That billboard you saw on your way to work today was magical. It made you relinquish all thoughts and switch your focus to its messaging. The colors, the images, the thoughtfully placed logo and, of course, the website link you had to visit as soon as you got into the office … after reading this blog entry.
It’s a crazy thing, this advertising world. Your thoughts are at the fingertips of the whimsically creative who, often times, obsess over the placement of that logo, or the weight of the scrupulously chosen font.
We have a term here at TJA that describes a state of mind for designers and their ability to get lost in a project; the creative canyon. Although it was introduced to communicate the immense amount of overage spent on a job, what if that canyon was filled with pollution, blocking all from entering the REM stage of creativity? This blockage comes by way of unnecessary distractions that keep the designer from completing the main objective they were hired to do.
Enter, the admin team.
In addition to creating a thousand ways to say thank you in email responses to clients, the general description for a Traffic Coordinator is the almighty manager of timelines. However, I like to think of it as a Happiness Coordinator: The Scheduler of Fun. Do you want a Grumpy Gus visiting your office to learn about your brand, only so they can go back to their agency, draft a timeline, worry about budgets and get lost in other unnecessary business details?
The billboard you saw didn’t just appear because someone put together some awesome artwork and sent an email. The stagehands behind the scenes were busy drafting proposals, setting timelines, assigning hours, gathering assets, communicating with clients and trafficking that billboard to the publication.
As an agency grows, the importance of a well developed admin team is significant in producing work that not only represents the clients, but the agency and designer, as well. Genuinely creative and purposeful work can only be done if the designer has the time necessary to venture into that canyon – hopefully just looking over the railing most of the time. With a strong admin team, an agency can run fluidly, allowing the designers to design and keeping the accountant sane.
Now continue sipping your coffee, go to that billboard website and ponder its genius.
Oh, and how that website got there, well, that’s an entirely different story … at the bottom of a very deep canyon.
– Bryan Zavala, Traffic Coordinator
