Design That Drives Action: Jim MacLeod on the Real Job of Visual Marketing

Jim MacLeod [00:00:00]:
What you want is a web interface that people can go to understand what’s going on, consume what they need to consume, and take the action you want them to take. If you’re just making it beautiful, then you’re not doing your job as a designer.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:11]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing.

Jim MacLeod [00:00:14]:
Sales and business the Business of Marketing.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:18]:
Podcast welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. Both creatives and marketers are on their edges right now, on the edge of their seats right now because of the rapid evolution of AI in the past few years. But the basics can’t be overlooked. In fact, when marketing and creative overlap, there’s a distinct gap where human experience is a huge advantage. Plus, with or without AI, marketers need to understand how important every visual element is in the process of doing business. That’s why I’m so excited to have today’s conversation and share it with you. Joining me today is the author of the visual marketer, Jim McLeod.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:58]:
Hey Jim.

Jim MacLeod [00:00:59]:
Hey. Thanks for having me.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:01]:
I’m looking forward to this because, you know, the creative part of marketing is near, near and dear to me. I was a creator before I was a marketer, and then as I became a marketer and more into the business world, I saw lots of disconnects between the two and misunderstandings between the two and sometimes they didn’t understand the importance of the things you talk about in your book in terms of the visual aspects of marketing. And so usually I don’t get into my guest bios upfront, but in this case it’s really interesting. I want to see or hear from you. How did you end up in this intersection between marketing and creative?

Jim MacLeod [00:01:40]:
I started as a designer and I worked for a bunch of different companies kind of moving through the early part of my career. And then I ended up at a marketing agency for a number of years and then I ended up within another marketing team and then I ended up at a tech company where I was part of this rapidly growing marketing team and there were some brilliant marketers on that team and it got me much more involved and interested in what what was going on. And even from the very beginning, my first job out of school where I was just graphic designer laying out books, I wanted to be part of the marketing team because that was always kind of more interesting to me than just laying things out. So when I had the opportunity to join this marketing team at this tech company and, and when I joined the team, There were about 14 or 15 marketers on the team. There were over 100 when I left the company. So the company grew a lot, and I was able to kind of grow with the company in my responsibilities. And what I found was design and visuals is so much more than, well, every designer knows this. It’s so much more than just making it pretty.

Jim MacLeod [00:02:44]:
It’s about telling a story. It’s about getting the viewer to do and take the actions that you want them to do and tying that into marketing and all the different aspects of marketing really just kind of brought everything home and realized that, okay, yes, I’m a designer, but I’m also a marketer that can do all these other things, you know?

A. Lee Judge [00:03:03]:
The time I got your book and began reading it was about the same week that I interviewed Nancy Harhut about behavioral science. And I started feeling a lot of overlap in behavioral science and visual marketing. So what are your thoughts and what are some things maybe you can mention from your book that lean into the psychology side of how important the visuals are in marketing?

Jim MacLeod [00:03:27]:
Yeah, that was one of the things that I liked the most about when she was on this podcast. I think the title was It’s Not Marketing, It’s Science. I was like, yes, design is a science. Like, it paired perfectly together. And it’s one of the battles that I had to fight early in my career because I had a CMO say to me one time, he’s like, it’s designed. There are no rules. I said, no, in art, there are no rules. In design, there are rules, and there’s a science behind it.

Jim MacLeod [00:03:53]:
There was one time where I was working with the product marketing team and I designed a new white paper layout. And this one product marketer came guns blazing. He hated the layout, thought it was unprofessional, and just. He had a laundry list of things he didn’t like. So we actually sat down. And the funny thing was, he actually went after one of my interns for the design. Um, so the intern and I sat down with him and his boss, who was the VP of product marketing, and I explained the science behind why this layout works better. Because what he was looking for was just 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper with the words going all the way across, just like a regular, you know, like a letter you might send.

Jim MacLeod [00:04:34]:
But so I told him, when was the last time you read a book that was eight and a half by 11? You don’t. Right. Like, books are smaller in width. And the reason is because you’re not supposed to have more than 12 words across in the line. Because what happens is, as people are reading across, they have to carry tree turn back down to read the next line. If they have to go across the full eight and a half by or eight and a half inches, well, you’ve got your quarter margin, so probably eight inches going across. Your eyes will get tired having to go all the way back and then figure out where in that paragraph of text is your next line. So what happens is if you, if you have wide text and a lot of text in a small amount of area, it actually wears out the reader and they get tired and they end up skimming and jumping ahead.

Jim MacLeod [00:05:19]:
If you’re somebody that’s writing this content, you don’t want your information to be skipped because of bad design. So when I walk through and I actually explained the science behind why I laid this document out this way, it made a lot of sense and everyone agreed that that was the direction we wanted to go in.

A. Lee Judge [00:05:34]:
That makes me think of so many things. One is very unexpected. I had a CEO once who insisted everyone. And it’s funny because now we, we pick on it as, as bro writing or whatever for our LinkedIn post. But this is 10, 15 years ago. The CEO insisted on emails having a space between each line and having a return after each line or not having long drawn on sentences without a return. And he really was just implying that it was easier for him to skim and read. I don’t know if it was any design plan, but now we understand.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:06]:
I understand what he was doing. He was making it more skimmable. He was making so he didn’t have to return his eyes back to the end of as much. It just made a lot more sense. And that’s what you kind of explained in, in your design scenario there.

Jim MacLeod [00:06:20]:
Yeah. And you see that on digital, on websites all the time. Right. Bulleted lists all over the place. Because a lot of people, they’re not reading, they’re skimming so they can find what they want and then they’ll read in. It’s kind of the way that we almost, it’s almost a human way of double clicking. So we kind of skim it, see what we’re looking for. Okay, this is interesting.

Jim MacLeod [00:06:39]:
And now I’ll actually read these bullets and then if I want to read more, there’s usually a link to read more information otherwise. But people aren’t, you know, think of a standard webpage on any marketing site. You’re not getting paragraphs and walls of text because people just don’t consume content that way.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:55]:
At least hopefully. Hopefully you’re not right. Those who haven’t gotten the note yet? What you said also made me think about this. A phrase that I use often, which is form over function. And I bring that up whenever either. I have a conflict of my creativity versus business, but I think I originally leaned into it when I was managing a marketing team and we had a dotted line to the creative team, and I was redoing our website, and the designer in charge of designing for the website was focused on beauty and amazement. It had no connection to functionality. And what happened was our website that was, you know, had decent speed, it had good.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:41]:
It was working, it was closing, it was getting business, and it had nice rankings for SEO. When they redesigned it, everything tanked. The user experience was horrible, but. Well, no, let me back up. The user experience was good, but the business output was horrible. SEO tanked. And every question, whenever I question the design team, they say, oh, isn’t this cool? Like, look at. Look at what this does when you go to the web page.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:09]:
This picture does this, and you mouse over that. Every icon moves when you mouse over it. And bang, wiz all this stuff. I realized at that point this was a designer who was so beholden to the creativity and the art that they would not lean into or give up anything for the purpose of the business. And I wrote an article about that time. Now, I don’t know if my listeners know I used to be a dj. And so the article was something like, you know, stop DJing for the DJ. And I kind of bent it to say, you know, stop creating for the creator.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:44]:
Because I remember one time in my career when I was. I had a little bit of popularity in the Atlanta area as a DJ, and other DJs certainly knew me. I remember walking into a club one time, and the club was packed, dance floor, people were dancing. The DJ saw me come in. Now, this is a DJ who sees a dj. He looks up to walk into the room. Suddenly, this DJ began doing too much. He began scratching and mixing and cutting everything.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:12]:
And the dance floor stopped. Like, what the hell are you doing? Right? He began deejaying for the DJ and not for his audience. And I saw that happen with creators, and whether it be designers or, you know, you know, artists, they began creating art for other artists instead of for their audience. So what do you say to someone who’s on a creative team who needs to understand how they fit into the business?

Jim MacLeod [00:09:40]:
You nailed the word perfectly when you called it art, because it is art. It’s just something that’s evoking emotion and one of the great phrases that I’ve heard is art says something different to everybody. Design says the exact same thing to everybody. And what you’re trying to do.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:58]:
Repeat that one.

Jim MacLeod [00:09:59]:
Yeah, art says something different to everybody. Design says the same thing to everybody. So the thinking behind that is when you look at a piece of art, you’re going to feel something, you’re going to think something, and it’s going to be unique to you because you see yourself in the art or the art reflects something back at you. With design, design has a job to do. Design is solving a problem. And in the, in business use cases, the designer needs to design something so that the viewer takes the action or consumes the information that they want that the business wants them to take. And the thinking behind this is you need, you know, the business needs certain things to happen and looking cool and winning awards is not usually what that business needs. The business needs revenue and you back it up like, okay, well how do we get to there? And it all starts with kind of that first, you know, web interface for example.

Jim MacLeod [00:10:59]:
And so what you want is a web interface that people can go to understand what’s going on, consume what they need to consume and take the action you want them to take. If you’re just making it beautiful, then you’re not doing your job as a designer.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:12]:
So let’s get down to some nuts and bolts here. I want to talk tools for a minute, especially considering how things have changed in the past year or two with AI and everything. Now I’m a die hard Adobe user, been using Adobe since before some of the tools were even owned by Adobe. So today I remember giving up Photoshop for most tasks for Canva the past year or two we begin using things like Cap Cut and other things for some editing where we still use Premiere for the serious stuff. So what’s your take on, I mean, using the Pro software? Like where there’s a line, right? There’s got to be a line. Tell me, do you think there is a line between where some of these prosumer softwares stop and where there’s still a need for the deep professional software that marketers may not be quite used to using?

Jim MacLeod [00:12:06]:
Yeah. So one of the things that there is a big difference between professional tools and consumer grade tools and the areas where you really want to use professional tools and professionals is when it comes to your brand identity, your logo design and any of your top level kind of assets, visual assets and brand assets. The reason for this is you want something that’s going to stand out and you want something that’s going to be unique and ownable. If you are using an AI tool like Midjourney or ChatGPT or even Canva’s AI tools, if it outputs something and you say, yep, this is my new logo, you don’t actually own the copyright on that because if it was generated by AI and a lot of these Canva logos are, then you don’t own it. And the other thing you run into is you don’t know if there’s somebody three towns over that’s selling a similar product, that AI created that exact same logo or very similar logo for them. So what happens is, you know, all of a sudden you’re diluting your brand before you even come to market. And you come out and people are like, oh, I’ve seen that logo before, or that makes me think of the AT&T logo or something. And now you’re already behind the eight ball.

Jim MacLeod [00:13:15]:
You’re already steps behind where you want to be when you’re kind of launching that core brand and visual identity that you want people to see and recognize. So that’s really where you want professional level design work to be done.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:28]:
By the way, if you see the background here, change any. If you’re watching the podcast, it’s because the power just went out and things are shutting down. So you may see the background change as the power begins to shut down. But we’re going to continue the conversation and hopefully get through this before the power goes out. So marketers and sales leaders, if you want to close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash. And I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, Cash the Four Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing and a Supercharged Revenue Machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue the most.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:06]:
Communication, alignment systems and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing engine and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now@aleadjudge.com cash now back to the content. From an agency standpoint, we know that, you know, we have lots of competitors in the market who are using the really consumer level softwares and competing to work against us. But we know that with the caliber of clients we have, there could always be very particular changes that have to be made. Small ones that some of the prepackaged softwares don’t have. For example, there are some trendy transitions for video in cap cut, for example. We can make some really fast stuff with that.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:54]:
But the minute a client says, oh, by the way, can you do this Thing with that, then you’re outside of these, these prepackaged transitions and software and then you need to go into the professional software. There have been amazing advances and this is not visual, this is more audio. I gotta say this, there have been amazing advances in audio in the past couple years that still require us at times to go offline from the AI, from the consumer level software, to go down to the engineer level in the professional software and still do some tweaks. And the same thing goes for visual. So I’m hoping that the marketing teams and the artists and the designers more so the designers, as he said earlier, understand there’s a level where their professionalism is still needed and that the tools that they may have online may not suffice. Right. So I mean, is there a word you’d want to say in terms of learning these tools? What, what do you say about that?

Jim MacLeod [00:15:57]:
There’s a high barrier to entry with a lot of these Adobe level tools and that’s one of the things that’s kind of killing them in some ways. And that’s why you’re starting to see competitors show up with larger suites of products. Canva now has a suite of products. Figma now has a suite of products. These things that just start as a single design tool are now trying to, trying to get in on some of that Adobe, you know, software, big software, big licensing, big ticket items because they know that’s how they’re going to drive revenue and their stock price when they go public.

A. Lee Judge [00:16:32]:
Yeah, I’m thinking that there’s going to be a time and maybe we’re here now, where marketers or designers, creators never use the pro software. So they don’t know what they’re missing. And they don’t, they may think that there is a, is a limitation that this cannot be done. Meanwhile, it can be done just on software they never used before. Like we had an issue last week where one of the cheaper softwares just would not synchronize some audio and video. Just didn’t seem possible. I pull it up in Adobe Premiere and it happened perfectly. Like, what’s going on? What’s the problem here, guys? Why is this not happening? Turns out it was because the other software just couldn’t do it.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:11]:
It wasn’t, it didn’t have 20, 30 years of software under it to recognize and make these kind of changes. So yeah, I do hope those who are coming into the, the, the profession do take the time to pass that bar and get into the deeper stuff.

Jim MacLeod [00:17:29]:
So yeah, I think they, they need to because, you know, if you. If you only know from here to here with the design capabilities and the tools, then there are going to be people over here that actually know the more complex tools. So one of the things that I do, I was recently working on a book cover for somebody, and I started with a sketch on my iPad. I then uploaded that to ChatGPT and said, make this into an illustration. And then I took that illustration, brought it into. Brought it into Photoshop, adjusted some things, then brought that into Adobe Illustrator to start laying out the type and the additional graphics behind it. But if somebody only knows the AI aspects of it, they’re not going to know, oh, I can bring this in and adjust these little colors or expand the background just a little bit in Photoshop using AI or even, like, how to properly adjust type within Illustrator or InDesign. So each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Jim MacLeod [00:18:24]:
But if you only know a small number of tools, you don’t necessarily know that there are better tools out there that can do this job better.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:31]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:19:16]:
In fact, for those, those who are watching, I got my copy right here. The visual Marketer. And so the visual marketer. The marketer’s crash course for creating memorable and effective visuals. So why did you write this book, Jim? And who’s it for?

Jim MacLeod [00:19:31]:
The reason I wrote the book is, it’s one of those things I remember clear as day. I was listening to Marc Shafer’s Known, and it all sudden dawned on me. I’m like, okay, this is an area that I kind of. That I can kind of own in ways that most other people can’t, which is design and marketing, that Venn diagram coming together. And then as I started to kind of plot it out, like, okay, well, what would I want to say about this? All of a sudden I realized that I’ve got this newsletter that I’ve been doing for 99 issues now that talks about how designers are going to need to expand their careers or shift out of design because AI is going to eat a lot of their jobs. You know, as we’ve been saying, it’s not going to eliminate all designers, but if you have a team of 10 designers, you might only need five in the future because AI is going to help automate a lot of this work. So many designers are going to need to go into adjacent fields. So that’s what I was trying to help with.

Jim MacLeod [00:20:23]:
But then as I was crafting the outline for this book, I realized, oh, all that work is going to somebody, right? So it’s now the marketers that are having to take on this, this design work without actually having any of the design knowledge, Right? Because teams are paring down on their designers and just saying, here’s Canva, go figure it out. So what I did is I wrote the book for marketers so they can learn the basics of design and they can create visuals that are actually effective rather than just pretty. Which, you know, Canva is good with some of the, with a lot of the guidelines it puts in, but it’s not going to teach you visual hierarchy, where you want them to look, what order you want them to view in, how people naturally view through documents, which is in a Z, like fashion. And, you know, Canva doesn’t teach that sort of stuff. So if I can teach marketers that those basics, they’re going to be able to create visuals that are much more effective.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:20]:
A few years back, there was a book called Don’t Make Me Think. And the book don’t make me think I remember was on the shelves of web designers everywhere. And I remember getting a copy of it when I was doing web design. And that book to this day still has some standards that I remember and that I think everyone should have had. But today, today the book is the Visual Marketer Jim’s Book. Jim, I thank you for this book because every designer, every marketer who has to create anything for business, for marketer, for marketing, should have this book. If you’re accompanied by this book and put it on the desk of your marketers. The visual marketer.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:58]:
Jim, thanks for joining me. And to the listeners, if you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Gemini and a visual of the book video, the podcast and others are available in the podcast section of Content monster dot com. Catch you next time. Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing Podcast, a show brought to.

Jim MacLeod [00:22:21]:
You by by contentmonsta.com, the producer of B2B digital marketing content show notes can.

A. Lee Judge [00:22:27]:
Be found on contentmonsta.com as well as aleadjudge.com.