Please Feed The Animals

BEFORE

Account Service Thursday

The following is the fifth in series of articles written by Josh Copeland for people with careers in account service. This feature will appear every Thursday.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been organizing my past work so that I could showcase it in a portfolio; both online and off.  My first step was recognizing the need to do it and I asked for your advice on where to focus.  My second step was to determine what to include, how many items to share and the order in which to share them.

Now I’m at the next step: taking the polished materials and organizing them into two formats: 1) the book 2) the website.

Preparing “the book” is proving to be a challenge, because I have a number of materials to show and I’m having trouble picking the most important elements.  For example, in order to communicate the complexities of the integrated campaign for my major CPG client I could show the client’s initial brief, our team’s brief, our team’s evolution of creative work and the final product— no less than 7 pages of material. I think I could have materials on-the-ready should potential interviewers ask for them, but I’m not sure.  I feel this way about all of the examples.
I’m leaning towards having one sheet accompanying a final creative product that shows
My key roles
The brief for the project (and the degree to which I prepared it)
Results
Marketing Strategy/Production & Development Lessons

This list was also helped by advice from Amelie, Jim, Mark and Aaron from last week.  I believe the book needs to have simplified materials but I could be wrong.

I also don’t know about the format.  I’ve got a shiny, stainless steel portfolio holder with sleeves to hold materials, but are there some pointers on what it should look like? Having never seen one myself, I don’t know…

Preparing the website is a little clearer mainly because I’ve led website development for a number of clients. I’m basically going to follow my own advice and put my site through the process of an organized redesign.  For that, these are the fundamental steps:
- Define objectives/strategies [done]
- Consider target audiences [done]
- Prepare content [done]
- Information architecture/ user experience [now in progress]
- Put creative elements into place
- Build.. test… launch!

SOON-TO-BE AFTER

I’ve looked at my existing website and as you can see from the graphic, there’s plenty of things I’m doing wrong.  Considering a new design, I’ve looked on the web for some examples that I think are simple, organized and elegant.  One catch: they’re all either designers or developers [no account folks… shocker.]

I’m leaning towards a visual hierarchy like these admirable sites from Jess3: Jesse’s site is primarily housed on one very long page. Less clicks, less reliance on heavy flash usage and clear descriptions are what really impress me here.

Phil Thompson: Phil uses arresting colors (and only two of them) to keep the focus on the content.  I like how he’s created obvious sections on the main page for best work, recent blog articles, client lists and contact info.

Jason Siffring: Jason is very clear about what he does right away.  He focuses on what he did well (website builds) and attributes creative design to other partners.  The content doesn’t feel cluttered, clunky or overly designed. And he’s got client testimonials visible above the examples.

I’ll be considering these elements as I redesign my own site, and I’ll likely have some sample designs I’ll be looking for this group to consider next week.  If you have any other advice on the materials, I’d love to hear it.

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Josh Copeland is a 10-year digital account service veteran with experience managing Whirlpool Corporation, ExxonMobil, Frito-Lay and the Clorox Company. Josh has worked for Tribal DDB, Arc Worldwide and Elevate Studios, and his campaigns have been featured in AdAge, Adweek, OMMA, ad:tech and Creativity Magazine.