TexasDesign.com

Are you caught in the vicious circle of spending all your time trying to earn enough money to pay the bills and spending no time on the marketing you know your design business needs?

It’s a problem all entrepreneurs face and design business owners perhaps even more so. The unpredictability of managing client interactions can seem like herding cats and our best intentions can fly out the window… day after day.

Stop the vicious circle and join us at the AIGA Nitty-Gritty TeleForum on for 60 minutes on Wednesday, December 6th. We’ll discuss and share proven tips and tricks for managing ourselves and our time. Learn some of your fellow AIGA member’s favorite time management tricks:

* The Four Quadrants
* 43 Folders
* Losing The Monkey & Keeping Focus
* Time Blocking
* Making Email Your Friend
* Shared Tips & Tricks

If you are interested in participating in this teleconference, please email pam@futureresultsnow.com and login details will be emailed to you.

Date Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Time 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Join us for HammerTime Happy Hour! Mix and mingle with your peers in a relaxed atmosphere at the Molotov Lounge.

Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location

Marty Neumeier from Neutron LLC.-a San Francisco-based firm specializing in brand collaboration —the “glue” that holds integrated marketing teams together.

Marty began his career as a designer and copywriter in southern California in the early ’70s, then moved to northern California in the early ’80s to focus on brand design for technology clients, including Apple and Netscape.

In 1996 he launched CRITIQUE, the magazine of graphic design thinking. In editing CRITIQUE, Marty joined the conversation about how to bridge the gap between strategy and design, which led to the formation of Neutron and the ideas in his book THE BRAND GAP. Marty has just released “Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands.”

For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.

Listen to the interview: .

Below is a transcript of the interview with Marty Neumeier:

TDc: Good afternoon, Marty. I wanted to start off by asking you, Craig Frazier once said that companies that asked you to be an image maker are companies that have no image. Is that true with branding?

Marty Neumeier: I don’t know what Craig meant but he’s really sure. He probably knows what he meant. I think every company has an image and every company has a brand. That’s one thing that they don’t really realize. Even if they haven’t put an investment into branding or brand building, they have a brand. A brand is the outside world’s view of the company or the product or the service. It’s not what you think, it’s what they think.

TDc: Right.

Marty Neumeier: That’s the big shift that people have to get used to.

TDc: So really, companies like yours, like Neutron, what you really do is cultivate that brand. Would that be a correct statement?

Mart Neumeier: No. I think there’s two parts of Neutron. Our tagline is “Think and Do.” One part – the Think part – is about learning about writing articles, about giving talks, about training people, giving workshops. We’re developing new ideas and learning about new things all the time. Then we apply that to engagements with clients, so that’s the Do part. They get the benefit of all this thinking and learning. We learn from the engagements what we have to learn about next in the thinking part. You could just refer to it as a circle. It’s like a little perpetual motion machine.

How we apply that is, if we have an engagement, we try to get in the middle of the brand building process and help everyone understand what the brand is trying to do, what the strategic content of the company is and then cut everybody loose to do their best work after they know, basically, where they’re going, Get everybody to start to collaborate and work together, which of course doesn’t happen very much now. People are working in silos and we always wonder why it never comes together at the end because they’re not sharing their ideas. We help the sharing process. We don’t actually compete with anybody out there. We don’t compete with other designers or agencies or anybody. We’re a layer apart from that where we just basically glue everybody together.

TDc: Do you see yourself sitting in the middle of that or on the periphery, pushing people in the right direction?

Marty Neumeier: Kind of in the middle but not everywhere. We’ll be put in to do some specific thing, perhaps. We’ll work with the management of the company to set a strategic selection as to be implemented with branding because, often, strategies are difficult to implement in branding because they’re not strong enough or bold enough or differentiated. We want to work with them to make that happen. We might work with them to create a corporate story. What’s the story of this brand that we’re all going to execute? Depending on where the most need is, that’s where we’ll go. We act as a bridge between creative people and leadership between internal and external groups. It can really go anywhere. The main thing is
that our intention is to make the brand holistic and healthy and clear to everybody without getting in the way of anybody’s work. In fact, we want to set the bar higher and help people get over it. That’s really our goal.

Read more

Master the five key disciplines of brand-building—differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation—in exciting one-day workshop, either September 26th or September 28th, at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. Marty Neumeier, author of THE BRAND GAP and consultant to Apple, Gap, Herman Miller, Kodak, Yahoo! and others, will show you how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. With fast-paced presentations and collaborative exercises, you’ll learn dozens of proven principles you can apply immediately to your business, whether you work in a small design firm or the marketing department of a Fortune 1000 company.

Listen to the podacst with ZAG author Mart Neumeir

Stephen F. Austin Hotel
701 Congress Ave, Austin
Phone: 512.457.8800 (Location info only. Not for RSVP or event info.)

Go to the Austin AIGA site for more information.

Join us for HammerTime Happy Hour! Mix and mingle with your peers in a relaxed atmosphere at the Molotov Lounge.

Molotov Lounge
719 West Sixth Street, Austin (map)
Phone: 512.499.0600 (Location info only. Not for RSVP or event info.)

Molotov Lounge
719 West Sixth Street, Austin (map)
Phone: 512.499.0600 (Location info only. Not for RSVP or event info.)