Live Discussion – Debbie Murphy on Design

Transcription – Aviation Branding and Design with Debbie Murphy

Paula Williams: Cool. Well, yeah, I really appreciate you spending some time with us because you are the best designer that I know that is actually working in an aviation company with a brand and a design and everything else that you built from the ground up. That is a rare thing I think these days, especially nowadays with all the acquisitions and other crazy stuff going on.

Debbie Murphy: Yeah. I sort of have like a complex, like my actual job title is vice president of marketing and digital strategy, but I really serve as the art director and brand manager too. I mean, it’s interesting when I thought about how most people work, where they’ll hire a designer or I actually have to think up what we’re going to do and then make it happen.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Yeah.

Paula: Like big companies, like Wells Fargo, I used to work for them. They had an entire branding department and anybody that was hired, went to half a day of what they called Brand Camp, they were kind of making fun of the whole brand camp idea, but you’d have to go for half a day, no matter what your job was, whether you were a teller or whatever, you’d have to go to brand camp and learn, these are the ways you can use our brand. These are the ways you can refer to our products and services. These is all…

Debbie:That’s a good idea, actually.

Paula: Yeah. And nobody does that in aviation. I mean, it’s not nearly as disciplined as it is in other industries, as you mentioned, that’s…

Debbie: Well, if you want any people who might be doing our material or interacting with, remember us, our brands of a valuable asset.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Really, should…

Paula: Oh yeah, you’ve got a company that is geez, I want to say 50 years old. Is it old…

Debbie: It’s 29 years old.

Paula: Twenty nine years old.

Debbie: Twenty nine. But my dad, Tom Crowell Sr. founded, it had been in the business since 60s.

Paula: Right. So you’ve got this amazing brand equity from all of these stories and all of this stuff that’s happened and all of that needs to be visually represented by a symbol. This is not a small thing, right. Maybe you can tell us the story of how you got involved with that and how that started for you. That’s I’m sure…

Debbie: The company was founded in 1993. And my mom who is also a designer, big surprise designed the logo, the original logo.

Paula: Oh, okay.

Debbie: The logo has changed and it needed to change when we all went digital.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Original format didn’t really work and you needed more contrast and it needed to show up better online. So it evolved into the logo that we currently have. Clearly you can see the history.

Paula: I love seeing like the evolution of like the coke logo from the 1920s to the present day and somebody…

Debbie: I actually have it.

Paula: Oh, you do?

Debbie: How fun. Yes.

Paula: Cool.

Debbie: Because the original was just part of the history.

Paula: Oh yeah, absolutely. That is a wonderful thing and, as you mentioned, the simpler it is. And this is something that people need to take into account working with clients that want to throw this and that, and the other thing, and, “Oh, we need to portray this and we need an eagle and a mountain and a sunrise.” All this in our logo the more you put in there, the harder it is.

Debbie: Less people know what it is. Yeah.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: They don’t recognize it.

Paula: Exactly. Your logo really symbolizes the whole simplicity of like apple. It just has one thing and everybody knows exactly what it is and there’s no… You can recognize it in multiple iterations because it is so simple. You could put different colors on it.

Debbie: Right. And it’s also like, who are our clients? There’s quite a lot of people who buy and sell jets that are big corporations and they have big branding their corporations have branding and it’s just like your logo speaks to your client base.

Paula: Exactly.

Debbie: I don’t just look for inspiration in other aviation companies, but who may be buying from us.

Paula: Yeah. In fact just recently I looked up, like color palettes for different companies and the higher end the company is usually the more restrained and simple their color palette is. And I know that’s something that you’ve done quite a bit with and you look at your logo, it’s just two colors really, other than black and well, black, white and red is really it.

Debbie: It got tricky. We put a gray gradient in it.

Debbie: In the icon. That’s the only other color.

Paula: Right. Exactly. No, that’s very, very cool. That’s an interesting thing.

Debbie: Yeah, I do have alternate colors that I use in the artwork. There’s like colors of sky colors of aircraft, like silver, like the things that you would associate with being flying basically.

Paula: Yeah. That’s cool. And I’ve seen some companies like Chase Aviation. They will make like a 4th of July version of their logo where they’ve got like stars and stripes and things kind of animated through their logo. And they do a Christmas one where they have sparkles and things and…

Debbie: That’s kind of fun.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie:  I’ve never thought about doing that.

Paula: Right. But the simpler, your logo is the easier it is to…

Debbie: Right.

Paula: … do things like that. So that’s kind of cool. Hey, Mark. Good to see you.

Debbie: Hello.

Mark: How you doing?

Debbie: Nice to see you.

Paula: Yeah.

Mark: How do everybody doing?

Debbie: Good.

Paula: Great. Yeah. Debbie’s talking about design today. Xo we were talking about Jet Brokers logo and where it came from and her mom, actually designed it, which is really, really cool.

Debbie: The original, yeah.

Paula: Yeah. And then through the different eras of making it more digitally versatile, and other things like that.

Debbie: It just didn’t fit, at some point when you started in the 80s.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Your graphics did not fit in properly in where you needed to put it in a website.

Paula: Yeah. Right.

Debbie: Or like all the places like you needed an icon on a social media or, so all that had to be invented.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: To work properly.

Paula: Exactly. And I really like the fact that you were talking about, it’s really designed to mimic some of the demographics of your target market, their high end luxury brands and things. So you’re following some of the elements of that as well. So how do you go about, and I know you’ve put together a really cool little set of notes to help some of us who are not designers get from point A to point B? How to define what you’re wanting in a design project and how to get from here to there?

Debbie: I think the first step is you need to know what your company is. You need to know yourself, you need to know your company’s story.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Before you make any visual stuff, you need to be able, it’s like a little longer than your elevator pitch. Like, what is your company’s story? Like, why are you in business? Just have something to work with.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Then you’ll figure out what kind of project you want to do. But I guess you have to start again, even back again, you need to know what your brand is. You need to define your brand.

Paula: Right. Exactly. Because a logo is just a symbol, if it doesn’t symbolize anything, if there’s nothing behind it, it’s kind of empty.

Debbie: Right.

Paula: If there’s no story there, right.

Debbie: It’s easier to make the logo if you know what your story is.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Because otherwise, you’re like, oh, what color should I use? Oh, what about this shape? And it’s much harder to, like grab some, find the right thing, and if your story and then that sort of associates with feeling in color and who your clients might be, and it just that makes it simpler.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: It’s also a good idea to see what other people and other companies that inspire you look like.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Your competitors or even just people that you know, their companies didn’t inspire you that maybe not in your particular field.

Paula: Right. So some of the best artists that we’ve worked with, I think have that ability to kind of draw out what is this story? What does this company mean to you? Why did you put this together? How long has it been in business? Who are the key players? What problem does it solve? Who does it serve? All of those questions really.

Debbie: Right.

Paula: If they’re not asking you those questions, then maybe you don’t have the right designer, right.

Debbie: I think you probably need to put together a design brief. If you haven’t worked somebody before so that you have it spelled out, so they understand what your brand is and what colors you want. If you have something that you want to restrain them, so it looks like your brand in a specific way, you should spell that out and then they know what to expect from you and you know what to expect from them.

Paula: Exactly. So you talk about like a visual brand guide, and I know, like Wells Fargo had like a manual that was a three ring binder.

Debbie: I love it those.

Paula: Yeah. That was their style there.

Debbie: I actually collect some of the old ones. I have like for NASA, there’s a great one for NASA. I have their original logo and branding. And like the New York City subway, the system.

Paula: Oh, wow.

Debbie: Yeah. Like there’s just some amazing.

Paula: Yeah. And so those are brand guides and the things that are in there are things, like, when and how to use the logo? What are the different variations of the logo? Do you have a black and white version? Do you have a four color version? Do you have all of those things, how much space does there need to be or?

Debbie: Space is really important. When you were dealing with aviation, which is like a luxury brand, you need to have more space. Don’t take the space up. It needs to have some openness, some air.

Paula: Yeah, absolutely. And then what else goes into a brand guide? I think, fonts most people have two or three fonts that are their primary…

Debbie: Right.

Paula: … fonts for their brand.

Debbie: Colors.

Paula: Colors. Right. And the hex values of the colors so that they come out the same all the time. Hopefully. [call cutting-out]. What else.

Debbie: Yeah. What else do we have in there? Just also I think even not. So even if you’re not going to supply just a brand guide, you should supply things that inspire you, that you want your stuff to look like, but look like.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie It’s really like this, like this direction or like this set of ideas, then it helps, especially a visual person understand where you, what you want.

Paula: Exactly. and one thing that we do recommend, especially for startups and, people without a huge budget is find a brand that serves the same audience as you. That is in maybe a different, like Harley Davidson, if you’re an aircraft part manufacturer or something like that. So somebody that doesn’t compete with you.

Debbie: That’s cool that you really like it, right.

Paula: That serves the same audience as you, and then copy some of their brand elements because you want to serve the same audience. And obviously they have the resources to have done all of this research. And so you could do worse than saying, okay. Harley Davidson has this amount of spacing and they’re using these particular fonts and some of these things, we could do something similar not to copy them, but at least we know what works for them so we can provide some of those. So, yeah. Great idea to do that brand guide and again, if you can’t do your own and borrow someone’s or start with somebody’s and revise it, right?

Debbie: Yeah. And you also may learn you most maybe you be inspired by it that you would may not have thought of using an alternate typeface or however, the color schemes the same way.

Paula: Exactly. Love that. And then that’s the visual brand guide, and then you talk about the products, project specifications, and Hey Ali, good to see you. Glad you…

Ali: Hello. Nice to see you.

Mark: Thank you.

Paula: Right. And sharing examples from examples that you like, like we’ve talked about that’s so much easier than saying, I want something that is inspiring and glossy and adjective, adjective, and…

Debbie: If nobody knows what that means.

Paula: Exactly.

Debbie: I think the biggest thing I wanted to say about working with a designer, if you haven’t done it a lot is, it’s a two way, it’s a communication. You have to communicate what you want and then help evaluate how that worked out. And you have like a feedback loop.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: To really get where you want to go to work well with somebody, you have to have a good feedback loop.

Paula: Right. Exactly. I mean, the neat thing about job brokers is you are the feedback loop, you are…

Debbie: I have some people that I work with that.

Paula: Okay.

Debbie: I listen to them. They don’t really give me design ideas too much, but I definitely make things that they need.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: All the time.

Paula: Yeah. They provide the business need, like you make it look like what they need and you are also well, you’re the designer, you’re the editor, you’re the brand police. You’re the whole nine yards.

Debbie: Yes.

Paula: Cool.

Debbie: I’m the only non-sales person.

Paula: Right. Okay. Fantastic.

Debbie: It’s a fun job. I like it.

Paula: Yeah, and when you talk about like the project specifications, and I’m going to include these in the notes for this episode so that people can see it well.

Debbie: Well, this is, like I say, if you’re doing social media they have to [speech cutting out] as you know, they need to be sized certain size to work, they’re not all the same. And especially if you’re doing print design, I’ve done a lot of magazine advertising. Those are very specific how they need to be set up.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: You need something that specific, then you need to give them down to the millimeter, the tiny amounts what it needs to be.

Paula: Right. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to share some of the things that we talked about yesterday, because I think they are amazing, some of the ways that you use, the media differently, as you are going through this. So if we look at your LinkedIn, as an example this is jet brokers, LinkedIn at the moment, and the posts here are very different from your… Oops. I’m sorry.

Debbie: Yeah.

Paula: Let me go back. I clicked the Linkedln instead of clicking the post.

Debbie: Yeah. That one’s just a link.

Paula: Yeah. That one is just a link, but you use this medium very differently than you use the other media. So here, you’ve got the neat little worlds as a bullet points. You’ve got a phone number, you’ve got a link to something and you’re using a video here to convey more information in the same space that you would on another media. And then if we look at your… I think is the same post on your Instagram.

Debbie: Instagram.

Paula:  You’re using a Carousell instead of a video.

Debbie: Because that works better on Instagram.

Paula: Right. Exactly.

Debbie: It’s the same artwork. It’s just, I’ve put one through in Adobe rush and made a short video. And this one, I just used the square graphics.

Paula: Exactly. And then we look at the same thing and let me find that on Twitter. I think that was here somewhere. Right. And then here, you’re using the video as well, because that’s works best on Twitter. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about your workflow because this is a lot of craftsmanship that goes into this.

Debbie: It doesn’t take that long. The first thing I make are the square graphics.

Debbie: Where we get the listing when I make the original brochures and the webpages.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I use Adobe illustrator and I just have set up square art boards.

Paula: Oh, okay.

Debbie: I just put them in there and I can save them all at once. Then I just use them, I try not to be boring.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: If we have the plane for sale, I try to make something. I don’t want to sit, share the same exact thing.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Repeatedly.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: It is the same thing, but it’s, it looks a little different, so that’s sort of why I do that. And sometimes I’ll use Canva, but I like the way this works for these photos.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: That’s why I did that.

Paula: Yeah. That makes sense. And I think we were talking yesterday about how those square graphics, you create the square graphics in Canva and then you use them in different ways, you can save them off as a video from Canva, you can save them off as a Carousell from Canva.

Debbie: Or GIF.

Paula: Exactly. Or GIF. Right. And do you rewrite your captions and your hashtags and things like that for each media? Or do you [crosstalk].

Debbie: I have them all saved in text, in a text document. I will adjust them in each one.

Paula: Oh, you do? Okay.

Debbie: I adjust that. I check them out, make sure they, I don’t have always the same amount of hashtags. Sometimes I take out some of the words, it just depends.

Paula: Right. That makes sense. Cool. I love that. And another thing that you do that I think is really fantastic. And not very many people in aviation do this. I know they do this in some of the more retail Instagram accounts and things like that is you have some of these Tableau where you’ve got like these three paints that make up this aircraft across your Instagram feed. And it’s just so interesting, when you’re just scrolling through and you run into that and you go, okay, here’s the front, middle and back of a citation.

Debbie: I do that at the same time I make the square graphics, I just set up it kind of fun. I think it’s entertaining.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I get enough hits from it. It’s worth doing every once in a while.

Paula: Right. Exactly. And we had talked about how some people do like their entire profile. All 9 or 12 images as a single Tableau or a single story or a single composition, but [crosstalk].

Debbie: It might be good if you had some big thing that you were announcing. You had some reason to make that big of a splash with it.

Paula: Right. And maybe had 12 different…

Debbie: Yeah

Paula: Yeah. 12 different posts. And it really was a subject that warranted all of that, but I love the way you’ve done this. This is a nice composition in the middle of Instagram. So that’s very cool. So if you wanted to maybe share how much time do you spend doing something like this, maybe for your average week or your average, how does that work for you? How do you manage that time? How do you get that done?

Debbie: A lot of the graphics I already have made, so I’m not making them new all the time. I mean, currently, we need a lot of aircraft to sell.

Paula: Yeah. So when people ask me to help them find off market aircraft, then I will make a graphic, like a lot of these aircraft needed.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: They make those pretty often, but I have quite a collection of beautiful landscapes. Like stock photos that I have in a folder and I cut out the plane out of its background and add them to an interesting landscape.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: The text is pretty much the same. Every once in a while, it’s a little different color has to go with the background.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: That could take me, maybe, I don’t know, 20 minutes doesn’t take me very long.

Paula: Okay.

Debbie: Then I post directly because I actually just find, it works easier for me just to do it.

Paula: Yeah. So don’t [crosstalk].

Debbie: … very long either, because I go from one to the other it just goes to have them, all the windows open and just do it all at once.

Paula: Wow. But you don’t use like a…

Debbie: I’m pretty efficient.

Paula: [inaudible] or anything like that. You just…

Debbie: Yeah.

Paula: Create them, send them done. Wow. Okay, cool.

Debbie: I kind of have a plan like through the week I start out the beginning of the week. They figure out, how they did last week. I do evaluate the analytics and see what works and that’s sort of how I figured out that the Carousell work better.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: In Instagram, but I don’t always need to make one, so I don’t.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I do like to fill in with quotes every once in a while.

Paula: Oh yeah. I love these. These are really cool.

Debbie: I just made that today. I changed our style. I had a different style in the quote and then I watched some of our competitors. I look at what everyone’s doing, who we could be with and if I like something, some style or something I’ll eventually adjust mine.

Paula: Yeah, exactly. And I know I was mystified until you told me how you find the original signatures to some of these famous people. That’s amazing.

Debbie: Well, it’s really, they’re all online. if you just look for how we use signature in Google and just hit images, there’s all sorts of them.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: You just use whatever program you have that removes the background and there you are.

Paula: There you are. Right. And I love the way you’ve done these bullet points. Where you have their HQ, this is the person’s…

Debbie: … building.

Paula: … phone number. Yep, exactly.

Debbie: It helps people notice it.

Paula: Also people are just so busy, when they’re scrolling and stuff like that, they’re looking for a phone number. They just see that little red phone and that’s just makes it a thousand times easier for them because you’ve never believe how many times people scroll back and forth over somebody’s feed and never find a phone number or contact information. And that just reduces your chance of making a sale because they can’t find how to contact.

Debbie: But you can’t use bold or other type of font styling. I mean, that’s the only thing you can really do.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Is use emoji and try not to be like, I try not to be obnoxious about it.

Paula: No, it’s not obnoxious. It actually looks really good.

Debbie: It’s just really to help people figure out what they’re looking at.

Paula: Yeah. So it’s kind of the Frank Lloyd Wright form follows function kind of thing. I think so.

Debbie: Right.

Paula: Okay. Cool. All right. So yeah. And then we talked about constructive feedback. Have you ever worked with other artists that. How do you…

Debbie: Oh, I went to art school.

Paula: Yeah, of course.

Debbie: Then I went to school for media studies and that’s between the main thing you learn there is to receive and give constructive feedback. They call it critiques.

Paula: You had to work on projects with other artists. Is that part of that process?

Debbie: Yes. I have a degree under my undergraduate degree in fine art printmaking.

Paula: Oh wow.

Debbie: Sometimes you work with other people, but even, if you don’t work with other people, you end up in a room full of 20 competitive people who all want to talk about what’s good or bad about everybody else’s work.

Paula: Yeah. And everybody says it’s subjective, but there are some rules [crosstalk].

Debbie: There’s some actual technical things that you shouldn’t. And it’s also whether like you need, you have to understand that even if you’re making fine art, you still are working. You still have an audience.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: But do you have an audience? Are you communicating clearly?

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: With an audience. So that’s probably the biggest thing I learned from that besides technical skills, but…

Paula: Yeah. And a thick skin, all that, right.

Debbie: But especially if you’re hiring someone to do something like a website or an ad or even just to do your social media.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: It’s really important to understand that, that’s part of the your interaction.

Paula: Part of the deal. Right. Exactly. When we do a website or any type of design work with people, we expect to go three or four rounds.

Debbie: Right.

Paula: Before they’re happy. And it is not a personal thing at all. In fact, I remember in some of the art classes that I took I had an instructor that was just like, you never, never say I like this, or I don’t like that. Like is not part of your vocabulary in [crosstalk].

Debbie: No, that’s not. That’s not enough.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: Yeah. That’s not descriptive enough.

Paula: Right. It has to be objective. It has to be descriptive. It has to be helpful. All of those things are really, really important and you have to kind of learn a whole new vocabulary in order to…

Debbie: It’s a mindset.

Paula: … to communicate that way. Yeah.

Debbie: Yeah. And you need to try to do it with kindness, because that’s…

Paula: Right. And the last one, I love this. If you love the work and no edits are needed, let them know, don’t just run off and pay them and take their stuff. I mean, that’s…

Debbie: It’s a relationship. And especially if you like working with them, you might want to keep doing that.

Paula: Oh yeah. People just like everybody else. Yes, you finally hit the mark. This is wonderful. Let’s go with it right.

Debbie: Yeah.

Paula: Cool.

Debbie: Then everybody’s happy.

Paula: Yeah. Cool. And then copywriting and proofreading. That is such a good [crosstalk].

Debbie: That’s a big deal. Because I’ve had a lot of problems with that as a designer myself where people weren’t really ready to have the design made.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I used to do websites, lots of websites for people. And it’s like, if you don’t know what you need to say, we need to go back to the…

Paula:  Yeah.

Debbie: Figure out what your story is.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: Like don’t get, you’re not all the way in this part yet.

Paula: See, I was a writer way before I ever was a designer. So for me, copy always comes first. And then the design is second. I don’t know how you feel. What’s your preference.

Debbie: Oh, I need to know my story first.

Paula: Okay. So you’re also a copy first.

Debbie: I write first.

Paula: Okay.

Debbie: Well, I’m a visual person, but I’ve always been both.

Paula: Yeah. Interesting. Well, that’s fantastic. And let your designer get to work, right and give them time. That’s another thing is it’s always great to have the time to go back and forth three or four times to make sure you’ve got the…

Debbie: Right. And sometimes it takes a little time like to come up with an idea or to evaluate what, or to get some inspiration. I mean, we’d rather have them think about it a little more than just do it.

Paula: Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, any famous, last words about design, any famous advice for some of our folks that may or may not be designers or anything else along those lines or?

Debbie: Yeah. It’s not really a mystery it’s a…

Paula: [crosstalk] to be…

Debbie: … everybody can either work with one or you can learn that some tools yourself. It’s it’s fun.

Paula: Right. Mark, did you have any questions for Debbie?

Mark: No. I was just following along lots of good stuff.

Paula: Yeah, exactly. I know. It’s really cool to have the real designer.

Debbie: I like to be playful too. That’s I’d like to entertain my audience.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I like to have fun and I like other people to have fun with us.

Mark: I can see I need to get better.

Paula: Hopefully, they’re fun.

Debbie: Right. I guess, my question would be, how could we improve? And I know we just started doing these. And so I’m always interested in finding out what we can do better. And this is, so I’ll put you on the spot for that. Since I’ve got you here, these holiday templates and things like that what could we do to make these better kilometers…

Debbie: My main recommendation would be to have some more negative space.

Paula: More negative space. Okay.

Debbie: Take the pictures that you have and shrink them up a little bit and have more negative space.

Paula: Ah. Okay.

Debbie: For the text or for whatever.

Paula: Right.

Debbie: That’s what I would do.

Paula: Okay. That’s a good idea. And we’ve been kind of taking up the whole thing with a photograph.

Debbie: But you can still have the photograph, but sometimes you can have the photo. Like I use a lot of skies.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: The reason I use a lot of skies is it gives me a lot of canvas.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: That’s a color and it’s folded with light, but it it’s sort of empty even though it’s just a sky.

Paula: Yeah. Right. So you do have the space there or the…

Debbie: Right.

Paula: But they used to call white space and it’s not white, but it’s space.

Debbie: Right. Yeah.

Paula: Cool. Okay. Yeah. That’s a good idea.

Debbie: What else do you have there? You have every heartbeat’s true. I don’t know about the little…

Paula: The little…

Debbie: Blurbs.

Paula: Okay. Yeah. Too much text and…

Debbie: Too much text.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: That’s for people to put in their to be inspiration for what they’re going to post with it.

Paula: Yeah. Good idea.

Debbie: It’s funny. I actually write what I’m going to post when I’m making the graphic. So it’s like, that’s the other part of the story, but I post with it.

Paula: Kind of like when you’re making a PowerPoint presentation or whatever, I always write all of my slides. And then I remove all of that text from the slides in the speaker notes and replace that with a diagram or a something that usually replaces…

Debbie: Another option that you can do in Canva, is you could make another slide.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: That relates to that and have texts on a blank, some type of blank thing on the next page.

Paula: Yeah. So how [crosstalk].

Debbie: Then save it as a GIF or a small MP4. So your story, that’s one of the things I learned in art school.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: I used to try to do everything in one piece. I’d be like, no, that’s what they’d say. No, that’s a whole series. You need to like make 5 things out of that.

Paula: Yeah. This is a triptych. Yeah, the carousell.

Debbie: That’s why sometimes. Or it could be a GIF or…

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: … a short slideshow.

Paula: All right.

Debbie: Yeah. That’s sometimes in like in Instagram having several graphics that are Carousell actually is better. It’ll get you more hits.

Paula: Right. That’s true.

Debbie: More traffic.

Paula: Yeah. I find it so interesting that the Carousell do better than the videos. And I think it’s because people like to feel like they’re in control of their experience. So they can go to the next slide when they’re ready or they can go back if they miss something, or…

Debbie: We learned that from using the analytics every month.

Paula: So much, right. We look at your analytics.

Debbie: Our competitors, it’s like, “oh, that works. Let’s do that.”

Paula: Right. Let’s do more Carousell because people are interacting with them. And that obviously is a…

Debbie: I highly recommend people do that too.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: Who are in the workshop? Because when you do, if they’re doing Semrush with you. When you look at their competitors, see what your competitors are doing that works, that’s getting more hits.

Paula: Yeah. I know. You’ve taken a lot of inspiration and out done them, usually at their own games.

Debbie: I’m a competitive character.

Paula: There you go. That’s cool.

Debbie: I can’t help it.

Paula: Yep. Love that. Okay, cool. So, yeah.

Debbie: I love the old plane. Is that actually a plane that was [inaudible]

Paula: It was, this is called the Gooney Bird.

Mark: Oh, that’s really nice.

Debbie: I love these old pictures.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: We have air show going on at spirit of St. Louis near my house this weekend.

Paula: Oh, nice.

Debbie: I don’t know which planes they have because I’m going to be going out of town. But a lot of times they have the old war birds from World War II.

Paula: Yeah. Out here they do that as well. They store a lot of them Nevada and Colorado and Utah, because it’s so dry.

Debbie: Yeah.

Paula: So fun me do to see them. That’s nice. Cool. Yeah. Great. Well, I think that’s probably about it for the design conversation list. There’s anything else you want to add?

Debbie: No, it was fun.

Paula: Yeah. No, I really appreciate you taking the time to, it’s nice to learn from an actual trained designer, as opposed to those of us who are just kind of doing it as part of what we do.

Debbie: Well, that’s sort of how I ended up being a designer and I was an artist and then I ended up doing like a marketing fundraising job and then I was directing other designers and then just did it myself.

Paula: Yeah.

Debbie: How I learned to it.

Paula: Yeah. Well, that’s fantastic.

[END]