McCormack Joinery

Contributed by Darren Wall, creative director at London-based Wallzo.

McCormack Joinery is a London-based furniture workshop. They have worked primarily on bespoke commissions, producing custom furniture and cabinetry for corporate and private clients. Soon to expand to sell their own products, they wanted a bold and extremely minimal identity comprised of a simple, powerful marque.

The logo is an abstracted M, the inspiration for which comes from a desk they designed with distinctive angled corners.

The stationery uses a matt grey foil on Cyclus offset stock. The edges of the business cards are edged with the company’s signature yellow. Print work by Generation Press.

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View more identity work on the Wallzo website, and follow Wallzo on Twitter.

Micro vs Macro: Using “Success Factors” To Manage Your Team

Every creative leader faces the challenge of building and managing a team. Finding the right folks is half the battle. After you find them, it is your responsibility to manage the team. Great management happens on both a “micro” level and a “macro” level.

Micro-management – not the notoriously negative “micromanagement,” but rather what I call the MICRO aspect of management – is all about the day-to-day management that keeps the team on track.
 
A great MICRO manager asks questions like: 

• What are the deadlines for a particular project?
• How do we measure progress (and are we making progress)?
• Is there sufficient feedback exchange?
• How do we promote more accountability within the team?

But what about the MACRO part of management? Beyond your day-to-day role as a manager, you must also consider each person's career trajectory.
 
A great MACRO manager asks questions like: 

• What skills does each employee want/need to develop?
• What are each person’s career aspirations?
• How will each person’s role develop over the coming years?
• Does each member of the team feel happy and fully utilized?

As you can see, the MICRO and MACRO perspectives of management are quite different. But they are equally important.
 
Our challenge as managers is that we have an inherent bias for the MICRO side. Our operational obsession with near-term progress and great performance at any given moment often inhibits our MACRO perspective. As a result, we may lose people or fail to push our colleagues to their greatest potential. 
 
So what's the secret to great MACRO management? Defining and then reinforcing “success factors.”
 
“Success factors” are the specific attributes for each person to be successful in his/her job. For example, a great “Office Manager” is (1) extremely organized, (2) has a great attention to detail, (3) understands the operations of the business, and (4) is comfortable working with different personalities. These four attributes are success factors.

A great MACRO manager states these success factors up front to someone hired for such a job. And then, over time, would consistently reinforce them – and support their development – going forward.
 
Everyone on your team should know (and agree) on the “success factors” for their role. When you check in periodically with folks on your team, you should restate the success factors and discuss what each person is doing to develop them over time. Industry conferences, workshops, and continuing education all lend themselves to addressing one’s success factors.

Rather than obsess over day-to-day performance, consider your team’s success factors on a consistent basis. By doing so, you will develop one of your own success factors - your capacity to MACRO manage!
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How Do You Manage Your Team?
Do you struggle with devoting enough energy to MACRO management? Do you use success factors, or an alternative approach?

Project: Design a Poster Promoting Alternative Holiday Gifts

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This holiday season, you will be spending a lot of money on gifts for your family and friends, and they will be spending a lot of money on you. What if you used some of that money to help people in the developing world? During the holidays, Mercy Corps offers people a chance to give gifts, like using $70 to buy a goat for a farmer in Zimbabwe, $33 to purchase crickets for an entrepreneur in Indonesia, or $125 to refurbish a classroom in Somalia. To help promote this kind of gift giving, Mercy Corps is asking the GOOD readership to design a poster to help promote the idea. The money that could go to these alternative holiday gifts could improve lives and, in some small way, change the world. Your design of a compelling poster could help accomplish that. Design, at its finest, has a history of driving social change. We hope you can continue in that tradition.

the OBJECTIVE
Create a poster promoting alternative gift giving.

the ASSIGNMENT
We're looking for a well-designed piece that encourages people to give during the holidays, and also expresses the impact that contributing some of these gifts to the developing world would have. We want to see something that might make someone change their minds about how they are going to spend their money during the holidays, because they can see the impact that their gift might have. You can do this with text, with information design, or with both. It's up to you.

the REQUIREMENTS
Submissions are due by midnight Pacific time on December 14, 2010. Please make your submissions 578 pixels wide by 900 pixels tall, and no larger than 5 megabytes. We’ll post all submissions here on December 15, 2010. Email your submissions to projects [at] goodinc.com. The winning entries will be selected by GOOD and Mercy Corps and winners will be announced December 17, featured on our homepage, and printed in the next issue of GOOD. We’ll send GOOD T-shirts and a free subscription (or gift subscription) to the winners. The winner will also receive a copy of The Mercy Corps Collection: Images From the Field, a collection of photographs documenting Mercy Corps's field work.

RESEARCH and INSPIRATION

Mercy Corps gift site has all the gift options and information about why giving should be so important at the holidays.

These Mercy Corps videos are also good examples of the impact these gifts can have.

The Cheaper Show no. 9

poster and invitation
art direction by Chris Allen

The concept of The Cheaper Show is simple: 200 multi-disciplined international artists presenting 400 pieces of art, each priced at $200 for one night only. Working Format interpreted the existing brand designed by Chris Allen to produce the promotional materials for the 2010 edition. Posters were blitzed through the city in a way that made the identifiable black-on-yellow impossible to avoid. This paved the way for an attendance for the event that surpassed all previous editions.

UNIT EDITIONS: A NEW DIRECTION

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Published By: Thomas 

Yesterday, design publisher Unit Editions launched a brand new website. With the launch came a beautiful selection of new products including several posters, Design/Research 03: ThreeSix and the long awaited Unit 02 book ‘Supergraphics’. The website takes on a new colour scheme and format, that creates further emphasis on the product and makes for a smoother more refined user experience than its predecessor.

Beautiful publications and  shiny websites aside, an interesting new blog post was added, simply titled ‘Unit Editions: A new direction’…

‘This new website marks a change of direction for Unit Editions. We are still committed to producing high quality books on graphic design and visual culture. But in recognition of the changing conditions within bookselling – Amazon discounts that are great for book buyers but fatal for small publishers; the demise of the traditional bookshop; the rise of e-publishing – we are working towards building a new publishing model for the internet age. This means two main changes: 

– our books, posters and papers will no longer be available through conventional bookshops (physical or online). They will only be available from this website

– we are investigating and experimenting with electronic publishing formats

It is our belief that although the seismic changes in publishing represent dangers, they also throw up opportunities. Five years ago, Unit Editions would not have been possible without substantial investment. Yet now, thanks to the networking channels that exist online, it is possible for a small publishing “unit” to launch, survive and even, in a small way, thrive.’

We here at Process cannot help to feel a little bit excited by this. As a small independent publisher ourselves, whilst we have had a relatively smooth road and currently do not deal with distribution of traditional hardcover books, we are certainly familiar with the politics and complications of publication distribution.

It is refreshing to see that Unit Editions have taken their thinking and concept of the ‘hybrid’ publishing platform to the next level. After reading several articles in last few months aboutAmazon bullying small publishers, this announcement has brought big smiles to our faces. Although I’m sure many readers will miss being able to pickup Unit Editions publications in their favourite bookstore, I think it is a small price to pay for an overall giant step in a new (and better) direction. It is decisions like these that are leading the way for small publishers, who are forced to re-think conventional methods in the ‘internet’ age. Put simply; a decision like this takes balls, and on that Unit Editions, we congratulate you.