“Where are the papers I had on my desk?” was one of the common asked questions at the office, before we started using Trello. Now these papers are inside a free online project management system – available 24/7 from all devises, everywhere. There are dusins of alternatives such as basecamp.com, asana.com etc. but here is why we choose this one.

Reasons to use Trello as a publisher

1. Freedom of placement. We have people in different locations and countries and some working from home some days etc. and therefore the paper archive had it’s limitations.
2. It’s free. We choose Trello for our online system, since it’s free part was important in the beginning, so we could test without costs.
3. Easy-to-use has proven to be more important than first anticipated, since we constantly need to involve new people (and even though they are ‘new’, doesn’t mean they are young and easy adapters).
4. Easy-on-the-eyes sounds like a superficial thing, but it turns out that many archive/update tasks will not be carried out, since we are busy and will rather prioritize something more rewarding. So when the system is easy-on-the-eyes (or fun) it dramatically helps people to do it. Just placing a check mark in a box is fun — more fun than writing ‘ok’ somewhere in an Excel spread sheet field no one else sees. There’s a whole science on motivational incentives / behavior called gamification.

99designs is a website where you can create a profile, create a contest and have designers create your design.

We have been using this service for some years now and have gathered some experience, that we are now sharing with you. So, here is a few suggestions / advice when using 99designs.com

1. Get the brief right from the start

When creating a contest on 99designs, you create a brief (that’s the name they have given the job description). Here you describe what you want and upload pictures for inspiration or use in the design.

I usually count on using 2 hours to do the brief, since the time spend here is saved many times later on. The first few times I ran contests on 99designs, I did the description somewhat fast and with a lot of internal terms and in general the explanation was too flawed. A few hours after I started the contest, the designers started asking questions and I had to explain what I actually meant. So i learned that I could probably set up a contest for a new cover design in 10 minutes, but that would mean that I needed to spend a lot of time later on post-developing the brief / explaining and furthermore. Furthermore, the designers might not even participate if they didn’t get the idea from the first look at the contest.

Publishing is a unique industry in the way that all skills are useful – and necessary to have represented. Creative, structured and technical (ok, let’s call them/us nerdy) people are all needed. In publishing there are so many interesting things to work with. This means that we often through ourselves into too many projects – and get overwhelmed.

To get more bang for the buck (‘buck’ is time in this case), we can outsource. One easy-to-use online service is Fiverr.com. Here you can hire people to do something within their expertise – prices starting at $5.

Tasks we have successfully outsource to Fiverr:

1. Webdesign. Landing page or poster. For example this Power Point / Key note poster to fit into a marketing slide show. I send the text and some guidelines and got this back within a day.

The Internet is constantly providing us with new ways to be more effecient and take advantage of expertise and low prices in other countries.

At Scandinavia Publishing House we have especially used 3 online tools to improve our product development and made it cheaper.

99designs.com

At www.99designs.com you can create a contest and have graphic designers from all over the world bring their proposal to the table. This means that you are no longer dependent on a single internal or external designer to hit the perfect cover design within a reasonable time frame. Now you can describe what you want, post it and have multiple people submit their entry that you can then evaluate and give feedback on. Within 7 days you’ll have a great design for sure. The price for one project (a cover design for instance) starts at US $299.