How to Be My Favorite Client

Some days, when the projects are tough and the deadlines are looming, I fantasize about the elusive perfect client: smart yet sensitive, makes me laugh, understanding, passionate, hardworking.

One day, I realized that the form of my professional fantasies closely resembled something a little closer to home—dating profiles.

I'm a millennial who’s never been married, so I've been on countless first dates made possible by the wonders of the web. In honor of all things close to my project manager’s heart, I decided to create a very special online dating profile.

OkCupid profile

Of course, as all of us online daters know, a good profile gives more details about you than it does about who you’re looking for. So what do I want in a professional relationship? Well, I’ll tell you.

Collaboration

I want to work with clients who are relentlessly committed to their projects as an important part of their business. While most clients we work with are also busy simply running their company, it’s important for clients to understand that without their participation, the project simply cannot succeed. We bring creative expertise to the table, but we need your unique insight about your business in order to fully use our skills and talents.

Commitment

Commitment means a vested, deep-rooted interest in seeing a project succeed—with actions that reflect that interest. Practically speaking, commitment means time—time spent in design meetings, in reviewing items and providing thoughtful, prompt feedback, in meeting your deadlines and holding us to ours. These things matter because without that participation, projects end up slowing or even stopping, which isn’t good for anyone.

Trust

We hope that when you hire us, it means you trust that we do excellent work. Sometimes, however, that’s easier to feel at the beginning of a project and harder when it comes to significant decisions about your specific business choices. We want to work with clients who trust that when it comes to strategic design, content, and development work, we’re passionate professionals. We don’t present anything we don’t believe in (and we generally provide options), but more importantly, there’s always thought behind the work that we do. Sometimes we’ll ask you to trust us.

Communication

Striking the right level of communication can be a tricky thing—we want you to speak up with questions and opinions about our work on your project, but we also need dedicated time to simply make production progress. When in doubt, we tend to prefer over-communication with project managers. Our process does, however, provide specific channels for facilitating feedback that’s good for the work being done and the people doing that work.

Understanding

We are, like everyone else, imperfect people, and while we always have the best of intentions, there will be unforeseen challenges in any project. Rising to the challenge requires a sense of understanding and patience from our clients. If we mess up, understand that it was unintentional and that we’ll make it right. If we need additional time on a specific aspect of your project, understand that we only ask for these extensions when we need more time to provide the best possible solution. If we have questions that seem elementary to you, understand that we simply want to be sure that we understand your business almost as well as you do.

I'm what I like to call a practical romantic, so I know the idea of perfection is entirely relative. I'm thankful for clients with the traits I long for and hopeful for the qualities I still seek (a combination of all these traits is understandably hard to find). At the end of the day, I want to do good work for every client; it's against my nature to do otherwise.

6 Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier

My senior year of high school we were told to write a letter to the incoming senior who would be taking our seat. Unlike most of the students in my class, I was really excited about this assignment in my last days of English class. I'm pretty sure I wrote at least three pages, mostly about how to win scholarships (that's how I paid my way through college). Maybe it's egotistical (and I hope it's not), but I really love figuring things out and sharing that knowledge with other people in similar positions. Last year, I wrote a post for andCulture about things I wish I'd learned in college. In the spirit of that post, I've figured out a few more things I wish I could have told myself earlier.

1. Don't wait for someone else to offer a handshake. Put yours out there.

At a recent AIGA event, I talked about this topic with a male colleague and he was really shocked. I told him that with men, shaking hands is typical not only in business situations, but also in casual situations and friendships. A man's handshake frequency is likely to be higher than a woman's. Since it's more common, it's less thought about—although I think men aren't always sure how to greet women when it comes to casual handshaking.

For women, we don't always have this handshaking relationship with others, men or women. In the U.S. at least, I find myself questioning the proper introduction and goodbye in non-business situations. With women I wonder if we're at the hugging stage. With men I try to guess if he's going to offer his hand first. It was very annoying.

I say "was" because at some point I decided I was tired of the uncertainty. So now, more often than not, I offer my hand first. Sometimes it catches people off-guard, but since it's a socially acceptable greeting, they recover quickly enough. And I feel more confident. So just offer your hand first.

2. Have a bucket list.

I did actually figure out this one early—I started my bucket list in high school. But what I thought might fizzle out after a month or two, turned out to be something I've added to and checked things off of for almost 10 years now. Maybe it's because checking things off is so satisfying, but my list has often given me the extra push I need to do something out of my comfort zone.

Sometimes it's simple (last month I went to a farm to milk a cow), sometimes it's frivolous (ride a tandem bicycle, which I got to do courtesy of Keas) and sometimes its downright unlikely (buying the house I grew up in is on the list). But having the list helps me remember to do things for the sake of wanting to experience them.

3. Look for opportunities to agree.

Even when you disagree with someone, pay attention to what you do agree on. If you can start a debate at a point of genuine agreement, you're more likely to have a healthy conversation rather than an ugly fight. The point is not to be right—it's to keep the conversation flowing toward the best possible outcome.

More than that, constant disagreement becomes a general sense of negativity, and it's downright depressing. You won't accomplish your best work if you're constantly thinking about what's wrong or bad about something or someone. Which brings me to my next point...

4. Stop complaining. Look for opportunities to do something good.

It is far too easy to complain about work, especially if you work in client services. There will always be something to be dissatisfied about, and you can choose whether to spend energy on anger and bitching.

My Dad always told me, if you don't like something, change it. You will feel better and go further if you instead choose to focus on exploiting opportunities instead of tolerating inadequacies. It's harder, but it's better.

5. Persistence and discipline matter.

The stories we read are highlights—a Fast Company article or a profile in GOOD magazine—that inspire us. They focus on turning points in someone's story, but most of life is not a eureka moment. Most moments are not revelations.

The "3 months later" that you don't see a moment of in a movie? That's when all the uncomfortable and exhausting effort happened, and it's not like a Rocky montage. Or rather, our constant efforts don't get nicely packaged into snapshots with Survivor music in the background, making 3 chin-ups look exciting when really, by chin-up 32, you want to take a nap.

6. Don't trust your ego.

Especially when you work in the design industry or anything online, you will be tempted to fight for your ego. Don't do it. Until you're willing to be wrong, you'll never be right.

I really can't stress this enough: there's a big difference between being confident in your abilities and being blind to better responses to a problem. If you're not willing to admit that maybe you don't know it all or have all the answers or all the best ideas, you won't seek out the information and inspiration you need to create something great. You must be willing to ignore your first great idea and push yourself to something better.

As a bonus item, I'd also advise everyone to turn to Buzzfeed Animals if they're having a tough day, because how can you possibly feel defeated when you're looking at corgis?

Swing Both Ways: Why Print Bibliophiles Should Stop Hating On E-books

My Spanish barista friends must have thought I was mad when shortly after sitting down to an afternoon Earl Grey, I frantically asked in broken Spanish if they could watch my heavy bag while I ran back to the metro station for Gertrude Stein. I was taking "American Writers in Paris" while studying English literature in Madrid (yeah, process that for a moment), and I'd been reading a copy of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" I stole from a library in Texas. I'd left it on the subway and panicked when I realized this.

Fortunately, the woman at the ticket counter understood my description of a small red book and produced it with a smile that said "you might be crazy, please leave now."

Today, this little hardback sits on my shelf, and every time I look at it, I remember this experience and smile. No other book has the same backstory. Had I been carrying an e-reader, I probably wouldn't have gotten it back and I wouldn't attach this memory to any particular text.

Embracing the Dark Side

Cut to last fall, when I purchased my first e-reader. It was a momentous occasion. Just a mere three years ago, I was fiercely devoted to print (hell, I worked at a newspaper). And to this day, when I walk into a good bookstore, I find myself needing to pee from excitement. But I've grown to love this digital format... and grown annoyed with the idea that I'm cheating on my other books.

The notion that e-books are inferior to "real" books is a misconstrued debate, and the fighting has to stop. It's about as productive as arguing over whether listening to an audio book "counts" as reading a book. Seriously? The "real thing" when it comes to storytelling goes further back than Gutenberg's press—all the way to oral storytelling traditions. So maybe audiobooks are really more authentic choices.

Stories are an experience. The format of that experience is not what makes the content worth engaging.

Why E-books Are My Friends

I chose my first e-books deliberately; I read Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane. It seemed like the most appropriate thing to try. Here's why I ended up loving the e-book experience more than I ever anticipated:

• Feedback. When I downloaded my first e-books, I also started using ReadMill. It is an almost surreal experience to be able to tweet comments on specific selections not only to my friends but to the actual author as well. She may not reply back, but I can give immediate feedback on how I'm receiving her work (although I've engaged in conversations with two authors via Twitter so far).
• Community. As much as I love book clubs (and don't intend to give them up), it's also fantastic to immediately see how people I will never meet IRL respond to something I've reacted to. My thoughts can be immediately influenced by others if I choose and thus have the chance to mature faster. I hope to see more web content structured this way in the future. In fact, I'd argue that reader feedback methods on most blog is disappointingly behind the curve (but that's another blog post).
• Portability. I still have many of my college textbooks that I can't bring myself to discard whenever moving time rolls around. It's both a matter of financial and intellectual investment. I may never sit down to re-read the whole of Plato's work or my massive collection of women's poetry—but I do return to sections of these texts now and then, and my notes remind me of where my mind was years ago. I don't want to discard these experiences—which is where e-books come in as a joy for those who feel connected to our texts and prefer living as lightweight as possible. (Interestingly enough, there's also an argument that just the opposite fuels e-book popularity—that e-books are the new mass market paperback.)
• Accessibility. Despite the abundance of trolling and otherwise disappointing human behavior, the potential this medium holds is mind blowing. As a civilization, it's startling how quickly we've moved from the preciousness of printed materials to an information free-for-all. What this means for education in places with limited opportunities is even more inspiring to me.

Stop Quibbling, Start Imagining

The long of the short of this bookish debate is that e-books can do things and have advantages that printed books cannot and do not. But the reverse is true as well.

Each format has its place, and I want to see what each can accomplish that the other cannot. For example, if you're going to spend the money to print something, make it different than what could be conveyed in a digital format.

I'm currently reading Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs, which has been bound in a lovely soft-touch coating that actually makes me pick up the book more often. That, my friends, is the power of print—and it's not being exercised often enough.

Swing Both Ways. Seriously.

But here's the real secret: you don't have to choose one or the other. You can love both (and most people are not exclusive with their book choices).

I have by no stretch of the imagination abandoned print (more than a dozen boxes of books my Dad has moved more than once is a testament to that). I stand in old bookstores and just breathe in the stories (ones printed on pages and ones left there by their former owners)—but I also spend my day writing content for the web. I have 6 pen pals I handwrite letters to every month—but I send email every hour.

Print and digital content are not at war. They are allies in the greater battle against ignorance.