My grandfather, Kittles Johannes Tronerud, was born in 1870 in Norway – the son of Jorgen Tronerud, school teacher and church singer, and Karen Mathea Tronerud. In 1889 Kittles jumped ship while in port in Melbourne and made his way to Tasmania where he married and raised his first family of five children on the North Coast before being widowed. His naturalisation papers note his profession as Photographer.

Kittles raised his second family of around 10 children – fathering my mother and Aunt Rita in his early 70s to a much younger wife – on King Island where he had much earlier shot extensive photography between 1900 and 1911.

Two attached PDFs [number 1 and number 2] outline Kittle’s family tree from the early 1800s… one brother emigrated to New York.

Mrs Dorothy Crow of Grassy, King Island wrote a letter (attached) to my sister in 1988 describing how her husband had come by Kittles (also known as Joe Tronerud) original camera and glass negatives from a local farmer. Her husband printed 100 of the negatives and they were exhibited on King Island then were exhibited for a further two weeks in the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston. Kittles camera and photographs are now housed in the King Island Museum.

A scan of a 1988 clipping from the King Island newspaper (also attached) shows four of the reproduced glass negatives.

The questions that I would like to address in the coursework relate to the way Kittles, an impoverished professional Photographer with dirt floors and a large family to feed, saw the world around him. I would like to revisit some of his key photographs and investigate the difference or sameness in culture and landscape on King Island exactly one century since some of these shots were taken. This would involve visiting King Island Museum and hunting down familial links in the local community. I shoot with a Nikon D90 DSLR and feel it would be interesting to compare the quality and attributes of those images, historical to contemporary, analogue to digital.

My photography portfolio work is available online at Steven Clark Studio.

Understand Brand

Let’s think about working as a freelance web designer or coder or photographer. All of the characteristics of your product or service create a perception in the mind of customers and industry players. Brand lives not in your company… brand lives in the minds of the people in your market.

One thing freelancers and small businesses (don’t get me started on artists) need to realise is that everything they do affects their brand. If they leave home in grubby track pants with smelly runners versus leaving home looking like a million dollars – it affects perception in their market. The same goes for calling out a dick in a forum or giving a helpful hand to a newbie. It affects their brand.

When you think of the brand NIKE what enters your head? Or Coke? Or Qantas? It’s not the product or the logo exactly… it’s a fuzzy feeling of what people perceive to be NIKE, Coke and Qantas. When you think about Australia Post the important criteria is your perception and not the actual nature of the company.

Understand Brand Equity

But blah-de-blah about the brand stuff. Where the rubber meets the road is in the traction your brand has (positive or negative) in the market. This is brand equity.

The easiest way of thinking about brand equity is to consider what that brand means in real terms in your market’s mind. How useful is it (in a positive or negative sense)? You could say brand equity is the inherent value of the brand that can be built up and lost over time. So it’s not enough to have a brand… you need brand equity, which is the value associated with the brand to your business or its customers.

Why is Brand and Brand Equity Important?

Your logo can be copied. Your business processes can be replicated. Your uniforms, designs, office location, finance… anything physical at all… can be reproduced by your competitors and there is really nothing you can do about it except scream to the feeble courts for IP violation or cry about your misfortune. This brave new world of business is about easy replication on a global scale and access to resources – learn to live with it.

If you have an invaluable employee – or you are an invaluable employee – they could be working at a competitor’s company tomorrow. Skills are transferable and poach-able – look at how effective cross-pollination is in Silicon Valley, probably more so than concentrated venture capital investment.

So you should realise by this point that tangible assets aren’t going to provide you with any sustainable competitive advantage. It’s not enough that you make the best websites in the world… tomorrow 100 people will be as good. The real deal of business is in building brands and developing brand equity. These are the intangible assets.

How hard do you think it is to work out how to replicate strong business relationships or the synergies between people in a company. Or the perception of a competitor’s customer about their service? It’s impossible. Just pick your best competitor and spend a week trying to steal his best customers – it won’t work.

At the end of the day brand and brand equity and other intangible assets are the areas you really need to focus on strategically. They are the only areas that offer the opportunity to achieve long-term competitive advantage in your market.

So stop obsessing on the physical artifacts you create as a business and go build some personal relationships. Make yourself all about authentic brand in the minds of your market.

Hyper-Competition is the Norm

The first thing to accept in a hyper-competitive market is that you can’t ignore the competition – if you don’t want to compete with the Bulgarian web designer then at least accept he’s already competing with you. He wants your customers. Or she, it doesn’t matter.

The second thing to accept in that environment is that hyper-competition is the new state of play everywhere. Everywhere. You no longer operate in a local area, even if your clients come from a local pool… their options are the rest of the world, if they so choose.

Hyper-Competition leads to Three Options

Option A is to crawl up into a ball, don’t compete and die an unnatural death as a business. Sorry but that’s not advisable – but it’s your choice.

Option B is to create a product in a part of the hyper-competitive market where everybody else is grubbing for their rent. The beauty of that is (a) you know that the product has an existing market and (b) you know that people are cashed up and paying. The down side, of course, is that everybody’s slice of the pie is reducing as more competitors flock like seagulls to the guy with the big bag of hot chips.

Option B also means that businesses are innovating in that space like crazy to out-do each other and so if you get to the top of the pack then don’t expect that good looks alone will keep you there. Innovation takes time, effort and money. Option B also probably means ordinary returns on investment over the long-term.

Then you have option C – you research and discover a niche market where you can either (a) serve a small portion of that hyper-competitive market far better than anybody else, or (b) serve a new market, a tiny slice of the pie that nobody has realised is worth the investment and effort. In a niche you are going to get less competition in the short-term.

Hyper-Competition is Inescapable

So we get back to the rub – hyper-competitive markets are inescapable. The moment someone realises you are making decent money they’ll be in there competing and if you haven’t exploited your opportunity to build brand equity they’ll snuff you right out of the picture. Even worse, the big danger is the second-mover behind you has learned from your mistakes.

My advice is simply this… if at all possible as a small business take option C… find a niche and work like crazy to build brand equity and relationships until you own that space. That’s your big friggen’ castle with a moat. The competition will attack. Inevitable. But at least you can win for a while and get ahead.

Oh and don’t be scared to see when the castle is falling… jump in the moat… new idea… new business… back to the options. If your underpants aren’t eating your arse every so often it’s a sign you’re not failing at business enough. Try harder.

Someone recently told me that I shouldn’t waste time on my interest in photography because everyone has high quality photography gear nowdays and there are trillions of available photographs online. What they meant was the market for photography is hyper-competitive. And so what? The market for web design is hyper-competitive, too. The trick is in accepting failure, the role of luck and in pursuing a strategy in the market aligning to A, B or C. How much money did I make by not playing the game last year? Nothing. Zero. Nix.

Contracting versus Consulting

If you’ve read those articles then Jared’s clarification of the hands versus brains metaphor is also essential. Good… now we’re all on the same page, so to speak.

Basically the metaphor runs like this… contractors (the hands) are the guys / girls who get brought in to build stuff – whereas consultants (the brains) are brought into work on strategy. Contractors work with their hands and consultants work with their brains, effectively explaining why contractors generally get paid less than consultants (if you read the final article). Of course, you need to be a master at hands to be good at being the brains. Jared argues the disparity between contractors and consultants is such that you will find it difficult to succeed at both hands and brains simultaneously.

Why you Shouldn’t be Hands and Brains

The first problem is that doing both means you over-or-under charge for one-or-the-other. The second is encapsulated in the following quote:

Doing one basically traps you for that client—once they see you as Hands, you’ll always be Hands to them. Same for Brains. It’s important to make your choice carefully.Jared Spool

This is my Hands versus Brains Situation

I have some experience and knowledge in the field of providing web solutions for clients in the low end of the market. I’ve been a hands guy – freelancer, contractor and in-house web developer. However, my qualifications sheet and Curriculum Vitae have significantly changed my value proposition for clients – I have industry qualifications in web design and web development, a Bachelor of Computing and I am about to graduate with very very strong marks from a Master of Business Administration with a further six month specialisation in Journalism and Media Studies.

I also believe in and practice continuous learning and therefore will continue to up-skill well into the future (on my own dime). For example, I hope to embark part-time next year on a Master of Fine Art and Design postgraduate qualification, rather than pursuing a PhD I’m not really interested in working on at this stage. And if I did another three units part-time I would earn a Master of Marketing (although I may never take that option… but then I just might take it on).So you see my point – am I hands (which I really haven’t been for around two years now)… or am I now overqualified for hands and should become the brains?

I am Probably now Brains Material

Just at a pinch I’d say that hiring me as hands would be a waste of your time and my time… hiring me as brains will get you better bang for your buck. Maybe I should be looking at setting up a consultancy next year, rather than a web design company. But I take Jared’s point… I can’t do or be both services. And to complicate matters, all those clients and employers who have hired me for hands are never going to see me as anything but the hands they previously employed.

I’m left wondering how everyone else thinks about this one – are you happy being hands? Clap if you’re happy OK, I’ll hear you.

That’s right, a whopping 64 and a half million people in the US don’t use the Internet for anything… not even email. That’s 64 million people who more than likely don’t understand the double-click or the idea of hyperlinks or even the navigational significance of using the back button as an escape pod when you find yourself up to your living eyeballs in website crap.

A recent article on Web Axe elicited sarcasm from me several days ago when they wrote that people need to be retrained to use the Internet. Seriously? In the US alone you would need to retrain over 242 million existing practitioners who may or most likely don’t visit your website – PLUS you’ve got to up-skill the unwashed poor of 64 million who have the idea that a mouse belongs in a field.

Excuse my obvious sarcasm, it’s tempting to use em tags to highlight my perverted sense of misdirection on this matter.

Fundamentally web designers suffer from attribution error caused by over-exposure to the Internet. We believe that everyone is online and everyone understands certain metaphors and UI designs… and we believe this because our exposure is saturated with the fuel to support our views. Thus, attribution error is fed through confirmation bias and we come up with a GIGO (Garbage In / Garbage Out) hypothesis – that everyone are just like web designers.

Nothing which we can do in this world will alter the existence of unsophisticated website visitors. Unless, of course, you get right out of the business and stop trying. But what we have to keep in perspective is that our job isn’t to dictate to any-and-all the terms of our relationship…

… Our relationship being that we work for clients to improve their ROI through the brand experienced by their customers…

So stop doing that. Stop demanding and start using finesse to understand the problem. If you’re not sure about the problem here is a clue… 21% of the people in the US don’t access the Internet. Your job just got harder.

The Design Team Meeting

Our manager called the design team – the team leader, an ex-employee turned contractor and myself – into his office. In front of him were five sheets of paper that I had never seen before… they were wireframes for the proposed Port Arthur website redesign being produced by a local premium corporate web design agency.

Usability and Fitt’s Law

This was how the story went. The manager wanted to know why, after DEPHA had spent AUD$30,000 on these 5 pages of wireframes, the external design agency had changed them? That’s a fair question until your mind goes into What-the-Fuck mode and works out that the man just said $30,000 without batting much of an eye. That’s a lot of cabbage, right?

The answer was simple – the new wireframes were more usable and took account of Fitts Law – noting the age of many tourists who visit the historic Port Arthur venue. So I had no problems with the new wireframes. The lead designer – owner of the previous wireframe iteration – was in her usual furious South African response mode. Say no more on that subject… I resigned shortly afterwards.

Appreciate the Bureaucratic Structure

So how did $30,000 get spent on five pages of wireframing by a public sector department? That’s a more than fair question and it drives at the inefficiencies that thrive in that bureaucratic environment. Know the monster you’re dealing with… so they say.

Each meeting racked up a bill for the in-house designers and managers as well as the external design team. Plus the client, another public sector organisation. The public sector thrives on meetings. And meetings and phone calls and iterations are the bread and butter of the premium corporate web design agency… God bless ‘em. I don’t fault the agency in this case because they were just going with the flow.

Wireframes aren’t always the Correct Tool

Which brings me to a valid point about the need for (and effectiveness of) using wireframes in every project. If they are costing your team tens of thousands of dollars to produce then you are either doing something dramatically wrong or they are the wrong tool for the job.

Port Arthur Redesign Launched 2 Years Later

This DEPHA meeting was exactly two years ago and I notice the Port Arthur website has recently achieved its redesign. It’s not quite the same design as those wireframes but there were two years of meetings between then and now and the web team migrated over to the Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment (PIWE). I’d be interested in reading the full cost between DEPHA, PIWE, the external web design agency and the Port Arthur administration.

Because when I hear that we should retrain website consumers to behave in a certain way it starts to smack of the concept that we are the Internet (or the World Wide Web which is an Internet application). But designers aren’t the Internet. And nearly most of everybody on the Internet are not as computer literate as web designers / developers / specialists… most people just use stuff that happens to run on their computer.

Ask people in the street what a browser is (oh yeh that’s been done)… where the Internet resides (not in their bedroom)… well, you get the picture.

So I see it as an arrogant assumption – at best – when someone says that we should retrain users how to use the Internet. That’s absolutely preposterous. That’s placing our professional expectation onto the masses. Isn’t one of the huge and exciting challenges of our industry that we have no control over people’s software / hardware / behaviour?

The problem with all this designer-borne expectation is that people have generally discovered their own uses for things other than that imposed by the designer or developer… don’t argue with me on that one, it’s a given. What was a needle designed for? What else is it used for?

Anyway, like the prostitute said to the midget, “It’s your party once you pay the entrance fee – bring a chair – hey bring a stepladder”… well, you get the direction I’m headed. By all means rail against the practice of text-sizing widgets. I wish you all the best. But at the same time accept that you have zero control over third party behaviour.

Because I don’t see a business model in training people how to use your website properly. Hell, they can bring your website up on a cheap mobile phone and toss it over a waterfall… that’s their prerogative.

That’s an interesting statement both for project managers and aspiring entrepreneurs. A good part of the skill (and probably luck) of successful enterprise is understanding how to distribute the right resources effectively across the problem to achieve successful outcomes. One designer too many spoils the broth… or was that developer? The point is that every person comes with an organisational overhead.

The real cost of adding another team member are their wages, their software/hardware, consumables, their training to get up to speed, the supervision in the training process to avoid catastrophic error or misdirection, and their recruitment… the gamut of everything before they achieve the status of autonomous well-oiled facet of your enterprise. They have to learn the culture, the hierarchy and the new ways of doing business.

The problem obviously becomes the true cost of hiring extra manpower… a cost that may have made you slip further behind the project timeline. So you hire a few new developers… and get those overheads, too… until at a certain point you realise that employing more manpower is sending your project backwards.

I like the baby metaphor because everybody understands it intuitively. We all know that 10 women will still take 9 months to produce that baby, come what may. Our challenge is to impregnate and deliver several babies with several mothers working out just the right foetus-to-mother relationship as we progress. We don’t want an extra mother getting in our way or an extra foetus bouncing around the floor.

If we can encourage all 10 mothers to have healthy babies in 9 months our job was successful. The product ships. The game is on. I’ll see you at the starting post.

My life story is a complicated one and if they were handing out big elephant stamps for large-scale failure I would have had ink up to my eyeballs. There have been many times in my life when I have sat with my head in my hands and wondered why everything turned to shit. Was it me? Was I the defective element?

That’s a very human moment. We all do it. Life has a way of pummeling us in the corner anywhere from the very beginning of the first round to the last second of the fifteenth. Sometimes that pummeling is a bitch slap from a circus clown and other times it comes from a Mike Tyson or a Lennox Lewis. The defining feature of failure is not that we experience it, because failure is inevitable, but in how we rebound from it.

Another point about failure we should accept is that failure is heavily correlated to risk. That is why our fear of failure drives us constantly to seek out mediocrity and safe paying 40 hour week droll jobs. Fear of failure impels us by nature to seek out security and avoid ambiguity.

So how do you succeed in life if you accept that you have a fear of failure that limits your ability to achieve beyond a certain limit?

Here is a recipe that might be worth taking on board. The next time you get knocked down I want you to get up and brush yourself off. Take two more steps. Try one more thing. Make educated decisions that include acceptable risk with the understanding that most of the time you will fail.

The outcome of that recipe is that you will sometimes succeed. Or at least you will maybe sometimes succeed.

The trick is in managing acceptable risk and not being battered when it doesn’t pan out… just say “OK this time it didn’t work and I’ll try another idea.”