Growing Thoughts

Sales people have a roadmap of the sales process, often called the Sales Funnel. The Sales Funnel is a metaphor for the typical process, from contact with many potential customers to the eventual payment of a single customer. It’s time we designers treat ourselves to our own funnel metaphor:

The Design Funnel.

The Design Funnel doesn’t introduce any new tools. It’s simply a roadmap of when a designer can use which tools to stimulate better work. As a matter of fact, many successful creatives use similar processes on a daily basis.

Here are the steps:

1. Define values and goals
2. Discover moods and metaphors through association
3. Generate ideas and define a concept
4. Create a visual language
5. “Design” it

Between each step comes the same sub-step: Verify that you’re on the right track. Why is most design bad design? Because most designers “jump into the funnel” at step 4 or 5. These are the steps involving “using Photoshop” and other fun, tool-based stuff. The funnel, on the other hand, focuses on the hard mental work involved in designing.

Youtube. Facebook. MySpace.
Flickr. Digg. Wikipedia. Google.

Have you heard of these? The internet has rapidly changed from a two lane highway of information to an organic, ever-changing network of real people sharing their experiences and opinions. With this change comes a dramatic shift in effective internet advertisements. Gone are the days of the supremacy of static, newspaperesque ads.Today, successful marketing campaigns include popular videos on youtube, facebook groups, blogs, and the like. A social web demands social marketing.

Did you know that 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its website? This is true for many brick-and-morter business as well, and it applies to the internet more today than ever. If your brick-and-morter building is clean and well designed, the service is friendly, and the bathrooms are sparkling, your customers will expect that the service is not only trustworth, but just as excellent as the presentation. Studies show that on the internet, a website has between 8 and 10 seconds to impress a potential customer before they will choose to hit the back button. Investing in a beautiful, innovative website can increase the ROI of many businesses several fold.

Create your own “money tree” by selling a product in an electronic format (like an ebook, music, training videos, and more). Your online store can be open 24/7 and can sell your products for you without any intervention. No shipping, no paper, no worries. If you are an expert in an area that would be useful to a given market, a music artist, videographer, photographer, or writer you can join the growing number of successful entrepreneurs making money through digital downloads.