[Music] [James Barnard] Hello, Adobe MAX London online viewers. Thank you for watching. If you don't know me, my name is James Barnard, and I run a logo design studio all the way from Australia. Buckle up, let's go. This is me, working as a designer in the publishing industry in the UK, before finally figuring out, at the age of 35, what I wanted to be when I grew up. And that was to start my own company and to work in the field of logo design and visual identity. And I was good enough as CEO to bring in about 4 or 5 leads a week to my business. Within those leads, about 70% of them looked like this. Now, I've since learned that the reason people were lowballing me like this was because I wasn't selling myself well at all. My website didn't show the value of what I could do for your business. On top of this, I made the stupid decision to put my prices on my website, which dried up any and all leads and almost cost me my business. In January 2022, I found out that three of my designs were going to be featured in the best-selling logo design inspiration book called the LogoLounge. It's judged by people like Aaron Draplin, Chris Do, Allan Peters. Those guys are three of my absolute heroes, by the way. So, getting a logo into this book is a huge deal for me anyway. So, giddy with excitement, I turned to social media. Now, up until this point, I'd been on TikTok posting time lapse videos like this for a little while, so I knew that this is the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff that is perfect for this app. So, I did something I don't normally do, turned that camera around and faced it on me. [TikTok user] Tell me something that's an absolute flex to a niche group but means nothing to the majority. [James Barnard] Every year, the LogoLounge publishes a book containing the best logo designs of that year. It's judged by industry professionals, and some of those are my personal heroes, the likes of Nadia Castro and Allan Peters. They go through 40,000 entries and select the best of the best. If you get selected your designs get printed in a book that's used for design inspiration for thousands of designers. You also get a little honors badge that you can put on your portfolio. It looks like this. The book... [Baby crying] [James Barnard] The book is the most respected and bestselling logo design book series in the world. And yesterday I found out that not one, but three of my logos made the cut.
Yay. Yay. So, I posted this to TikTok. Now, let me just highlight some notable elements of this video, because I've pulled this clip apart and dissected it like you wouldn't believe. Number one, the first thing to note is that that is not me at the start of the video. That is TikTok user iwillfightyourdad. And I stitched her video because that is the best hooking question ever. Tell me something that's an absolute flex to a niche group but means nothing to the majority. And I thought that that was the perfect way to share my LogoLounge news. Number two, I'm kind of geeking out in the video and I'm clearly very proud of myself. Number three, I say logo in a British accent, but to the American audience, this sounds like LEGO, which means a shedload of people are thinking that they are about to see some sick LEGO designs. Number four, a cute baby ruins one of my takes, but I left it in anyway. That's my son Lincoln, who was about nine months old at the time. So, those four things combined, thrown together mostly by luck, turns out is the perfect recipe for a viral video. The start of the video has a great hook, not mine, but it works. My explanation of the LogoLounge is what's referred to in the industry as Act 1 - the setup. Act 2 is known as the conflict - my son interrupts me, causing tension and suspense. And Act 3 is the solution or resolution. Yes, I got three designs in - yay. The only thing that was missing was the final piece of the puzzle, which is the call-to-action, which normally sounds like, Follow me for more or Subscribe. Over the next week, the video peaks at 3.1 million views. At the end of that week something else has happened. My inbox is full to the brim with logo design leads. That one video generated something like 70 leads for my business.
So, first lesson learned. A free video has just generated me more leads in a week than the previous six months combined. I need to be doing this more. So, let me ask you this right now. If one of your design posts on social media blew up suddenly today and went super viral, would you be ready for that amount of people to see it? Let's say 15 million people see your video about the Pencil Tool in Adobe Illustrator. If a potential client is watching and maybe they want to work with you, what does that interaction look like? Now, if the answer is no to any of the questions on this list, then you are not ready. Yes, the stars aligned quite a lot of my video. My post went viral, which led to a lot of new business. But there's one thing that wasn't luck and that's that I had my ducks in a row before it happened. Before we start trying to improve our social media presence, we need to be ready for that call.
Now, I'm not going to go into how to structure your portfolio, there are tons of great free resources for that, but the bullet points are show the problem your clients were having, show how you solved that problem and show the specific services you provided. And bonus points if you can show the results your impact had.
So, if you're committed to investing a little time into improving your social media, then what the heck are we going to post about? The title of this talk is Navigating Social Media as a Designer, so I'm going to give you my pillars of content. This is a framework for a designer with an audience that is a mix of other designers and potential clients. So, number one: case studies, by far the most powerful lead generator. This is an example of your work and how you solved a problem for your client. Now, in the days when Instagram was just static posts, or even when carousels first came out, you were boxed into making image-only posts. So, your work had to speak for itself visually. But because once TikTok took off and all the other social profiles had to catch up to try and capture some of that traffic back, video has now become the most prevalent way to share on places like Instagram, Facebook, and now even LinkedIn are promoting video content. Now, this is good news if you're a designer that works in an industry that's a little unsexy. You're not reliant on how good your work looks in the feed. You're reliant on how well you can tell a story. I do a lot of work for some very unsexy businesses like this job for Heath Hill Green, an accountant who specializes in the dental industry. It's about as corporate as you can get. But because I can use video to tell the story of what happened with the client, I can show off my talents in the form of a teachable moment. This is one of the biggest lessons I learned in my career as a graphic designer. This guy messaged me and asked me to redesign his logo for his accountancy firm. They specialize in helping people grow their businesses. His old logo, it was a bit cluttered. It's quite a lot going on. It doesn't scale too well. But most importantly, it didn't work as a core emblem for him to build on. The idea was that this icon would be future proofed, so that Bilal could eventually spin off sister companies. So, we need a core icon that represents his values, and if it's a monogram that uses the initials HHG for Heath Hill Green, then that's a bonus. Now I could have just started designing straight away, working up ideas around integrity and advocacy, a couple of the key words from the briefing form. But I did it. I got on the phone and had a good chat and just listened to him talk to me about his business, how he wants to be perceived, and how he got started - backstory is important. Try not to interrupt them but take relentless notes and only interject when you need clarification on something. During the call, I'm aiming to get a success statement for the project and 4 or 5 nouns that I can use in the design phase - pre-approved - so there're no questions about concepts down the line, and you're not designing using ideas that aren't right for the client. If you can get these before you start working, the design bit will be more about execution rather than conceptualizing. So, I took that success statement and brand nouns and put them at the top of my Illustrator document, where I can see them all the time, and these ground me in the project and stop me trailing off in directions that aren't right for the client. And look, here are the nouns and this one here are the steps which represent some core values: earn, learn and grow, that led me to this ladder concept. And honestly, I knock this design out on a single artboard. I combined the two Hs on top of each other with the G, cutting through the design to add the third step in the middle, and all I had to do was separate the characters a little with a cut here that looks like a shadow. And bingo, bango, bongo - we have a really versatile, bold mark that Bilal can use across his business. And with a little color treatment, it was just a case of changing the type to match to create all of these sister companies. So, yes, a little extra chit-chat there saved me weeks of work. If you want to see more images from the project, head to my website for the case study. So yes, check that out and follow me for more like this, please. [Music] [James Barnard] So, call-to-action at the end there, which gets more people to my site. That video is framed as an educational video for designers. I'm giving away my process along with advice on how to tackle a logo design brief. But my seeker audience, which is any prospective clients watching, have just seen how I like to work, how much I care when it comes to your business and what the whole experience might look like for them if they come on board. If I just shared a static image of this logo, that post would have died a death, and nobody would have seen it. Instead, that video had a couple of hundred thousand views and gave me a bump in leads that week. Number two: software tips. So, this is probably what I'm best known for. And I make content about this in two ways. There is the talking on-camera way where I explain a problem that I face all the time in my software, or there're the no-dialogue bombshell Illustrator tip videos. This style will get you more views because there's no language barrier, but videos like this are actually way harder to pull off. You have to create a hook, a set up, a conflict and a resolution, all without speaking, your timing has to be spot on and bonus points if you can time your actions to an absolute bang all over the track. But if you can get it right, then you can go insanely viral. This one had 14 million views on Instagram alone. Software tips are absolutely for your graphic designer audience, but this kind of content will bolster your follower count, especially when you start banking up videos like this and your page starts to become a resource for designers. Your clients will also see you teaching others, which lends you credibility. Number three: education. Any time you find yourself googling how something works or what Boolean operations actually mean when it comes to the Pathfinder Tools in Adobe Illustrator, start thinking about whether or not this is a teachable moment that you can make into a piece of content. If that interests you, then it'll likely interest a lot of other people too. And the final pillar number four: entertainment, stories and inspiration. These ones I do for fun to inject a bit more personality into my profile. All of this lets people inside of your circle and shows potential clients what you're like as a person. After all, they're going to be dealing with you directly if you work together. So, why not give them just a little taste? Instagram Stories are also great for this kind of behind-the-scenes content, as well. But it's important that you experiment and find your own ideas. Over time, you'll find your voice and then things that you can repeat. And pretty soon you'll have content ideas coming out of your ears. So, it's a good idea to form an idea bank, ideally somewhere where you can access it easily. But if you're really struggling for content ideas, always revert to documenting the problems that you face in your own life. If these are problems for you, then they're happening to other designers too. Now this is the question I probably get asked the most: How on earth do I find the time to churn out so much social media content? The short answer is you need to make time. If you only focus on your own marketing when you need work, you'll fall into this sine wave of despair where your income peaks and troughs as you stop trying to bring in work while you're working for your clients. Instead, if we take the advice of my friend Jamie Brindle, and we invest half of our time on our current clients and half of our time driving new business, then that sine wave starts to flatten and maybe even starts trending upwards. I live my life by this 50-50 rule. My social media is my marketing. It actively drives the business, so I need to make the time to work on it. So, we need to figure out pretty quickly how often you feel comfortable posting each week. There's no right or wrong answer to the question of how often you should be posting two to three times a week is a comfortable amount for me, but that might be way too much for you. Especially as you get to grips with making videos. But pick a schedule that's sustainable and try to stay consistent. We're playing the long game here. I've had clients that have followed me for years before they got in touch, so as much as possible, try to think of your content as a body of work that you're going to add to over time. And if video production is going to be the most consuming part for you, you can watch my live streams on the Adobe Live channel, where I run through how to make my reels from start to finish. Some great time saving tips in that.
Social media etiquette as a designer for those first few weeks. Number one: be yourself. I've met a lot of the big Instagram designers, and almost without exception, they are exactly what they're like on camera. And that's because if they pretend to be a different person for the gram, they would have to maintain that persona constantly, and that would be exhausting and unsustainable. Number two: don't plagiarize other people. If you learn about a cool new software tip from another content creator and you want to share it with the world, do not take the format of the video and make your own word-for-word carbon copy. Instead, take that information and make a piece of content that is relevant to you. How would you use that software tip in your day-to-day life? Your audience will appreciate the storytelling. Number three: give credit where credit is due. If you did learn that tip from someone else, be honest and just give them a shout out. And finally: don't ever talk about AI. It's bad for your mental health. Every time I mention AI, I get dragged over the coals in the comments. Before we wrap up, I just want to touch on a little on happiness. Now you know I'm going to say, apps like Instagram and TikTok are designed to feed on your attention. They want you on that app for as long as possible. Now, I've had multiple videos go over the millions of views mark, and since that first viral TikTok, I'm on the apps all the time, answering comments across different platforms. And as a result, I've experienced some of the negative effects, things like eyestrain, poor sleep quality, posture issues, and a general increase in anxiety.
If that happens to you, you're going to lose motivation. Plus, you might develop a very negative relationship with making content. So, it's important to remember why you're doing it. Karen X talked about this in her keynote at Adobe MAX in 2023, and I was in the audience watching when she said, "One for me, one for the algorithm." When I started chasing that feeling of going viral, I lost sight of why I was doing it in the first place. So, this mantra has been something I've tried to live by ever since. Some videos I make because I know they will do well, and they serve the algorithm. Videos like setting Illustrator tips to popular music and other videos I make because I want to make them, like answering the question: Why can't we use red, green and blue ink on our printer? These types of videos probably won't go viral, but this approach leaves me with so much more fulfillment. And it's these kinds of videos that show your potential clients that you really know your stuff. So, for me, it's not about leaving behind a legacy of nerdy videos, it's about leaving behind a body of work that I'm proud of, and that comes with bigger and more high-profile jobs, which social media has been able to afford me. That way, when I finally do meet my design heroes, I'll be as proud as punch and I can hold my head high. Thanks very much.
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