Clients and Throw Up
Matt D. Smith talks about balancing gym time, family life with four kids, and client work. He responds to viewer comments and shares his approach to content strategy in a casual vlog format.
I'm gonna try to keep these videos pretty low key. I don't want to have to edit a whole bunch of crap. But you know, it's good to get like the occasional day to day. So right now I'm gonna head to the gym. We have arrived. Done with the workout. Is that better? I can't tell. All right, let's look at these comments. Joel Buchelman, glad you're back at it. I'm trying to start the rhythm as well. Thank you, Joel. Bart Ingalls hey. Love your content. I'm a proud member of the AI UX class where I'm curious about is how you take on content strategy for new clients. Bart, thank you. Thank you so much for being in the AIUX course. It means a lot to me that you would take it and stick around and tell me that you love my content. Thank you so much. New content strategy for clients I have a very simple, simple process and that is really just me asking question after question after question after question. I just, I do my own poor man's research by talking to the client about their content. And if it's something that I don't know anything about, I ask even more questions. And so I try to become as much of an expert as I can before I start trying to design anything or to put any content in place. You know, depending on the project, I either like to have a face to face session or several calls or a Slack chat or someone available that I can ask questions to like a lot. Like for the first week or two, depending on how big how long the project is, I just ask a lot of questions and I try to make a content map, same way that I show in the AI UX course. I try to make some sort of content map, whether it's a spreadsheet or an outline. Some way that I can start to get out all of the ingredients that are important for the project. Like same way you would cook a meal. The French have this term called mise en place. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but everything is in its exact place and it's all the ingredients you need to make an exact meal. And I don't like getting started on the design project or making the meal until I know exactly what I'm going to work with. And it really just comes from asking lots of questions. James Renson House Abigail and I want to know how often all four children throw up at one time and how to handle that. We enjoy the silly videos and cool editing, but Obviously, you can't be silly all the time. That's right, James. I can't be silly all the time. Just a little bit of the time. All four kids have not thrown up at the same time. We've probably had one or two throwing up at the same time. And it is as bad of an experience as you would expect it to be. Brandon Houlahan Trying to make time for things has been tough for me lately. I'm glad I'm not the only one. And no, I'm not the only one, man. I have this like looming, like fear slash guilt for most of last year, especially the latter half. Like, oh, I need to be vlogging every day.
I need to sit on email newsletter every day. I gotta be filming it. If I'm filming, I'm not enjoying the moment. And so like, I gotta tweet and I got Instagram postings.
It feels very overwhelming. And this year I'm just trying to let go of anything that feels overwhelming. I'm trying to be less polished and more consistent. All right, David. Or sorry, Dave. Switched careers from accounting to design recently. It was the right choice, but I've got a long way to go. Wife and I are also expecting the first child in a couple months. Ah, man, I feel you. When I had my first kid almost 10 years ago, crazy 4 kids now. I was designing flash websites back in 2006 and really didn't know anything about UX design. I was a trained graphic designer from the University of Georgia, but I didn't know a lot about it. But really I just, I pursued the projects that were interesting. I did a lot of agency contracting and got a lot of UX UX experience and it was actually more information architecture experience. This was back before UX was a. Was a buzz acronym and actually most of UX is a lot of IA IA information architecture. It's just the industry buzzword trend. But yeah, man, just there's no secret answer. It's just take care of your family, take care of your wife. Especially with a newborn, your wife's your number one priority and just work hard and keep at it, man. Let me know if there's any questions I can answer along the way. J.R. ingram, any advice on how to balance a newborn and beginning a new family when not accustomed to having children? Yeah, same answer. You just gotta keep rolling with it, man. The biggest piece of advice I can give for balancing a new family, a newborn. Especially if your newborn wakes up in the middle of the night crying. Like my first newborn. Did you just have to try to be as patient as possible. You know what, it's hard to be patient. But the more patient you can be, the less stressed out you'll be and the more you can focus your energy on work. And it's gonna be tough. It's gonna be hard. Having kids and raising a family is one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, but it is also the one of the most rewarding. I would trade absolutely nothing. I would do nothing differently. It is the best. It's hard, but the reward is worth it. As far as clients go, I started off doing a lot of contract work, which evolved into more contract work at agencies, like if someone needed a designer for a project. And then that's kind of snowballed into people finding out I did client work. And then word of mouth started picking up. I started posting a lot more online. I get a decent amount of clients through dribble and just people that I meet at conferences who I've done some projects with. So really just getting out, getting the word out that you're doing work, what kind of work you're looking for. I spent a long time trying to think that I was some special magnet and then if I created the perfect portfolio, everything would just come to me. That's just not how it works. Even nowadays a lot of work does come to my inbox just because I've been doing it for so long. And I've continued to build a big network of clients and people that come back and people that I've kind of talked about working with, but it's never worked out. It still takes work to reach out and to try to always look ahead. You know, it's tough to design a project and then look ahead for your next one or look ahead for your next one. So if you're, if you're doing freelance or you're running your own business, you know, there's a lot of personal finance that factors into it. Personal finance, cash flow forecasting, all that good stuff. But that's a whole different topic. Andy Santana says it would be awesome to see someone of your caliber going through some UI UX tutorial on process design thinking. There's a lot of videos from other designers, mostly beginners, but they're always covering the same stuff, which is mostly ui, not ux. They're making awesome pixel pushing work, but not adopting good UX principles and guidelines. Tools don't matter, but I like Sketch and principle. Oh, by the way, I loved your Adobe XD live stream. Thank you Andy Santana. Thank you for the note. I'm going to work on that. So thank you for the recommendation. Joel, another comment from Joel. Joel, doubling up with a. All right. My battery died there, so there's gonna be a weird cut anyway. Joel, thank you. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. In the past videos you showed a lot of client calls. I'm curious what your typical relationship looks like with a client. Phone calls versus in person versus video calls versus email. That's a good question. It's always different. I always have. I always start things off with at least a phone call. If I can do like a Google Hangouts, like in person, that's even better. If I can be. So here's my ranking. Like at least a phone call, at least. Bare minimum. Second best would be video. Face to face. I can see body language. We can smile, we can joke, we can see each other. And then number, number three. Maybe the best is like an in person, you know, if I can do like a half day, full day kind of session planning strategy, that is the best. You know, I just, I think of every project, every client project, kind of like a relationship. And. And not even kind of like a relationship. It is a relationship. So if you think about your best friend or your wife or your husband or your significant other, whatever you have, if you have actual face time, that is better quality time where you get to learn what they need and what they don't. Hello there. Hello. So I hope that answers Your question. Oxygen 3000. Yes, you were the first to comment, but there was no question, so I'm going to disregard it. Thanks for this little mini Q and A. I wasn't planning on really doing that for my second vlog of 2017, but that's what I did. And thank you for watching and I will see you next week. And now a word for my wife. Hello.
