Turning your Vision into Reality

I recently attended the last session of the inaugural West Island Leadership Development program, an initiative of the West Island Federation CJA that aims to foster future community leaders by training us about fundraising, entrepreneuring, and community activism. Guested by Dr. Ken Robertson, Director General of Champlain Regional College, the focus of the session concerned establishing a vision, and learning how to set goals, prioritize, and meet objectives.

I found this session particularly interesting because the issues covered not only applied to your career path (i.e. where do you see yourself in your job, or how do you envision your company's growth 5 years from now), but also to your everyday life.

There are 2 fundamental conclusions that Dr. Robertson conveyed, which I found particularly poignant:

1. Achieving future success is dependent on 2 things: the successful relationship building with others, such as your colleagues and friends; never forgetting to look back to see how you arrived to your current situation in the first place.
   
   Personally, I'm completely turned off by arrogance. I distate people who are so arrogant, they feel it necessary to belittle you in order to maintain their level of arrogance. This applies to people who do not feel it necessary to even speak to you if they feel you have nothing to contribute to their lives in any way. This also applied to people who have success dumped into their laps by either being born into a successful family, or marrying into one. People like that often develop a hoity-toity attitude which just completely sours my grapes. Thus, the true measure of success, in my opinion, is summarized by the first point.
   
2. The "finite" vs. the "infinite"
   
   Invariably, when trying to build yourself up, someone along the way will try to keep you down, either literally, or by verbal criticism. It's therefore important to never allow the finite to influence the possibilities of what you can do.
   
   For example, a violin has 4 strings and is 12" long. This is finite. However, for several hundreds of years, composers have been using the violin to create an infinite number of combinations of music, and are still doing so today.

Just think what you can do when your vision isn't hampered by the bounds of reality...

Creating a Personal Brand

One question I'm often asked by entrepreneurs is how to create a "personal brand" to better market oneself to others.

What you're basically asking is how to "productize" yourself. Meaning, if I went to a supermarket, and found a picture of you on a bottle, would I buy it? And furthermore, would I drink from the bottle?

Find out what makes you, you. What makes you unique. Mitch Joel, a marketing guru I've had the pleasure of listening speak, would dare you to find your "it" factor. What makes you stand out in a crowded room of billions of people asking the same question, all trying to make a buck.

Why is that only a handful of people in the world have procured the most wealth the world has to offer? It's because they've found out what it takes to unlock that something magical and get people to believe in what they're all about.

Being Unique as a Graphic Designer

I was recently asked the question about being a graphic designer, "Other than serving a niche market, how do you differentiate yourself from other designers or small design shops?"

Graphic design is a saturated field. But the bigger problem lies in getting recognized and hired in a flooded field of talent.

I find that graphic design is very much like acting -- you're only as good as your last performance. However, in addition to raw talent in what you do, what will set you apart from other designers is customer service.

Graphic design unfortunately suffers from a bit of a "bottom-feeder" syndrome in that everyone believes they can be a designer, but few actually can. With that said, the dollar figure attributed to graphic design tends to be quite low.

So to distinguish yourself from the pack, you must cater to your clients uniquely from the rest. Be good to your clients, treat them with the utmost respect, and they will respect you.

With respect comes repeat business.

Free Ways for Entrepreneurs to Network

In browsing through the internet today, I stumbled across a great resource for discovering groups of people with common interest who meet, yes, in the real world. While social networking is becoming more and more popular, meeting with someone face-to-face still ranks extremely high, if not appearing on the highest rung on the successful business ladder.

I've complied a short list of best resources for entrepreneurs to network (in no particular order):

1. MEETUP.COM: Meetup Groups meet face-to-face to pursue hobbies, network, get support, make friends, find playgroups or even change the world. What's interesting here is that while you can still meet and chat in a virtual world, the true power here lies with the ability to meet with the people you connect with in a real-world setting. So chances are while you've plugged your services online, you're way ahead of the game when meeting with potential clients at a later date. There's already that sense of familiarity... And yes, very often these group meetings are free.
   
2. LINKEDIN.COM: LinkedIn has been around for several years and has begun porting several features from the more common social community websites. The advantage of LinkedIn is that it's geared to drive more "professional" connections as opposed to social or friendship liaisons. LinkedIn also has a Q&A feature which lets you position yourself as an "expert" in your field depending on the number of questions you answer from the public and of course the quality of your answer. The trick is to always leave a link to your website as part of your signature. The disadvantage of LinkedIn is its lack of a portfolio feature, so if you're in a creative field, it difficult to directly expose your work.
   
3. FACEBOOK.COM: The most popular kid in school, Facebook provides a means of uploading and displaying our portfolio within a dedicated company group to which many of our contacts have willingly joined. As a result of our continued perserverance and belief in social marketing (and quite frankly, one of the best "free" forms of networking available to us), we've managed to connect with people that helped us secure projects with clients we would not have normally had the opportunity to work for -- case in point, SoftImage and Bell Canada.
   
4. BLOGGING: Red Dream Studios has a company blog, yes. It's used to expose what's going on at our company and showcase new designs as they are released, but to also educate about design and web practices, and how to use social media marketing to expose your company digitally throughout cyberspace. I think the real power of blogging isn't in the blog per se, but connecting it through various portals that index and scour blogs for relevant content such as Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. By building communities who are "fans" of what you blog about, you inherently increase your relevance in the online world, and therefore that of your company's offerings.
   
5. BEHANCE.NET: Behance is portfolio/networking site for creatives. While there are others out there, this is one of the more ingenious ones. Not only can you expose your creative portfolio here, but it's also a warehouse of tips, tricks, links, and lets you collaborate on projects with other creative gurus around the world.
   
6. YOUR OWN WEBSITE: I hesitated about putting this one in because you typically have to pay a little for the server space to run a website, but it's of course a primary way to get your business known to the public. In short, if you're not on the web in this respect, there's very little hope that your business will succeed.
   
7. CLASSIFIED ADS: I find this a last resort to soliciting business because it's a little altruistic in my opinion. The most obvious choice here is to post a free ad on Craigslist in trying to promote your service offering even though it's a more ommon practice to ask for something on Craigslist.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's a few good ones to get you started. If you have any success stories you'd like to share, please feel free to comment.

Visit my Meetup Profile here.
Visit my LinkedIn Profile here.
Visit my Facebook Group here.
Visit my Behance.net Profile here.

Flaming Hot Rod Text for Rez Rides

Ever since my fascination with Star Trek as a wee lad, I've wanted to be on TV. I was just discussing this with my lifelong friend turned Hollywood director, Michael Greenspan. When we were in elementary school, we did a lot of role-playing together and we're convinced it set things in motion for him to end up in film school and me doing my shtick in video production and editing.

While I knew my path would never lead me to appear physically on TV as an actor, I had the pleasure of witnessing a logo I designed appear as part of the title sequence for the second season of Rez Rides, a Quebec production that airs weekly on the APTN network. It was quite a thrill!

For the second season, the original logo (also designed at Red Dream Studios) was revamped to give it a classic hot rod treatment -- flaming tracer stipes painted over a hard, red glossy body. In fact, two versions of the logo were created -- the first was a pitted, mottled and rusted steel gray version, complete with spot welds, which after a digital painting, sanding, and buffing, transitions into the final version of the logo, the premise being, "bring your rusted crappy car into Mad Mohawk's autobody shop and walk away with a killer set of wheels." The transition effects were created by our partner, Rev13 Films.

The first pass of the logo showing Rez Rides in a "before" condition.

Creating the logo was actually straightforward. The basis of the logo is the word "Rez Rides" written in the font "NiseHotRod" upon which various textures of flame decals were applied and masked around the letters. The flames themselves are also font-based, letting us easily scale up our design to conform to an HD resolution, the format in which the show is produced. The rest of the look is achieved simply by using Photoshop's own built-in style effects, although to get the proper highlighting and texturing, mutiple copies of the logo layers were assembled and composited using different transfer modes to get the final result.

The second pass of the logo showing Rez Rides in an "after" condition.