designers also became information
>architects, HTML coders, brand managers etc. For us it
>meant that to be any good at our jobs we had to spread
>ourselves thinly. I need to understand branding in an
>online context, I need to appreciate usability within
>information design, I need to know how my interface will
>interact with a database and how to incorporate marketing
>pathways underpinned by data capture and analysis. I need
>to be a brand manager, an ethnographer, a programmer and a
>business analyst. They didn’t teach me any of this
>at Art College.
>
>What they did teach me was structure: the grid was
>sacrosanct, typography is right or wrong, the benefits of
>a watertight creative brief etc. Art College taught me
>that process and structure increase focus, knowledge and
>therefore creativity. David Ogilvy said "Shakespeare
>wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen
>lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in three quatrains and
>a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas
>within an equally rigid discipline - exposition,
>development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?"
>
>Other industries don’t do it like us, they begin
>with restrictions. Look at the jobs pages for traditional
>advertising agencies: brand guardians, page layout
>artists, above, below and through the line creatives, etc,
>etc. Then look at the same for digital agencies: web
>designer, web designer with usability, web designer with
>JavaScript, nobody knows what they are looking for, job
>descriptions are vague, confused or non-existent.
>Designers come with programming, brand or latterly, HCI
>experience. Often they want it all. Why aren’t there
>any standards? More guidelines, more restrictions,
>detailed job descriptions, effective direction, more
>accepted thinking - it’s been 10 years and
>we’re still the naive, enthusiastic newcomers who
>haven't defined just what we do.
>
>It’s important that I understand the fundamentals of
>usability and info architecture but I don’t want to
>test and research myself - it’s a different job. I
>want a best practice methodology as a basis when creating
>layouts for a shopping basket process, put me alongside an
>information architect, give me a restrictive brief and let
>me shape it. Best practice is good for me, good for the
>customer and therefore good for the brand. Ask Amazon,
>they lost no time in patenting their one-click technology
>and you can licence it. Good, user-centric design is a
>commodity - brand equity that money can now buy.
>
>Why is competitive advantage not driven by ideas but by
>implementation issues? I’ve lost track of the times
>I’ve told clients that "simple things done well
>will gain you advantage because your competitors
>haven’t". It should be unthinkable for
>implementation issues to define the success and failure of
>a site - download speeds, usability and basic
>functionality should not be an issue, proven structures,
>best practice and science can manage this for you. Users
>expect a certain standard - process and organisation
>should be givens.
>
>Then, finally we will have removed the clutter to
>concentrate on ideas: build ideas, own ideas, direct
>ideas, ‘think out of the box’, encourage,
>play, cajole, inspire, evangelise - in the past this was
>called creativity.
>
>Paul