Work Your Way | Project Management: Concept.vu Review

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One of the toughest things for me as a freelancer is the amount of time I spend managing client feedback. Often there is more than one person that I am speaking to, they have meetings with each other, separately with me, and we often spend a lot of time re-hashing the same feedback and discussions multiple times. If I was the boss of the world, things would be more streamlined, but as it turns out, I'm not, and client feedback and project management can be time consuming and messy.

Have you ever worked at a job (any job) where you feel like you spend more time emailing, explaining and repeating yourself than actually working? Yep. Me too. As a freelancer, it's up to me to manage my time as best as I can and try to minimise the time spent on admin, so I can spend my valuable hours on designing rather than emailing.

When Concept.vu contacted me to do a review of their new platform, they definitely caught my attention! I signed up and gave it a test run. You can use Concept.vu to share audio, video and images with clients, which is awesome for me, since I do a lot of video work. The interface is really simple and intuitive, there's no fancy menus or complicated systems to figure out. To share your work with a client, you just:

1. drag and drop (or upload) your work
2. add overall comments
3. annotate comments directly on a specific part of the image
4. designate one client as the bossman (i.e. the approval fairy)
5. share with your client(s)

The Concept.vu interface is clean and easy to use.
You can see where the approval process is at a glance.

For the sake of research, I pretended to be my own client (hey, a girl can dream, right?) just to see what the process is like from the client side as well. It's really easy, actually. The client receives an email with a password to access the project (no account setup required!) They just log in, look at your notes and then add their feedback. Again, the client can add annotations to specific spots on the image, or they can add overall comments. Each time a comment is added/amended, you get notified, so you know when the client has done their thing. No more back and forth asking where the approval is at. Once everyone is happy, the designated approval fairy simply clicks the big green "Approve" button and you'll receive an email to let you know it's good to go.

Another great feature of Concept.vu is that you can add multiple versions of the same file to a project. You can address the feedback and upload another image as a new version, keeping all notes and versions in a handy dropdown menu (together) for future reference.

I've been using Concept.vu for a couple of weeks now and I'm loving it. I can see it being a really useful tool to keep projects running smoothly and (hopefully) removing a whole lot of email thread-searching for feedback and client review notes.

If you want to try it out, you can get a free trial for 30 days. After that, there are a variety of options from the Freeloader Plan right up to the Agency Plan for companies with 50 active projects going (phew, glad that's not me!)

Have you ever used a project management system like this? I'd love to hear your experience. If you don't use a project management system, what are your tips for handling client feedback, deadlines and communication?

Full disclosure:
Concept.vu has provided me with a 6 month plan in order to trial and review their product. As always, all opinions and words are my own (including approval-fairy™) and not influenced in any way.

Kitty
xo

Creative Workspace Inspiration

inspiring office space from Design Love Fest

Welcome to my new series "Work Your Way". It's all about inspiring each other and sharing knowledge to help us all work better and smarter. Since I started working from home, I've been thinking of ways to optimize my workspace. It's been a little haphazard as I've been based all over the place, from various offices to my own desk. I'm now on a 2 month contract working from home, so it's about time I organised my workspace properly! I've been peeping at some beautiful creative spaces online and dreaming about what I can concoct at home.

The most important things about you home workspace are:

• Comfort - making sure you have a proper chair that won't send you to the chiropractor every few weeks! I'm even considering setting up a standing desk. It's the way of the future
• Light - I'm a night owl so I am not great at this one. But making sure you have adequate light for the task at hand. While natural light is ideal, adequate soft lighting is also good.
• Space - Ideally I need a spot for my laptop, extra monitor (a must for animation! The laptop screen is way too small), Wacom tablet and a notepad. It's important to have all of your everyday tools at hand, easily accesible but not cluttering up your space.
• Storage - I'm sure like most of you, I do way too many things. Even for a single job I might need to draw and scan storyboards, characters or lettering. I might need to set up a little photo studio, cut out paper, fabric, and many more things! To keep my workspace pared down to the everyday essentials, I need a good storage system for extra stationary, fabric and other supplies. Easily accessible, but tidy and out of the way when not in use.
• Inspiration - staring at a white wall will probably squash any creative ideas you might have had. Create an inspiration board, where you can pin anything you collect for inspiration, photos, magazine clippings and business cards. Sometimes the greatest ideas sprout from an unexpected glimpse at your collection of tidbits.

Here's some more beautiful working environments for you to enjoy. I'd love to know your tips on having a successful space to work from, six months in and I'm starting to know what I want (and need!)

1 // Remodelista ◆ 2 // source unknown

(please let me know if you have the source)

1 // Style Files ◆ 2 // source unknown

(please let me know if you have the source) 

1 // Truck Furniture, Osaka ◆ 2 // 79 Ideas

Kitty

xo

Photo A Day #101 Success

Wow! I've surpassed 100 photo a days! It's a good way for you guys to know, I have officially reached my 101st day of blogging! How exciting is that? Now that I feel a little more sure of what I'm doing, and since I've had so many new readers in the past month or so, I thought I'd do a post this week, like a monthly recap, but for the whole 3 months. Just in case you missed something ;)

Today I attended the Etsy Success forum (part of the Vivid Festival) in Sydney, which was a full, exciting and tiring day! I learned a whole lot about selling on Etsy and a whole lot of things that can be applied to pretty much any creative challenge. I'll be sharing some of the top secret things I learned on the blog soon, they deserve their own post, and I need to compile my phone-book sized swathe of notes into something more digestible! I also met a bunch of lovely people, so if they are reading - hi! It was wonderful to meet so many creative and motivated lovelies in one spot.

I love this picture and haven't done ANYTHING in photoshop. The venue had all these cherry blossom fairy light trees and this one came out just right :)

I'll leave you with a quote that Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy shared with us today, as I felt it was quite poignant, not (necessarily) for selling on Esty, but just for living life! I seem to have been thinking about this idea a lot lately, so here goes:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, "Man in the Arena" Speech given April 23, 1910

How good is Teddy? I love that last line, life is all about doing, even if you fail or make a mistake, at least you've lived :)

Kitty
xo