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The Art of Collaboration
Why collaborate with other like - minded or similar businesses? Because partnerships are good!
Let’s say you are a web coder but not a graphic designer or you are a graphic designer but have no idea how to code or do search engine optimization ( hey that sounds like me!) Why not partner up with someone?
In my graphic design business, I specialize in marketing material for small to medium sized business such as branding and logos, print materials ( brochures, rack cards, business cards etc) as well as social media marketing. My boyfriend and business partner George Gates offers mobile IT support for local businesses but also offers website and emailing host too ( a new service for him!)
Many of his customers have asked about web design and while I am not a web designer, I can create the graphics for the web so why not partner up with someone who can write the code and do the SEO! So over the summer I decided to add website design to my list of services. Sounds like a win win situation to me!
Collaboration can also be something as simple as meeting with your printer and having them suggest how to design your work in order for it to print the best. For example, I once designed a business card that had a border on one side and a bleed ( edge to edge colour) on the other side.
Instead of just telling me the issue, the printer took me back to where it all happened, showed me the equipment, showed me that sometimes in the printing process, the paper does shift ( which means at cutting time, the border would not be evenly spaced) so having the correctly sized border or even no border at all worked better in the printing world. ( he suggested a bleed on both sides would have work better on that particular design project)
I had simply designed the card to make it look good and never thought how difficult the design may be to print so I really appreciated the printer not only explaining but showing the process to me.
I feel the art of collaboration is about uniting necessary skills in order to get the job done but it also can create a new way of thinking or even educating yourself or someone on your team. This could lead to strong creative ventures and I feel it’s one thing to definitely try!
I found this great read as inspiration for this blog. The article is a few years old but does get its point across. Happy reading!