Journal #11

Same old stuff this week – still working with SMI and Ressler. This week I designed another email blast for Ressler Importers. This one was for a very high end chair of theirs. I usually do a couple of designs for them, then see which design they prefer. It can sometimes be difficult to do.

Their style is more formal, older, almost elegant. If I do an email design for them, it typically takes me 3 hours, sometimes longer if I need to make any edits or come up with a completely new design. My typical process is to read the email that they want to send and get the general idea of what they’re trying to sell that week/what they’re trying to promote/etc and get a feel for whatever idea they’re trying to get across to people. They will tell me what chairs they want to use in the email (in case the all item numbers are not listed specifically) and I’ll usually have to first correct the chair color, and make general adjustments to the chair. Then, I’ll look online for inspiration. If they are specifically trying to get across the ‘high end’ style, I’ll look at companies online like Restoration Hardware, maybe Design within Reach, sometimes they’ll promote chairs that are more modern, in which case I’ll look at CB2, maybe Eames online, etc. And other times it’s hard to find inspiration for what they’re selling.

I find that my style is a lot more modern than what they’re looking for – so I do have to curb this to suite their needs. But from time to time I just can’t help it – I push the modern look, they push back wanting to go back to their more detailed, elegant, older look. Geesh, sometimes it’s so hard to conform. 🙂