ImagesMagUK_August_20

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Marshall Atkinson paints a picture of the ideal art department, and helps you draw up a strategy that will deliver increased speed and quality R ecently in the Shirt Lab Tribe live Q&A session on Zoom, the group discussion was focused on ways to run an art department better. As a former art director, I have some viewpoints on this and thought it would make a good topic for an article. Let’s start with the obvious Speed and quality in the art department can increase exponentially if your shop simply handles one thing correctly. Can you guess what that might be? Brand new MacBook Pro? Nope, but I like what you are thinking. Crazy- talented designer and separation ninja? You need that certainly, but that’s not where I’m going with this. A dimly lit room with some funky music playing softly, and some incense burning? Um… no! Here’s the answer: It all starts with your sales and customer service team getting the right information and directions from your customers. Your art department should shoot for (and track) an 85% first-time art approval acceptance rate from your customers. This means that for at least 85% of the time when they send something out, it comes back approved immediately from the customer without any changes. Bingo! Speed comes from getting the details right in the creative brief that originates from your customer-facing group. That’s your sales and customer service or order entry team. This idea works whether you are using a group of creative artists in-house or outsourcing your art department. Here’s a problematic example Often when I’m coaching clients through this, I use an example project for a client to talk about what might be needed to do this particular workflow right. Customer: “Here’s our idea for the T-shirt. We want a monkey riding a bicycle. The headline should read, ‘We’re Open!’. Our logo should be on there too somewhere.” Salesperson: “No problem. Our design team will get right on it. They will design something really cool.” Does this exchange sound like a typical conversation for your shop? The salesperson didn’t ask any questions at all to nail down a direction for the creative. They will simply hand off this time-sucking hand grenade to the art team to wrestle with. This design is destined to be changed or edited at least three times – maybe more – especially when the salesperson uses the three most hated words that any art team never wants to hear: “Do something cool.” (If that’s you, please stop doing that.) Why can’t production get started with staging and organising jobs on time? Frankly, because a huge chunk of the jobs on your schedule aren’t even approved yet. You need to get a handle on this. Asking better questions Instead, your customer-facing team needs to be trained to ask better questions to nail down a direction for your creative staff to execute. Think of these questions as guideposts or breadcrumbs along the way for your art crew to follow. Let’s revisit that same example conversation… Customer: “Here’s our idea for the T-shirt. We want a monkey riding a bicycle. The headline should read, ‘We’re Open!’. Our logo should be on there too somewhere.” Salesperson: “A monkey riding a bicycle! That’s interesting. What kind of monkey, and what type of bicycle?” Customer: “What do you mean?” Salesperson: “We want to nail the art the first time out, so these details matter. Is the monkey a chimpanzee, a spider monkey, a gorilla…what type of monkey are you imagining?” Customer: “Oh, I see. We were thinking about a big gorilla riding a tiny bicycle.” Salesperson: “That’s hilarious! How do you envision the art? Is it an illustration, a cartoon line-drawing, something realistic? Do you have anything similar you can show me?” Customer: “I don’t have anything to show you, but I do want it to be Accelerate your art department 34 images AUGUST 2020 www.images-magazine.com