During the past week,
Jeff and I have been really busy trying to come up with the design of the backdrop. We can humbly say that is some serious hard work. Our hats go off to people who do this nicely day in and day out. Being the first time I’ve ever done this, here are a few lessons learned I would like to share with you guys.
Lessons learned :
- Pressure kills creativity; do not try to force yourself to be create for the next hour. Putting a gun on your head won’t make you creative. Let the ideas emerge and do the design in a playful mood. It’ll be much more productive, and will probably even cost you less time then pressuring yourself.
- Do cheap mock ups first; Draw a cheap mock-up first. Pick up a pen and something you can write on and start building on top of that. Having a real artifact to talk around facilitates communication big time. Don’t waste time on colors first. Place you elements around first and decide the most important stuff, like where you want to put you emphasis first. You can always make it look nice in Photoshop later.
- Get frequent feedback; Do small incremental changes. Letting your designer alone to work on the design for hours at a time won’t do any good. You will probably not like half of what he or she did at best and at worst you will scrap all the work he added. Work in small increments to build it up.
- Do it in advance; Like I said, pressure kills creativity. You do not want to try and be creative 5 minutes before you have to handout the design to the printer. It won’t work.
- Respect your designer; This may sound like a given, but giving someone work only to tell them hours later that their work sucks can kill all their enthusiasm towards the project. Be understanding.
Here is the almost final draft of our backdrop for the Agile 2010 conference.
You will probably recognize the no frills look of ProjectCards in it. And that’s pretty much what we are all about. Just an awesome software that gets you on the right track and keeps you there.
- Nicholas Lemay Want to enable your Agile team to be in control of their success ?jumpstart @ projectcards.com/download
