Winter is now officially over. Spring has sprung. Rain and thunderstorms mark the coming of warmer weather. Michigan begins to turn green. And my work has taken off at MPHI with much acclaim from both internal and external clients. And I can’t tell you how cool it is to create work that actually matters – like designing the look and feel to a website that connects users to vital information about genetic resources. It’s design that actually improves lives.
Category: Work
Musings on work
Great clients have vision
What makes a great client? They have a vision and can articulate that vision while deferring to your expertise in design to meet their vision. The opposite of these great clients are those who, so to speak, say, “we have no idea what we want.” They are the hardest to please because they don’t have a vision…or if they do they don’t communicate it very well. These “visionless” clients are tough because the designer then needs to start the process of asking questions and trying to decipher the clients’ mind. Its a tough, and oftentimes near-impossible task. Great clients make it easy by providing you with a vision and expectations. It’s so much easier and less guesswork. In the end both the client and the designer end up with a product they can both feel proud of as it meets both’s expectations.
So tell us about your new job…
Michigan Public Health Institute was started by the Michigan State government as a non-profit organization to study and create programs in regards to public health issues. This is good in that MPHI is not government (although it closely works with government) and can easily adapt and change in comparison to typical government bureaucracy. I work in the Interactive Solutions Group (ISG) as a graphic designer. ISG provides technology-aided solutions for information problems (think training and education). Previously ISG and MPHI outsourced all their graphic design. They now want to bring the design in-house to reduce costs, improve information control and to remove “layers” between end clients and the ISG.
So what do I do?
Amazingly enough this graphic design position covers everything thing from web design to print with a healthy dose of multi-media design thrown in. Basically its very wide ranging. What I really love about the position is that I can have a positive influence on something more important (and life helping) then say, the latest annual report. Annual reports are important, but at MPHI I can help with public health issues. That’s pretty cool in my book.