We first met with the folks at the Portland Schools Foundation five or six months ago. They told us how their work with schools and the community had evolved over the past 17 years. How, as the backbone organization leading the Cradle to Career initiative, their name no longer reflected who they are today.

Instead of going with a traditional graphic design firm, they were looking for a creative partner who could not only develop their new brand, but could also engage the community to share their insights and aspirations. (and all on a shoestring, non-profit-sized budget.)

True to the 52 model, we set out to build the right team for the assignment. We searched for a writer and designer who shared our passion for education and had the experience to boot. Jake Murray (copywriter) and Greg Parra (designer), both accomplished creatives and parents themselves, raised their hands.

In addition, we needed an instigator. Someone with a deep connection to education and the ability to provide an inspirational spark to the community engagement process. Despite a full schedule of speaking engagements around the world, Kevin Carroll was the perfect person for the job and lucky for us, he figured out a way to make it work.

We started by hosting a series of internal discovery and community workshops that eventually led the 52 team to craft a brand platform to guide the naming exploration. We started concepting and presented our shortlist of ideas. One name immediately rose to the top. And so, with the unanimous support of the board, the Portland Schools Foundation has become All Hands Raised–A name that will serve as a rallying cry, mobilizing a diverse community passionate about helping all kids achieve their full potential.

We’re proud to have been partners on this journey and hope to continue to support Dan Ryan and his team as they grow into their new skin. For more about All Hands Raised and the work they do, visit:  All Hands Raised

When the economy went south, marketing budgets were some of the first on the chopping block. So the story goes, lower sales mean less revenue equals scaling back on expenses. Fast-forward two years and we find ourselves still teetering on tough economic times. Is your company now viewing the marketing department as a mitigated expense or an investment opportunity?

Unfortunately, we all know too well that lesser budgets don’t necessarily mean fewer expectations. In fact, in trying times despite waning resources, many marketers are asked to do more with less. Play short-handed. Stretch their dollars. Continue as before but with one hand tied behind their backs. So what do you do? Rely on Twitter and Facebook to weather the storm? We feel your pain.

When business is not “as usual”, traditional marketing resources may need to be reevaluated. You may need to realign your strategy. And the full-service agency you’re currently tethered to might not be the best bang for the buck anymore. If this is the case, consider exploring 52 Limited. Whether sourcing senior freelance talent to fill a temporary void or activating one of our custom project teams to provide fresh creative horsepower, we can keep your brand moving forward without showing up on the CFO’s radar.

By Ryan Gallagher, Account Director @ 52 Limited

Around here we keep our eyes peeled and an ear to the ground for companies that really value good design and support a culture of innovation. (Those companies tend to also be the ones that value their employees and keeping them fulfilled and challenged.) The common thread seems to always be that the decision makers at the top incorporate design and creativity into every aspect of their business. Fast Company’s Alissa Walker recently wrote up a profile of the surprisingly small team running Tumblr. Despite having only a single designer on staff (for now), Tumblr has placed emphasis on good, simple design at the center of all their offerings.

How Tumblr Created A Design Culture With No Design Team

I am very trusting, especially when it comes to portfolios. If you are showing me your book and there’s a load of work inside, I assume it is yours. I trust it is yours. Why would I doubt otherwise?

Am I too trusting? Are there recruiters out there who keep an ounce of doubt wondering whether every piece inside is actually truly that persons? I never, ever would have thought so.

Until today.

There is a crazy story circling the internet today about a not-at-all-junior creative who has be outed for putting creative work he did not do on his portfolio site. Un-capital B-believeable.

Lots of thoughts are swirling through my mind:
why in the heck would someone do this?
have I been looking at bogus work from other people?
how will I ever know what is truly legit or not?
how many other people do this?
why in the heck would someone do this?

Guys, this is never, never, never ok.

First, let’s just say you get hired off a bogus portfolio. Day one on the job you’ll have to prove your creative chops and when you come up short, you’ll be found out anyway.

Second, let’s say someone finds out (a la not-so-junior-creative referenced above). And not just someone, a large portion of the advertising community finds out. Well, you can kiss your reputation and hire-ability goodbye. And I will tell you, that is never going to be worth it.

Some advice: Be very clear on attributing who else worked on the pieces in your book. Be very clear about your role on the work. Be clear about what is your original idea and what is not. Be clear about whether you worked fulltime versus freelanced. Be clear on your title and role. Be clear about your salary (that’s a whole other blog post by the way).

Be clear. Be clear. Be clear. And, god forbid, do not steal another person’s creative work.

Written by Cecilia Gormon and originally posted at: http://www.creativerecruiter.blogspot.com/

No one wants be held down by The Man. The Man has been keeping down rebellious and artistic souls throughout history. The Man has inspired everything from Jesus’ crucifixion and Western Civilization’s breakaway from feudalism to the shaking hips of Rock and Roll.

People I am here to tell you – Oprah is The Man. Sweeping powers over women, television, lifestyles, maybe even presidential elections. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Oprah, do you? Ask Letterman. Now – The Man is moving her empire off of the “vintage media.”

The decision to end the syndicated show has tectonic implications for the media of the next Millennium. In short, stations can’t afford to pay the massive overheads due to ad revenue fallout, and the overall decline of content worth in the rise of the .com world.

U.K.’s Observer sums it up:

“In the months and years to come, whenever big programs like The Oprah Winfrey Show sit down to renegotiate their deals with local, broadcast stations they are likely to find a grim market where station-group managers are unable or unwilling to match the fees of yesteryear, let alone increase them. That leaves two options for the likes of Oprah. Lower your fees. Or pack up shop.”

You may not think this affects you, as a creator, as a designer, a mAd Man, whatever your gig, but it does. What they say about war goes for broadcast mediums: You may not go looking for it (in this case TV-Web convergence) but IT may coming looking for YOU. A channel on the digital dial is where your work is headed. And you don’t need to know the number.

The days of the Big Three are obviously long past us, and their power to hold advertisers’ dollars are being condensed, specialized, localized and downsized. These are your clients. This is your audience.

How did schools ever advertise their Christmas fairs without it? Has a homemade birthday card ever looked so friendly written in anything else? Have type lovers ever found anything they loathe as much?

If you wrote these questions in Comic Sans you’d have something that was warm, inoffensive and rather unsuitable, a typeface that’s gone wrong. And you’d also have something guaranteed to provoke a howl of protest.

Comic Sans is unique: used the world over, it’s a typeface that doesn’t really want to be type. It looks homely and handwritten, something perfect for things we deem to be fun and liberating. Great for the awnings of toyshops, less good on news websites or on gravestones and the sides of ambulances.

Last year it stuck out like an unfunny joke in Time magazine and Adidas adverts, and even the BBC wasn’t immune, choosing the font to promote its Composers of the Year during the Proms.

What can be done? One can buy the “Ban Comic Sans” mugs, caps and T-shirts, and help finance a documentary called Comic Sans, Or the Most Hated Font In The World.

Black-tie do (not)

Holly and David Combs, the husband and wife cottage industry behind bancomicsans.com, argue that the misuse of the font is “analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume”. Some of what the Combses have to say is tongue-in-cheek, but it is hard to disagree with their claims that type – used well or badly – has the ability to express meaning far beyond the basic words it clothes.

But why, more than any other font, has Comic Sans inspired so much revulsion?

Partly because its ubiquity has led to such misuse (or at least to uses far beyond its original intentions). And partly because it is so irritably simple, so apparently written by a small child. Helvetica is everywhere and simple too, but it usually has the air of modern Swiss sophistication about it, or at least corporate authority. Comic Sans just smirks at you, and begs to be printed in multiple colours.

Perhaps the most comic thing about Comic Sans is that it was never designed as a font for common use. It was intended merely as a perfect solution to a small corporate problem.

It was created in 1994 by Vincent Connare, who worked at Microsoft with the title of “typographic engineer”.

Mrs Gates’ role

In 1994, Connare looked at his computer screen and saw something strange. He was clicking his way through an unreleased trial copy of Microsoft Bob, a software package designed to be particularly user-friendly. It included a finance manager and a word processor, and for a time was the responsibility of Melinda French, who later became Mrs Bill Gates.

But the typeface it used was Times New Roman, which Connare judged to be a strange choice. It was a little harsh and schoolmasterly, not to say boring. It was not something that would hold your hand in a welcoming way.

Connare was a fan of the graphic novel, and was inspired by the speech bubbles to create something simple and rounded, letters that might have been created by cutting with blunt scissors (the truth is he used a popular font-making software package).

His font, not yet called Comic Sans, was rejected for technical reasons (it didn’t fit the existing grids), but not long afterwards was adopted for the successful Microsoft Movie Maker. It was then included as a supplementary typeface in the Windows 95 operating system, where everyone with a PC could not only see it, but use it.

Better than Times New Roman

And thus it became a global phenomenon, something that would inspire attention from Design Week magazine to the Wall St Journal. Connare later explained why it worked so well: “‘Because it’s sometimes better than Times New Roman, that’s why.”

One thing the Comic Sans debate has demonstrated beyond doubt is that one’s choice of font is now a serious affair.

Twenty years ago fonts were not something most of us gave much of a second thought. Unless we were in the print or design industries, fonts were something we accepted rather than chose.

The pull-down menu on our computers changed everything. Here was a way of expressing our intentions and emotions in a new way, a choice that stretched from digital updates of Garamond from the 16th Century up to modern screen fonts such as Georgia and Calibri.

We could employ the efficient Gill Sans for job applications or the more elegant Didot for wedding invitations. We could become familiar with the differences between serif faces and sans serifs, the former with feet and tips on their letters, the latter usually with a less formal air. And we could unleash a seemingly harmless childlike new font on a defenceless world.

Almost inevitably, the Comic Sans backlash has produced a backlash of its own. There are already signs that the font may be becoming retro-chic, in the same way that we now embrace 80s fashion and pop. Most significant of all, it has become highly regarded by those who work with dyslexic children – one of the better uses for which it was never intended.

As companies trim their advertising budgets, the ad agencies they work with are also learning how to survive the recession with less business than in recent years.

Jeff Freedman, co-founder and marketing principal of Boston-based ad shop Small Army, says that he has had to tweak his – and his clients’ – strategy.

Many of the agency’s clients, which include Bugaboo Creek Steak House, SolidWorks and Emerson Hospital, among others, are focused more on planning and how to spend their media dollars in this economy. For instance, some clients have trimmed print work, but beefed up their online advertising.

“There might be less ads, but more messaging and positioning work,” said Freedman, who is encouraging clients to be bold with their marketing messages to grab attention during the downturn.

As for his own business, Freedman, whose 18-person shop is on Newbury Street, has a positive outlook.

But Freedman is nevertheless taking precautions to keep costs in check by being conservative about hiring.

“We won’t hire people unless we know we can take care of them for a while. We never want to be in a position where we hire people and then the economy hits us. So we’re more dependent on freelancers,” said Freedman, who notes that there’s a large pool of talented freelancers in the market now.

What it does is point to the power of networking in a job search. We advise that people do 3 main things when looking for a job. 1. Following job posting boards is a necessary evil of the job search. You may find a job here, but you are just one of thousands of people looking at the same posting. 2. A placement agency like 52 can open doors and provide opportunities that never show up on job boards. A placement agency is also a function of the next and critical step. 3. Network. Often networking is the most important missing piece. It’s also of course, the hardest one and the one that requires the most work.

So, getting back to the “who you know”. It’s not really who you know as much as it is what you know and who you know. If you don’t have marketable employment skills, it really doesn’t matter who you know, chances are you still are not going to be hired to run your mom’s friend’s marketing department. The key is to know as many people in your chosen profession and specialization as you can. If you are good at what you do, you should have a network of people that know it. When looking for a new job, you tap into that network and let it work for you.

If you need to build a network, it takes time, effort and focus. When you make a contact make sure you also ask that contact for a referral. That way one contact becomes two. And always follow up. Keep track of your contacts and the activity you have had with them. When trying to build a network on a job search you need to ask yourself, who would hire me? As in, what is the position or job title of the person who would hire me? If you are a graphic designer, it might be a creative director or marketing manager. Those are the people then that you target for your networking. You also target people who would be doing the same work as you, but they are more able to refer you to opportunities, the higher level people may be the ones doing the hiring. Either way, it’s still networking and building your sphere of contacts.

It’s good to get this skill down early because it is a recurring theme. A job search through proactive networking is very similar to the business development cycle that companies pursue. And it’s hard work. But, it is worth it because you never know the opportunities that will present themselves, either in the short term or years down the road.

Because, it’s all about who you know.

Working in the planning capacity in the marketing industry for more than 10 years, I and other account planners run into the similar challenges.

One of the biggest is clients and creatives who don’t believe in research. Usually the aversion has to do with an experience(s) involving bad research or a lack of knowledge on what to do with information once it is presented.

Research-averse people need to know that gathered information is a launching point. From there, you grow, create and excel.

On rare, and very lucky occasions, clients say out loud and directly that they don’t believe in research. However, the usual and unfortunate situation (and a source of ongoing contention) is that most clients will not admit this. Instead, they will hem and haw over the budget, methodology, your background, the timeline, the recruit and/or anything else they can use to pick apart the project. In so doing, they are avoiding the real issue: that they truly don’t believe in research.

Experience has shown me this stems from a lack of understanding.

At the same time, creatives will fight tooth and nail to avoid doing research. When a creative, hears “research” they equate it with “creative testing,” which to them signals the death of creativity.

Resistance to the concept of research puts planning in the role of the ugly stepsister: Abused and misunderstood.

It is seen as the last step to validate and confirm opinions, soothe egos or kill campaigns. We’ve all been there and it isn’t pretty.

The process that is “planning” is at least helpful and hopefully inspiring. Done correctly, research (creative testing) can yield insights regarding the target audience that can be used to help hone messages.

It can be a great tool for selling the work to the client, for creating effective resonance with the audience and giving vision and voice to the brand.

After all, brands live in the hearts and minds of consumers, and you are nowhere if you don’t know how to speak their language. Research provides understanding and interpretation!

But, I digress. Let’s get back to the root of this problem. When it comes to resistance to research, it is most likely because people have conjured in their minds a notion that research is some blue-haired lady at the library, using the Dewey Decimal system to look up a book written in 1967 by Professor So-and-So.

Or, worse yet, there may be a sense that research is the net result of one of those annoying phone surveys where you are called just as you are sitting down to dinner and are asked to rate the likelihood of whether you would buy whitening toothpaste over tartar control paste. In that moment, who cares what kind of toothpaste you use, all you are thinking about is your meal getting cold, your screaming kids and getting off the phone.

That’s not research. That’s simply the dinner-hour at one middle-American household.

This can all be boiled down to two points to keep in mind when dealing with clients and creatives. Those who, a) don’t believe in research or b) have never experienced good research.

How can this battle be overcome? Education.

Performed by talented people who know what methodologies to use, how to get from consumers information of depth, how to interpret resulting insights and how to take action. Creatives need to know that the planner is here to support them, to help inspire the process and help ensure the work is the best it can be.

Not to kill it.

Good research brings clarity and leaves everyone with a deep understanding of the target, the playing field, the brand as it is, what it can become and what it will take to get there.

It is simple: the right research + a good planner = successful project!

We just need to overcome the stereotypes of research as it has been known. There is a better way, one less concerned with quantifying and more aware of understanding.

After all, is that not the foundation for all things great?