Perhaps I’m more stalker-ish than most people, but I find watching how creative professionals work fascinating. It’s hard not to be inspired by the passion that creatives have in their work, and in their process.

My favorite resource for this is Pretty Cool People Interviews. A fantastic selection of video interviews from creative people in all industries, and constantly updated. I watch a lot of these types of things on YouTube but never bookmark them! If anyone knows of any similar videos please post links below.

###

RELATED: While many people were critical of her best-selling book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert delivered a really special talk at the TED conference on creativity, and the pressures of success:

Today I’m happy to announce the completion of three new websites, designed by Phillips Design:

Talonsharp Street Art

Psychic Kara

Church of United Spiritualism of Australia – Toowoomba Branch

It’s impossible to turn on the TV or radio without hearing about the financial crisis, “market downturns”, or the implosion of the worldwide economy in general. With so much fear in the minds of business owners on decreasing customer spending (with no end in sight), you would be forgiven for running a fine-toothed comb over your marketing budget.

The budget for creating, maintaining or promoting your online presence, however, should definitely not be given the chop. If anything, you should be looking to increase the online budget, and heres three reasons why:

1. It’s cost effective

Past economic downturns have taught us that during tough times marketing dollars invested wisely reap big rewards. Depending on your business and target market, it can be much cheaper to find a new customer online than through traditional means such as print (newspaper ads, flyers, brochures) or television.

Gerry McGovern makes the argument that the web is 14 times cheaper to have a customer complete a task online (such as buying a product or updating billing information) than via the phone, and a startling 35 times cheaper than face-to-face interaction. 

2. It gets ahead of the competition

Warren Buffet advised stock market investors to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful”, which is why he is now buying up stock during this shaky economic situation. You can apply the same principle to your marketing budget. For example, there is now a great opportunity to advertise your website with Google AdWords as big companies trim their online advertising budgets and ad prices begin to drop.

3. It creates opportunity for clever marketing

Those with small online advertising budgets are not left out in the cold during this economic winter. You have at your disposal a wide variety of online services that can bring new customers with little to no cost. Social networking websites are great for this, as well as social media such as YouTube. The smarter you can be when using these mediums, the better your chances at success. These are easy to get started with but difficult to master, and not a silver-bullet for all your marketing needs. In my opinion, using these mediums along with traditional advertising is a winning combination.

From the maker of Helvetica (the movie) comes a documentary on industrial design and the creativity behind everyday objects. The trailer for the film has just been released:

The voice-overs comes from Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid. This looks really fantastic…I can’t wait to see this movie

Objectified Web Site

I’m a bit slow to get around to watching this, but the second series of Not Quite Art has been broadcast on ABC1. The show features various artists working outside of the mainstream art world, and how they are getting a global audience. Series 1 & 2 are available for download on the ABC’s website.

Here’s hoping the ABC commission a third season!

I’m totally in love with tilt-shifting, the photographic technique used to make everyday scenes look like miniature sets. Sydneysider Keith Loutit creates some amazing time-lapse videos of common scenes, such as beaches and harbors. The latest is a time-lapse of a monster truck rally:

After thinking how cool it would be to see this in a music video, I found Thom Yorke’s Harrowdown Hill video uses something similar (dubbed SmallGantics) to achieve the same effect.

Find out more: Flickr, Wikipedia, camera how-to, photoshop how-to

[via BoingBoing]

There is an interesting blog post at Smart Company on unprofessional web developer behavior.

“…needless to say, the design was messy, the e-commerce section (which we repeatedly said we did not want to go live yet) was incomplete as customers could not see prices next to items displayed, and to make matters worse, she held off removing inappropriate/incomplete material until we paid. We both felt that asking for the total of $9000 for a website that was incomplete and which we did not approve was not rational.”

It gets better:

“…I looked up our business name on Google and it led to her web design company and under our profile in her list of projects she states that the client (that would be us) “has been taken off line for their inability to pay their bills on time”.”

Unfortunately it’s an all to common occurrence for unprofessional web designers/developers to taint the online experience for the client. Many of the problems listed in the post could have been avoided by:

1. Agreeing on the scope of the project before work commences
2. Agreeing on the costs before work commences
3. The web developer behaving in a professional manner

I ordered a few hundred business cards for Phillips Design this week. I settled on VistaPrint after reading a few positive reviews in online forums. While I have yet to see the actual cards, the company has already left a bitter taste in my mouth from their in-your-face upselling techniques.

During the order process VistaPrint attemps to upsell various stationary with the customer’s logo plastered on it around 2-3 times, in some cases making the user scroll down an entire page with “special” and “limited time” offers. After skipping through these, a final attempt to sell the same thing at an even lower price was made.  After ordering the cards, an email order confirmation is sent with another dozen special offers.

In my opinion this kind of marketing poisons the entire user experience just to make a few extra dollars. It certainly made me think twice about referring any of my clients.

Upselling is an excellent way of giving the customer extra value and increasing business profit — just be careful not to overdo.

Welcome to the Phillips Design notebook!

This blog will be a journal of ideas relating to web design, business, marketing and anything else I think readers may be interested in. If you like the posts, please consider subscribing via the RSS feed.

Enjoy!

Andrew Phillips