Blog Archives - Mike Lucas

June 8, 2020 — Comments are off for this post.

How to determine your creative team’s capacity.

Are you ever asked how many hours do you or your team have available to actually take on projects? Or what your true creative team capacity when adding a new team member(s)?

Whether you're an in-house team, a small agency or even just a freelancer, you need to see what capacity your team really has to produce great work that isn't compromising creative integrity.

For me, leading an in-house team, I was more cognizant of this when working on our chargeback model. How many hours we could allocate to different parts of the business was the main challenge - but we had to establish how many hours we had available, to begin with.

Here’s how we came up with the algorithm :

First - Let’s create a list of all employees on the team.

I also like to put a description of their role (i.e., worker, senior, Team leader etc…) I do this because everyone on your team likely has other responsibilities based on their seniority or people leading skills that take away from their billable hours.

Next, using a tool like this one - determine how many working days a year you have. For example, in Canada, for 2020, there will be 252 working days when we remove weekends and statutory holidays.

Workingdays.ca helps quickly identify how many working days in a selected date range.

A screenshot of the homepage of workingdays.ca to help determine how many work days there are in a given year. — Workingdays.ca helps quickly identify how many working days in a selected period of time

Vacation Days

Next - Find out how many vacation days a year each team member gets. If they're different per employee, make sure you keep track of them next to each person in the spreadsheet.

Now we have the total working days for the year by removing vacation days from the total working days in 2020.

Getting to the final results :

With this example, Marc is a senior role with 2 direct reports - he has more admin with people leading roles, along with more proofing work - so he has a bit less capacity than the others.

Tommy is the Creative Director - so he's always in various meetings - but his "billable" hours are only 50% of his time.

Even with these 2 examples, you can see that everyone's actual capacity shifts based on their role. There are also basic things like admin, training, status meetings, small conversations etc. that lead to someone not working 100% of every minute they're in the office. Therefore I give everyone a productive percent score of approximately what percent of their hours as a team member are actually billable.

And if we use the Productive Percent column across everyone's individual hours - We can now truly establish an accurate picture of how many hours your team has available to work on critical, creative projects.

And here's how it all comes together in a single chart:

This exercise can be used for a chargeback model - but also for a variety of other tasks. Like to identify how many billable hours your agency needs to stay profitable or to identify when a brief comes in if your team can still take it on. You can quickly determine if a single project will consume 50% of your team or only 5%.

It’s worth taking a few moments to establish your team’s capacity. If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet, you can download it here.

October 12, 2019 — Comments are off for this post.

When Technology can be Friend or Foe for your creative team…

I'm participating in this year's Henry Stewart Creative Operations event in San Diego and had the opportunity to write an article for them around the good, the bad, and the ugly about how technology can affect your creative team.

I focused the article on Communication, software, metrics as each have key technology components that affect our team on a day-to-day basis.

Have a look at the article on LinkedIn here

I'm curious to see how the article performs - if it seems to resonate, It may signal the start of a new series I could start writing about to help new creatives figure their way around the world of in-house creative work, and even corporate creative work.

See you over on LinkedIn to have a good discussion about it!

February 16, 2016 — Comments are off for this post.

Magnets simplify Mac OSX window management

While doing a bit of usual checking in and updating of my mac in the app store 2 weeks ago, I stumbled on a little app called "Magnet" that promised me some easier window management. Well, holy heck did it ever deliver!This little app moves your active window to specific x-y coordinates on your mac screen with a quick keyboard shortcut! It does everything in %, and uses 25%, 50% or full screen to divy up your screen. You can't customize the sizes or introduce more layouts, it essentially just does 4 quarters, 2 halves or full screen, but it's shown itself super useful so far!

Even if you don't use keyboard shortcuts, there's a little menu bar icon that let's you select where you'd like your window to go as well. It's well worth the $2.79 Canadian!

You can download it here!

August 3, 2015 — Comments are off for this post.

Noel Gallagher in Toronto

So, I'm quite late to the boat on this one, but I thought I'd share a couple of the pix from the 2 nights in Toronto that Noel Gallagher did back in May of 2015.

Here are a couple of my best shots - Taken from a Sony A7 and Sony RX100.

February 8, 2015 — Comments are off for this post.

Fixing (not provided) Google Analytics data error

It's been nearly 8 months since my analytics for Vinyldust.com has been wonky. I'm getting good tracking data in the nature of visits, and time spent, but for a while, my keywords area has simply shown me (not provided).

So tonight, I took it to challenge to figure out why - There's very little in terms of documentation about what might be causing it. Some other blog posts suggest it's due to security settings on the search users end. Well, I realized tonight that my Google code was very old. I'd simply been copy/pasting it for a few versions. I'm hopeful that updating the code is going to solve this issue ... So I'll likely update this post next week to see the outcome.

December 6, 2014 — Comments are off for this post.

Tips on using Fiverr to create an iPhone app

Earlier this year in the summer I had a great idea for a new iPhone app, just after apple announced iOS 8. After deciding if want to make my own app and getting the apple developer account and buying an e-book to get me started, I realized there would be a lot of things to do.

To speed things up and try and have my app out around the same time iOS 8 was going to be released, I decided I'd leverage some extra help. While I used @fancyhands to help do research and find things out, I leveraged Fiverr to actually get some other tasks done.

The biggest and most successful piece was needed extra help coding my app. I'd looked online for freelancers but too many people either wanted to do a revenue sharing deal or barter services - both okay options , nothing against them, but this time I really just wanted someone to help me, and not owe them anything else. Freelancer.com had a bunch of freelancers bid to a rediculous price range from $100-$3000 to build my little utility.

Feeling frustrated, I looked at fiverr's technology area and found @luvieere. He offered 30 mins of coding for $5. After a bit of back and forth - we got started. Working with @luvieere was like a dream come true. Through Fiverr, I found a developer who helped create the best infographic making app for last.fm users. The app logs you in and uses all your personal playback statistics (officially called scrobbles) to create a beautiful infographic.

@luvieere worked back and forth with me in adding features and even a bug fix 2 weeks after launch after getting some feedback from users.

Document I used to share instructions / requested functionality for Lasttrax

As the app was nearly complete - I realized I needed help in a couple other areas of expertise :

Writing PR releases
Distributing said PR release
Seo optimization for my app website (www.lasttraxapp.com)
Social advertising to large base of followers

With the power of Fiverr, I found someone for each of these tasks that helped get the job done nice and quickly.

What's best, they let me really focus on the tasks I really wanted to work on - designing and building the app. Not the boring or tedious seeming tasks that wouldn't help improve my growth.

If you're an just a single person with lots of ambitions, the power of fiverr can really help get your ideas moving fast at little cost to you.

To close, here are my top 3 recommendations to get the most out of your work with someone on fiverr:

Invest in a good markup tool that lets you visually communicate your thoughts up-front so there are no surprises on either end (I used Napkin for OS X)

There's a great deal of gig providers, take a quick look at their feedback - I found it to be all pretty accurate and no surprises!

Don't forget the time it would take you to do the task - if a gig doer asks for another $5 for the change request or for another enhancement, it's likely still totally worth it.

October 13, 2014 — Comments are off for this post.

How I used Fancy Hands to help make my first iOS app

This summer, I undertook a personal project that had been a desire of mine for a long time while of creating my first iOS / iPhone app - Lasttrax for Last.fm

After picking up an ebook to help me actually create an app (designcode.io) and come up with my unique idea, I had everything I needed to get started … or so I thought!

A big chunk is evidently around the actual creation of the app itself, but it became clear early on, to make this work, I’d need to do a lot more than just design & code an app. I’d have to research and market it - and there was bound to be things I didn't know how to do, or would want help doing, so I could focus on the most important bits. This was only a side project after all, and I still had to manage my day-to-day at work. So I came up with a list of all the other things I’d need to get this project out-the-door in a decent amount of time. You’d probably be surprised at how many little things came up along the way!

I asked Fancy Hands to research my idea to make sure there would be an audience for it. More specifically, I asked them to help identify any recent stats of how many Last.fm users there were.

Karishma let me know that as of July 28th, 2014 there were 57.3 Million users. (Good, there is an audience for an app that uses Last.fm! - Maybe not here in North America though!)

I then asked Fancy Hands to help make a grid of some of the more popular iPhone apps that leverage Last.fm - They listed the Name, URL, Company Name, Price, Features, and Reviews/ Stars - This was helpful in determining what my app would do that was different from theirs - and get a gauge of what I could charge for mine.

Lastfm app research for Lasttrax iPhone App

One important part that was really helpful was getting Fancy Hands to find the legal documents I would need so I could have a Non Disclosure Agreement between myself and the freelancer I would be using for some coding help - I was giving my entire project & design (and the entire idea) to him to add some of the trickiest bits of code - so it was important to have him agree to not doing anything with it.

Fancy Hands found me a few different resources and template documents I could fill right in - and they were free!

I then leveraged Fancy Hands on a few different tasks to help research modern, new articles to help setup my marketing plan. I had them get me a list of possible iOS app reviewers. A list of blog posts / articles on cost-effective (almost free, or free) ways to market my new app - there are after all lots of apps out there for mine to cut through.

Lastly - Fancy Hands proof read everything. They reviewed the app website (www.lasttraxapp.com) , they reviewed the App Store description, and even this blog post.

By handing off some of these research / admin tasks, I was able to focus on designing the best info graphics app for Last.fm users in a pretty fast time frame (2 months!) If you’re about to undertake a similar project - maybe Fancy Hands can help.

Give Lasttrax a shot if you're a Last.fm user - Download it here.

October 4, 2014 — Comments are off for this post.

How I made my first app with Designcode.io

While perusing Twitter back in the spring of 2014, I stumbled on a link that brought me to the page for designcode.io. The website looked amazing and promised everything would be included, code, files and videos to help me make my first app. Making my own app after all has been a dream for a while - but I couldn’t think of anything to make that wasn’t already made.

I bought my copy and the next day perused the site for an hour thinking, man,there's so much here, lots of steps, and I don't want to just make another news feed app - surely anyone who buys this book will end up making one too. There will be a sea of news feed apps.

I didn’t begin building or following the book immediately but I did watch the Facebook group and the emails Meng sent out with suggestions and weekly tips And articles which were great.

With great fanfare, iOS 8 was announced with some great new features for developers. Finally, the ability for apps to sorta talk to each other with extensions was really exciting, but I still had no idea what I would create. It didn’t take long for 1Password to show a rough video of how their extension would work which was really awesome to see the first extension come to life.

Finally, two weeks after the announcement I was on the subway home and an idea dawned on me. Earlier in the day, I’d shown a co-worker how much I’d been listening to a band lately (Too much, but so good!). To show him the stats, I had to log in to my Last.fm profile page, scroll down, and show him the charts / graphs that looked a bit clunky and old. “Wouldn’t it be neat to have this on my phone all the time?” I said to myself. A small rush of excitement energized my walk home from the subway station. I checked later in the evening in the app store - While there were many apps that helped you track/scrobble a song, none seemed to be focus on your analytics / playback stats. And there you go, now I had the piece of my puzzle solved. I decided I’d try my hand at building an app that would make an infographic of the music you listen to with your last.fm stats.

Now, there are different points of view on how popular Last.fm still is; many people still use it, but many have moved on to other music discovery platforms. The issue with the new ones, is they don’t all have public API’s yet, and I don’t believe many actually track what you listen to in a big database. I figure, if I’m still using Last.fm, I can’t be alone.

The next thought in my mind was, “Is designcode.io still worth it / will it still help me?” Yes. Absolutely it was. At the core, my app idea was very different from a news reader, but it had the same core principles.

Login with an API
Display results
Allow sharing

The principles were the same, just the API and the data I would show would be different - The book was definitely going to get me going in Sketch, and getting all my assets ready in Xcode which in itself was going to be very helpful.

I used the discount code to pickup a copy of Sketch. I quickly realized it had a fair amount of differences from the usual Adobe products you’d previously used. It felt a bit like it was a hybrid between Illustrator and Photoshop to some extent.

Finally, I sat down with a full day on a Saturday in August to just design in Sketch. I iterated and tried a bunch of things and had made decent progress for a 6 hour day. The next day I tried a few more things and designs and was getting happier with what it was looking like.

Initial design and learnings in Sketch for the first time as I was putting together the home screen. Click to watch animated .gif

Another work week went by and I decided I should spend my next Saturday just building in xCode to move forward and I would tweak the design as I pleased along the way. I started following the steps on how to get my design in Xcode. I won't lie, in some of Meng's videos he was going so quick I had to watch them nearly frame by frame. After a few hours, I had most of the elements in, and animating between view controllers with almost no code at this point. It was really exciting!

The next hurdle was to understand cocoa pods. I found lots of references to it all over but as a complete non-coder, I had no idea how to actually install it. Turns out, I needed Ruby installed on my Mac first, then install cocoa pods, then install the individual pods I would need.

Cocoapods used for Lasttrax

Now I had installed the cocoa pods I would need - The same ones suggested in the book so far, but I also found that there was a Last.fm cocoa pod already made I could leverage for that which was stellar. I added the 1Password cocoa pod next and followed the steps in their instructions and was over the moon when I got it working - and without any error pop ups! I got to work on the login, but after a full day I had more errors then Windows Me on a good day. I had really messed up all this code - or at least had tried plugging things in without declaring them and or not even having the right code. It was clear I had a lot more to learn about Objective C or Swift to make any real progress - but at the end of the day, part of me didn’t want to fully learn a bunch of code. I’m used to seeing web code and have worked lots with css/html / WordPress level php, but I’d never had any interest in becoming a full programmer.

I figured I’d do the following, find someone who codes well, and have them do the real heavy API / Code integration, and leave me to do the smaller things (like adding analytics, design, colour and font settings for typography, and even ensuring that I had everything ready for iPhone 6 & 6Plus in Xcode). This way, I could really focus on the pieces that I’m really good at - design & marketing.

I searched for help within my own circle of Facebook / Twitter followers, but no one was able to help out directly. A few re-tweets on twitter led me to a couple nice people, but as soon as they heard that I might consider adding a fee for the app, the conversation went straight to profit sharing and splitting the app, which didn’t really interest me - I wanted to build something from the ground-up myself without consulting with someone else's thoughts / opinions. I tried looking for a freelancer on a few of the larger sites like freelancer.com without any success. Crazy cost estimates from $100-$1500 and all mostly from people with a wide range of positive and negative reviews. Finally, after some searching, I met @luvieere on fiverr.com - He had lots of good reviews so I gave him a shot.

He worked out great - after a couple weeks he’d fixed all my horrible errors, and had the Last.fm connections working with the cocoa pod and helped me out with the share feature. The week that he worked on this, I took to step back from the app and focus on the next piece I was more than comfortable with - building the website.

I spent a week building www.lasttraxapp.com and ensuring it was responsive and up to my expectations.

After @luvieere sent me back the build he had worked on, It was time for me to come back in, and add another coat of polish. I came back and revised most of the visuals on the homescreen feeling that it was a bit empty and naked with just copy and on white. I got my font setup, and fixed language tweaks all around. I re-exported and added the @3x sizes for the iPhone 6, and dropped in the app Icon and launch image. I followed more steps in designcode.io, including adding Mixpanel analytics so I knew what people would be clicking on and how often within the app.

Before (Left) and After (Left) of the Home View Controller with polish and design

Before (Left) and After (Left) of the Settings View Controller with polish and design

Elements in place for Final build in Xcode with final fonts / design.

I lastly, had to figure out how to submit the app to the app store - the video’s in designcode.io were definitely a bit different since they’re done in xCode 5 vs the new Xcode 6 needed for iOS 8, but I didn’t have any difficulty - they were almost the same steps, just looked a bit different visually.

Apple rejected my app on the first round - simply because I didn’t include a privacy policy since my app required / captured a username/password. I didn’t have to re-submit my binary to fix this though - It was only a meta-data error.

After another day, they sent the app to the app store!

See it in action here!

I didn’t promote the app immediately, choosing to work this weekend to update a few screen shots online to represent the last changes I made in the submission on the website and prepare the social channels on Twitter & Facebook.

My next steps in the coming weeks will be to discuss how I'm going to promote and market the app (and identify tactics that did or did not work)

Let me know what you think of the app, or any questions about the details above on Twitter : @vinyldust

Update : Find out how I used Fancy Hands to help make and promote this app a bit quicker here

October 4, 2014 — Comments are off for this post.

Kasabian in Toronto

On Tuesday, September 30th, Kasabian were in Toronto. What a kick ass show. Their set included several songs from their new album, along with a bunch of favourites, Fire and Underdog were two of my favourites. Check out this clip I took from the balcony!

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#kasabian #fire #toronto #yyz #livemusic #concert

View on Instagram

July 5, 2014 — Comments are off for this post.

Strong Yellow Pages Campaign

Leo Burnett here in Toronto have done a really strong job with their follow up to the 2012 Local Attack Campaign.

They've taken over some key out of home locations to create a really strong message that Yellow Pages can help you find things.

Now, I wont lie, I have not installed the app - and I'm likely not going to - Mostly because the past experiences with the YP have been rather poor. Nonetheless , I think the work and messaging is fun and playful - It's also really smart given how much work / copywriting went into each place, and ensuring the message was exactly right for each placement.

Well done!

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