SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Hello folks. Welcome to Creator News Live. I’m Jeff c and you’re not.

[00:00:03] Conor Brown: And I’m Conor Brown, and this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the creator economy and so much more.

[00:00:10] Jeff Sieh: You ever struggled to make your visuals stand out in a crowded feed? Maybe you’ve wondered why some brands instantly grab attention while others fade into the scroll, or maybe you’ve tried designing your own graphics and thought there has gotta be a smarter way to do this. If any of that sounds familiar, you’re gonna wanna stick around for this episode.

[00:00:29] Jeff Sieh: ’cause today we’re, joined by a creative strategist who bridges the world of design and marketing to help brands communicate with clarity and confidence, with decades of experience leading award-winning teams, and shaping how companies show up online. Jim McLeod is here to share how anyone, even non-designers, can use visuals to connect and convert.

[00:00:50] Jeff Sieh: So, sit back, clear your schedule, clear your mind to get ready for this week’s episode of Creator News Live. Jim, thank you so much for being on the show today. I’m so excited for this.

[00:00:58] Jim MacLeod: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:59] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. [00:01:00] So, um, we’re gonna, we’ve been doing this, you guys know I’m kind of a fan of this new ai, so we have also got a theme music.

[00:01:07] Jeff Sieh: I talked about this at, uh, Ecamm. So I’m gonna go ahead and play that right now, and then, uh, Conor will hit the intro. So here we go. There we go. It’s Jim McLoud. We, uh, actually use Suno for that. They’ve come up with a new version, which it’s even better. uh, we’ll, we’ll talk about that a little bit later. But Jim, thank you again for being here.

[00:01:23] Jim MacLeod: That was amazing.

[00:01:24] Conor Brown: You know what, Jeff? We gotta start using that in our marketing for guests. Come on the show. Get your own free soundtrack

[00:01:30] Conor Brown: That’s true. That’s

[00:01:31] Jeff Sieh: true.

[00:01:31] Conor Brown: If you don’t know who Jim is, you should ’cause Jim. Is a designer turned marketer with 25 years of experience across agencies, startups, and billion dollar brands.

[00:01:41] Conor Brown: He’s led creative and digital strategy in tech, higher ed and retail. He’s built award-winning in-house teams and helped companies improve how they show up in the world. He’s also the co-founder and O of EBRs, a brand and digital marketing consultancy. [00:02:00] He’s also the author of the Visual Marketer, A book for marketers and communicators who are suddenly expected to design and want to do it well.

[00:02:09] Conor Brown: Thanks again for being here, Jim. And we were talking a little bit before the show. My Latin, my great Catholic school, Latin taught me that Eris, uh, well, you are a co-founder in C-E-O-C-M-O is Latin four. Intoxicated or comes from the rude, intoxicated, drunk, as the chat knows you are in good company because most of us do indulge in the drink.

[00:02:34] Jeff Sieh: Chris may actually be indulging right now. I’ll just mention Google Plus, and he always takes a drink when I do that. So, uh, we’ve got more people chiming in. But first I wanna do a big shout out to our friends. We’re talking about visual marketing today, and the sponsors of the show is our friends over at Ecamm.

[00:02:47] Jeff Sieh: We find out more about them at Ecamm dot com slash jeff. Use code Jeff 15 to save 15% on your first purchase. But holy cow, can they make your stuff look good online? We can use it to create presentations, all sorts of things. They [00:03:00] also have an amazing community. Ecamm dot com slash Jeff.

[00:03:04] Jeff Sieh: Make sure you guys go check that out. But we’re talking about. The book right now of the Visual Marketer by Jim McLeod. we do have our friends showing up today. Before we get into it, I I wanted to say Doghouse Dog. he’s actually, uh, watching from Boston, just south of Boston. I believe that’s, uh, Kevin Chay, and so I’m, I’m glad to see him there.

[00:03:22] Jeff Sieh: And then Amy Keys, so excited about this topic, so we’re gonna dive into it, Amy. And the first question I have for the actual audience, when you’re scrolling the feed, what kind of visuals makes you stop, right? Like, what is it? Is it the bold colors? Is it faces?

[00:03:38] Jeff Sieh: Is it quotes? Is it something weird or funny? I want to know if you guys kind of, kind of dive into the last time you like stopped and watched an ad or something on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, what made you stop? I wanna know, let us know wherever you’re watching from. But Jim, we’re gonna talk about your book.

[00:03:56] Jeff Sieh: And the first thing I really liked your science of [00:04:00] seeing kind of chapter, What habits, what two habits should a small team or a solepreneur even, do like right after watching the show to align their graphics with how people naturally scan content? ’cause you talked about this a lot in your book. I thought it was really fascinating.

[00:04:16] Jeff Sieh: And so how would you use the, that philosophy to like do a LinkedIn carousel or a YouTube thumbnail? Just talk a little bit about that. the way we actually look at content online.

[00:04:26] Jim MacLeod: It. Yeah. So the reality is we don’t read a whole lot of content, right? Like we scan and then determine where we should stop and read. So what you want to do is make it easy for them to absorb that. If you start putting up giant paragraphs of text, people aren’t going to read that to see if there’s something valuable in there.

[00:04:44] Jim MacLeod: So that’s why you see a lot of websites, a lot of content on LinkedIn or other systems. They’re a lot of bullet points because it’s like, okay, people are just kind of looking for keywords. Is this interesting? Is this entertaining? And then they’ll dive in a little [00:05:00] deeper or they’re looking for visuals that appeal to them.

[00:05:03] Jim MacLeod: And now it’s, it’s tricky ’cause everyone has their own preferences, but in a lot of times, you know, faces are a good way to draw people in. Bolt type is another way. Um, you especially see that when it comes to YouTube thumbnails and, and, and it’s really interesting because YouTube will. It’s great ’cause it’ll you can upload multiple thumbnails and the AI will then tell you which one’s performing best.

[00:05:26] Jim MacLeod: So if you start to look at your analytics and see what’s working that, that’s a good way to see, okay, what is my audience looking for? So understanding that allows you to make your future

[00:05:35] Jim MacLeod: graphics much easier?

[00:05:37] Jeff Sieh: Hmm. So I kind of have two questions to follow up on this, The first one is because you talked about the Z pattern and how we look and, and, and watch, is that just for. Landscape style images, or would you even say for, because all the short form content and all the stuff we’ve got going on, is that still applicable?

[00:05:54] Jeff Sieh: Is it just a, a longer, bigger z Do we still continue to do that on the, the, uh, tall images [00:06:00] or, you know, vertical?

[00:06:01] Jim MacLeod: It, yeah. Yeah, we do, because it’s, it’s just how those of us in the western world have learned how to read. Right. Like we, we start in the upper left hand corner and then work our way through. And if you can design your, your visuals, your video, your webpages, whatever it is to follow that natural inclination, then that will, that will help people absorb it easier.

[00:06:23] Jim MacLeod: Because if you put your big, big headline down to the lower left and then something else, you know, in different places that the, the way you want people to view around your page, if you start breaking people’s natural inclinations for how they wanna read it creates tension and it creates more effort on their part, and they’re more likely just

[00:06:41] Jim MacLeod: to keep scrolling.

[00:06:42] Jeff Sieh: Hmm. One of the things that you gave a great example in the book is a lot of times we want our logo to pop ’cause that’s our brand, da da da. And you and you even showed an example of how you have the text and, and using that same z pattern. You saw the logo on there, but you really had it. Kind of muted and not as important ’cause you don’t want the eye to, [00:07:00] to fight with that.

[00:07:00] Jeff Sieh: And so I really liked, there’s so many great examples in that book. but that was one that really stuck out to me is like, okay, you don’t have to have your logo super bright to keep it on brand.

[00:07:10] Jim MacLeod: Yeah, because you, you need to think, so some, some businesses, obviously their logo carries a lot of brand affinity, but in a lot of cases people are just looking for specific content. So what you want to do if, if they’re just looking for a specific content, you need your headline to jump out more than your logo.

[00:07:28] Jim MacLeod: And so a lot of times it’s creating that visual hierarchy. What do you want them to see first and then to get them to stop scrolling and then they can consume the rest

[00:07:36] Jim MacLeod: of the visual.

[00:07:37] Jeff Sieh: Hmm. All right, last question on this one. Sorry, Conor. It is really fascinating to me because when I, so I cut my teeth in Pinterest, like that was my thing. And you talk about Pinterest a lot in the book, but one of the things that I used to do this for brands is they would have me put their entire catalog on, on Pinterest, and for a while we would like, especially for like outfits or something, we would specifically crop off the [00:08:00] model’s head.

[00:08:01] Jeff Sieh: Because the thought, at least back then is that just like a mannequin doesn’t have a face on it, is that you want those people to see themselves. In that outfit and not so much, you know, comparing themselves with the model or whatever, that has kind of gone away, and that doesn’t really happen, especially on Instagram.

[00:08:17] Jeff Sieh: Is that just a style philosophy that’s gone out of, you know, style and may swing back? Or do you think that was flawed to begin with? That we can imagine ourselves, no matter what, you know, the, the model is or how it’s actually portrayed, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:08:32] Jim MacLeod: It, it is interesting because there, there was a website maybe 10, 15 years ago called She Has No Head,

[00:08:39] Jim MacLeod: and it, it was mostly in the comic book space, but it started to identify just the objectification of women, right? If you’re only showing a woman from the neck down, you know, you’re, you’re kind of taking her, her presence out of And so I think as the world has become more enlightened over time, we’re kind of realizing that like, [00:09:00] oh, that, you know, there’s more to a woman than just her body. So I think what that’s, that could be part of that. But then the other thing that I talk about in the book is the value of faces and drawing people in.

[00:09:11] Jeff Sieh: right

[00:09:12] Jim MacLeod: Because we are trained from the minute we’re born, we need to find safety and faces help indicate whose safety, who’s a safe place and who’s a threat. And so that’s something we learn really on. And it just goes back to like the basic, primal parts of our brain of we need comfort, we need safety, and faces will help indicate that.

[00:09:31] Jim MacLeod: So that’s why we’re drawn to faces whenever we see them.

[00:09:33] Jeff Sieh: Gotcha. I don’t know about this face, but it is safe. Safe space, Conor,

[00:09:38] Conor Brown: I was gonna say, if, if we cut off Jeff’s head to show his bowling shirts off, we’d first just see half of his beard. And that might be more

[00:09:45] Jeff Sieh: would be, that would freaky.

[00:09:47] Jeff Sieh: Yeah.

[00:09:47] Conor Brown: figure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Jim, you, you’ve in your book, you talk about how visuals can be a shortcut to brand recognition, right?

[00:09:55] Conor Brown: So somebody sees a visual, they know it’s in your style, they immediately know, [00:10:00] oh, that’s x, y, Z brand. I think it takes a lot of time to get to that level, right? And it takes a lot of content creation and putting your content out there before people absolutely start recognizing that that visual.

[00:10:15] Conor Brown: Corresponds to that brand, but are there some simple tests or metrics that you can kind of run or see or look at to really understand that your visual system is working, is getting to that point where people are seeing these visuals and they, they understand their brand. Are there metrics and stuff we can kind of look at for that?

[00:10:35] Jim MacLeod: It. Yeah. If you’re doing customer surveys on visuals and graphics, one of the things that you can do is do kind of a, a low resolution, almost pixelated version of your graphics, and does your audience, or do your consumers, are they able to recognize this is you versus this is your competitor versus somebody else.

[00:10:55] Jim MacLeod: So if you reduce it down and, you know, [00:11:00] really kind of get to the, the core message of, of what it is. That will be able to tell you, do my visuals resonate without my logo? I used to work for A CMO years ago who said, if you took the logo off of our slides or content or whatever, would people be able to distinguish this is ours versus this is our competitors. And so that, that drove us to kind of really change, you know, really reevaluate how we were putting these things together because we did want it to be uniquely ours. So then it was more of, okay, just make sure the logo’s on there it is. What’s our typeface? What’s our color? What are kind of the basics of the brand that we need?

[00:11:37] Jim MacLeod: But then it is, okay, can the user still

[00:11:40] Jim MacLeod: tell what that is without the logo?

[00:11:42] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. And the other thing you talked about Pinterest and Instagram, there was a really, and it’s still a problem, but they love to use those scripty fonts, like where you can’t read ’em, like if you shrink ’em down to the size of a phone.

[00:11:54] Jeff Sieh: You can’t, I don’t even know what your logo is, like, it just looks like a scribble on the screen. and I know that’s kind of a [00:12:00] trend in like Pinterest and Instagram and I’ve always told the team like, shrink don’t, you know, it looks different when you have a big wide screen monitor and you’re designing your YouTube thumbnails on Photoshop, but shrink it down and see if you can still read that stuff.

[00:12:11] Jeff Sieh: Like, it’ll be the size on a phone or whatever. So I, I know you talked about that a lot in your book as well, is like making sure it looks and, and testing it. You know, you have a lot of stuff in your book about how to test it in the best way and some the ways to even optimize your funnel. But one of the things you say a lot in your book, you repeat over and over be consistent.

[00:12:32] Jeff Sieh: Like, It’s very important. That’s how people know your brand is like, don’t be swapped. I mean, we’re creatives and we wanna switch stuff out, but we need to be consistent. So where is it safe to be playful without harming recognition? Like, ’cause we’re talking, I know this audience is full of these really creative people.

[00:12:48] Jeff Sieh: It’s a struggle. We’re like, we’re very like, squirrel, go into the next thing. We wanna try this new AI platform or whatever. So when can you help your team or even yourself, like set those guardrails so, it’s not [00:13:00] boring. You can be consistent, but still not be boring.

[00:13:02] Jim MacLeod: Yeah. And that, like you said, that’s the struggle is people want to do new things, new exciting things, but you need that solid visual brand foundation from the start. And you can’t mess with that for a couple years, really. I recommend, you know, two to three years of not straying from, from what you’re doing, but then where you can start to stray is if you have, say, an event you can expand your brand guidelines by, you know, 15, 20% for a particular event.

[00:13:31] Jim MacLeod: Everything related to that event can have this new kind of sub style, but then realize that that sub style ends at the end of that event that then doesn’t go into your next campaign. ” cause what happens is then you start training people, oh, I’ve seen these visuals before and it’s tied to that event. Now that I see this, you know, this banner ad for a webinar, it must be tied to the event.

[00:13:53] Jim MacLeod: And you don’t want to do that because you know, people are consuming these things and learning on a regular basis. So you want to make sure that what you’re [00:14:00] putting out there is always consistent and it’s always clear who it is and you know the baseline of what your brand is. But where you get to be creative is in events or in other kind of one-off use cases.

[00:14:13] Jim MacLeod: You wanna make sure not to do big visual brand shifts without a lot of kind of research and thought put into it. And you don’t wanna be changing it up every two years or whatever, which is always challenging with, you know, short CMO tenures. They wanna come in and they’re like, we need to change this and change this and change this.

[00:14:29] Jim MacLeod: Like, no, we’re just getting to a point of recognition. We need to keep building on it. Right. Like the thing about being, I, I worked for a creative director years ago who said, oh, I’d love to be a designer for Apple. I said, there’s no creativity there whatsoever. It’s basic type on a white or a black box, you know, in one image.

[00:14:48] Jim MacLeod: Like there, you know, but that is Apple and that’s a sign of quality because they’ve stuck to that, that simple visual

[00:14:54] Jim MacLeod: identity.

[00:14:55] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, and like your, your point was like even in Apple, they’re creative in their ads, like the [00:15:00] 1984 ad and then like, even when they’re doing new stuff and the new iPhone stuff, like that icon, that icon that they use for their Apple is always the same at the end, but they have a little bit of fun playing.

[00:15:11] Jeff Sieh: So I think your, your point of like, you can be creative in other ways, but keep your visual branding, you know, like on point. So I think that’s really, really good. and, and we have got some great comments. rich said, we were talking about the scribbly fonts, like he says, like the fonts on live laugh, love throw pillows and kitchen art.

[00:15:25] Jeff Sieh: That’s very, very and then Amy says, ah, boring is good. It’s so hard to convince teams of that. I am often the brand police, no unicorns and glitter if it’s not part of your brand. Yeah. she’s got a very solid brand as well

[00:15:38] Jim MacLeod: Yeah. Canva has, has introduced a lot of the script typography that’s out there. And it’s, it’s tricky ’cause sometimes you’ll look at somebody’s Instagram page and it is just different typefaces and colors and everything on e you know, like there’s no consistency. But you can tell they’re just using whatever new template that Canva produced that they like.

[00:15:59] Jim MacLeod: They’re [00:16:00] putting it out there and, you know, that’s where if you are a Canva user, you know, upgrade to the, the pro plan, have their brand standards, brand guidelines, and then just create things within there. Yes, it feels old. Yes, it feels boring as she said. But the reality is, your, your prospects aren’t consuming every single thing you’re putting out.

[00:16:20] Jim MacLeod: It might be boring to you, but it’s not boring to them. ’cause they’re only seeing one out of every six or seven things that you’re putting out there.

[00:16:25] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And the other thing, I think it’s on the pro plan with Canva is you can upload your own fonts. So what I like to do, if I’m doing something and I’m designing something, is actually go find like a font designer, or you can buy like these specific kind of boutique fonts that you can use that you know a lot of people aren’t using.

[00:16:42] Jeff Sieh: And you can use that and upload that in your brand design in Canva. And, and you also, I just wanna mention this real quick, Conor, before we go onto your question, is that, you talk a little about like getting stuff, designed by designer, like having them build your Canva templates for you and then you can use those to create all your assets and stuff.

[00:16:59] Jeff Sieh: [00:17:00] I thought that’s genius. I’ve been talking about that for a long time. So we’re not talking about getting rid of designers, but we’re using them in the best, the most optimized way we can possible.

[00:17:08] Jim MacLeod: it. Yeah. And I’ve done that for, for different companies and businesses where they don’t wanna hire a full-time designer, but they want those professional looking templates. And so, so I’ll create a whole bunch of custom templates for them, and then they’re able to just move forward with it. So it, it’s one of those interesting things where I know a lot of, designers with the kind of old school mentality of like, well, no, I want that recurring revenue.

[00:17:31] Jim MacLeod: But the reality is a lot of these businesses don’t have that sort of money. So be helpful where you can.

[00:17:36] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Great point.

[00:17:37] Conor Brown: And I think that that also helps build a relationship, right? Like when you give them that they are more inclined to, to come back to you when they do have another project or a need for that verse, they think you’re, you know, just dragging ’em along or, or whatever. But it’s important to stay within those guardrails.

[00:17:52] Conor Brown: So you give them a template and stuff like that. They still have to be consistent and stick with it and not go rogue, like what Amy’s dealing with [00:18:00] all over here. You also talked about a lot the importance of, you know, learning from your competitors, right? Can you kind of through what you think a competitor visual SWAT looks like, especially with, with a Pinterest board and, and using that to kind of get some ideas from, from your competitors.

[00:18:20] Jim MacLeod: Yes. Using Pinterest to create a SWOT analysis can be really helpful because you just go through, find everything that they’re doing, collect it into a board, and then you’ll start to see, you know, okay, are. You know, are they focused on one color? Do they use a lot of product photography? Are they using people?

[00:18:37] Jim MacLeod: Are they using bold fonts and light fonts? And whatever type of typography that they’re using, you can start to see what, what’s working or how they’re using it. And then there are other tools out there that can help you kind of see what’s actually performing well. it’s too bad. There used to be a website called moat.com where you could see everyone’s ads that were out there.

[00:18:57] Jim MacLeod: And, but then they got acquired and they’re not really [00:19:00] used. But one place where you can see how competitors ads are performing is Facebook in the meta ad place. And so you can go in and see, you type in any company and it’ll show you all the ads that have been running for them, and duration and some stats that go along with it. So that’s really kind of interesting to see, okay, what’s performing for them? What do, what do they have running for a long time, right? Because if, if something’s running for a long time, it must be performing well, or they’re not paying any attention. But you want to, you know, the, they, there’s a lot of information out there now that didn’t use to be available to us.

[00:19:33] Jim MacLeod: So, and, and Pinterest is a great way to, to figure out what the white space is. Like where, where are your competitors not covering? What are they not talking about? What are they not using for visuals? And then that kind of gives you some guide guidelines about how you can establish your own visual

[00:19:48] Jim MacLeod: brand.

[00:19:49] Conor Brown: I think that that’s a great thing that you can use like a, an ai like a chat GPT to follow up on as well. You kind of consolidate this information and then you have it help you also find that [00:20:00] white space that you’re not even thinking about. I use that tip,when it comes to looking at competitors’ Facebook ads all the time, and if you really wanna humble yourself, go to Nike and see how many ads they’re running, and you’re like, that’s a different league.

[00:20:13] Conor Brown: I am not,

[00:20:14] Conor Brown: I’m Yeah.

[00:20:14] Conor Brown: not there.

[00:20:15] Jim MacLeod: Yeah. Years ago I used a tool called TrackMaven to, to follow competitors and see what they were doing, just kind of all across the digital ecosystem. And we saw this one ad from one of our competitors taking off. We’re like, oh, what’s going on here? Like, you know, I wanna pay attention to it. Yeah. It was a Peter Dinkle Cisco ad run like during the Super Bowl.

[00:20:35] Jim MacLeod: I’m like, okay. We, we we’re not competing with that at all. So like, we’re just gonna take that one out, you know, like the, we’ll take out the French judges score for that one because it’s throwing off all the

[00:20:45] Jim MacLeod: metrics.

[00:20:47] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Very, very true. and, and I love your idea of going and you, you mentioned in your book Zigging while when other people are Zagging and the whole, the white space thing, I mean, it’s actually kind of why we are doing those goofy little, intro [00:21:00] songs for guests because no one else, I mean, they can now, but most people aren’t doing a custom intro for a guest.

[00:21:08] Jeff Sieh: And so that’s what, so the same way with your visuals, like what can you do? That other people can’t. And how can you expand your space? And you don’t wanna copy people, but there are some places where you can look at your competitors and go, oh, they’re not doing that, and I can, how can I move quicker on that?

[00:21:23] Jeff Sieh: So I thought that that’s another great, section in the book where you, you talk a lot about that. we’ve got some great comments as well. Um, Amy says she, she shut down so many rogue Canva accounts. Yeah. we, I joke in even my presentation, like it used to be like, you could go and say, oh, there’s a Canva template.

[00:21:38] Jeff Sieh: Oh, there’s a Canva template in Pinterest. You could just watch and, and see ’em scroll through. And then Rich says, ’cause he does this in Brandon merch, this is a struggle too. So many wanna print their entire mailing address on a cheap giveaway pin rather than a more thoughtful message on a better, smarter product.

[00:21:55] Jeff Sieh: the other thing I saw somebody was doing was that they were giving out [00:22:00] stuff. But they weren’t putting their logo on it. They were pushing their, their, uh, person, they were sending it TOS logo on it. So, because you get so many stuff with like, oh, here’s like, I, I love Ecamm. I got their Ecamm pin, but what if you sent somebody my, you know, if they sent me my logo on a pin and said, Hey, we love what you’re doing.

[00:22:16] Jeff Sieh: Here’s, you know, we made a couple of these for you. I’ve had that happen a couple times, and that is incredibly effective. So once again, to Jim’s point, Zig when other people are zagging,

[00:22:26] Jim MacLeod: And, and on that topic of Canva, rogue Canva accounts, I worked for this one multi-billion dollar company, and Canva reached out to me and they said, do you know you have 75 individual Canva licenses across company?

[00:22:39] Jeff Sieh: Gosh.

[00:22:40] Jim MacLeod: and I oversaw three different design teams, you know, and the brand design team was one of them.

[00:22:45] Jim MacLeod: And I was like, okay, this is not right. And so they’re basically like, Hey, unify it all set up brand standards, you know, do the pro account for all the users and then you can actually control what they’re putting out there. And, but you know, budget was [00:23:00] gonna be an issue ’cause it was a large company and who do you license and who do you not license?

[00:23:04] Jim MacLeod: But Canva was actually smart to reach out and say, you realize that your own employees are damaging your brand because they’re doing this rogue work and you have no idea what they’re putting out

[00:23:15] Jim MacLeod: there.

[00:23:15] Jeff Sieh: yeah. really it’s just, it’s really interesting with the licensing, they, they can, you can add up some money really quick, even if you’re on a small team. it can add up really quick. so what, this last question I have, like for distinct assets like color, ’cause you talked about like some brands that actually own the color, like Tiffany’s Blue and some stuff like that.

[00:23:34] Jeff Sieh: Like they have the copyright to use it on their packaging and all that. And you can’t make a Tiffany blue box ’cause that’s illegal. but what can small brands do to like. Own a cue practically without like legal headaches or going and trying to copyright a, a Pantone color or something like that. So what can us, as small business owners, solopreneurs do to have that, those like distinctive assets that [00:24:00] are distinctively ours?

[00:24:01] Jim MacLeod: I’d say first and foremost, make sure you’re using that color wherever possible. Even if it’s just kind of a, a simple little line or stroke at the bottom of your banner ad or cover or whatever it is, you know, make sure that color is always there and, and you’re always tying back to it. And then, yeah, use it as often as possible so that people start to associate, okay, when I see this color, it means this company, which means quality.

[00:24:27] Jim MacLeod: a former coworker of mine said that he’s like, we want people to think that when they see our product out of a, a whole rack of, you know, other products that look similar from other vendors. Ours are purple. And we want them to know this is not where the problem is ’cause this is high quality and we don’t have to worry about that one ’cause it’s purple and

[00:24:46] Jim MacLeod: it’s, it’s a good one.

[00:24:48] Jeff Sieh: Got it. So, and you, you’re at my presentation. One of the things I talk about visual improv, and one of them was like, commit a hundred percent. So how important is it, do you think that not only do you need to have all this visual [00:25:00] branding down and you’re, you’re bring, you know, a a design sheet that has all your fonts and all your colors and all that stuff.

[00:25:05] Jeff Sieh: How important is it to love your branding? Because I think a lot of the problems that we talked about earlier is people trying new things is because they, they always think the grass is greener on the other side and they really haven’t fallen in love with their brand. And it’s hard to commit 100% on something if you get bored with it.

[00:25:22] Jeff Sieh: Or it’s gonna, you know, you’re gonna get bored with it after a year. So how do you, I guess, balance following in love with something that you really like and then something that’s very practical and eye-catching.

[00:25:32] Jim MacLeod: you need to think about first and foremost, what works. know, like it’s, it’s not about you, right? You’re not the customer, you’re not the target audience. It’s what they’re looking for. And the, the same company I was just referencing, the purple company, we’d actually worked for a different company, were acquired by the purple company, and so many people that I worked with were like, oh, purple.

[00:25:51] Jim MacLeod: why? You know, like, we’re in technology. Why using purple? But then I, I went to, a big trade show event at the time called Interop, and I looked around and it was like [00:26:00] 70% of the, of the companies there were blue. 25% were red, and 5% were every other color. So I said, okay, this is where we can really stand out if we own purple, really kind of get out there.

[00:26:11] Jim MacLeod: You know, like I’m, I’m not somebody who’s going to wear a lot of purple on a regular basis, but I went all in on it because I’m like, nobody else is here. This is a space we can own with this color.

[00:26:22] Jeff Sieh: Well, one of the things is, is like for, for me, you know, we love the old fashioned like fifties kind of aesthetic, and so we’ve leaned into that really hard and the funny thing is, is people are going. They recognize it in the feed, they recognize, oh, this is Jeff’s ’cause it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s like, you know, it’s classic I guess, or whatever, and people have really enjoyed that.

[00:26:41] Jeff Sieh: So that’s why we’re, we’re leaning into it and we enjoy making it here too. So I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a yes and kind of a thing where you have both of ’em. If you can, it can make it so.

[00:26:49] Jim MacLeod: I, I that recently with my newsletter, my Marketing by design newsletter, where after issue 100, I said, okay, all of my graphics are gonna be cyan, magenta, and yellow. [00:27:00] And so that’s part of my, my big prompt that I have when I’m making my imagery, so that every week when people are scrolling and they see those bright colors, okay, that, that’s this newsletter and I wanna read it because it’s, they already know what’s inside.

[00:27:14] Jim MacLeod: They just need to see that to kind of trigger them to say, Hey, I should stop reading it.

[00:27:18] Jeff Sieh: That’s a great, that’s a great point.

[00:27:20] Conor Brown: I think that that’s, that’s so awesome. But I, I also think, you know, I’ve been in the situation too before where we have a creative director or, or a CMO or something and they’re, oh, I’m just so bored with our, our brand. It, I’m just bored. We need to redesign. You’re like, why? Why do you need to redesign? Do you wanna redesign?

[00:27:39] Conor Brown: Because you look at it every single day and you are bored with it. Boring is good, right? Boring means consistency. Boring means you’re gonna get the same thing every single time, and people take comfort in knowing that verse, you’re changing this, that, and the other. Constantly. That means you’re unpredictable, chaotic, right?

[00:27:59] Conor Brown: [00:28:00] Those types of words gravitate towards those actions that you’re doing. I do think there are some ways to have fun with your own brand, have fun with your own designs, and kind of do it in a short. Sprint, what have you. Amy Keys brings up a great point. She’s like, can we talk about all of the brands doing a green orange thing and jumping on the Taylor Swift bandwagon this month, obviously for her, her new album, the Life of a Showgirl, which I know Jeff has on repeat

[00:28:29] Jeff Sieh: Amy. Not Amy Keys. That’s not her album. You mean Taylor Swift?

[00:28:32] Conor Brown: Taylor Swift album. Taylor Swift album. Taylor Swift album. Yes, yes, yes. But you know, Jim, we’ve seen that, you know, people change up their brand for a month to celebrate a certain cause or, or something like that. What do you say to that? Is that something that if done right, it can be done well? Or is it something that it can also be really, really chaotic and, and un unorganized?

[00:28:54] Jim MacLeod: I think if it’s done right, it can really help things. And the reason is, like I, I wrote about that, [00:29:00] the Taylor Swift Orange phenomenon, and because I, I found a bunch of articles and some people were down on the whole concept. They thought it was, you know, news jacking a little bit too much.

[00:29:10] Jim MacLeod: But the reality is it shows to your audience that you’re willing to have some fun. You’re willing to do something that’s a little bit outside of your, like, this is my corporate thing and this is what I talk about. And it could open you up to a new audience, right? Like if you’re selling, you know, some high tech system.

[00:29:29] Jim MacLeod: You know, and a 15-year-old girl might not know anything about it, and she’s not going to care for a long time, but she might talk about, you know, to her parents or whomever, like, Hey, I saw this thing, I heard you talk about this company a while ago. They just did this Taylor Swift thing, and now that’s a conversation.

[00:29:45] Jim MacLeod: And now indirectly you’re being, your brand’s being mentioned at the dinner table with somebody who could be a potential buyer, and just to get your name in those articles, right? ’cause they’re always the recap articles. It’s, it’s another way to get out there. [00:30:00] And if you are in that target audience, you know, if, if Taylor Swift fans are somebody who might buy your product, then you know it, it creates an affinity there and they might be more likely to buy your coffee or attend your

[00:30:14] Jim MacLeod: school.

[00:30:15] Jeff Sieh: Interesting.

[00:30:16] Conor Brown: Jeff, I have a follow up question

[00:30:17] Jeff Sieh: Go it.

[00:30:18] Conor Brown: Jim, you mentioned how it, it can produce an indirect kind of, of action with that, right. In today’s day and age, especially in marketing, if it’s not trackable, a lot of higher ups don’t want to deal with it. Right? They want to know a dollar in is $2 out and here’s why.

[00:30:37] Conor Brown: ’cause this click happened, or this impression happened or what that with branding, it’s so much more about the intangibles, the things that can’t be tracked, right? How do you make the justification for those things, for the things that can’t be measured, especially when you have an executive that’s really, really overbearing or, or really wants to focus only on the numbers.

[00:30:58] Conor Brown: How do you go about that?

[00:30:59] Jim MacLeod: [00:31:00] I try to explain that the marketing landscape is changing dramatically, and it has been the last two and a half years or so. You know, AI is it Now brand is more important than any than ever because of AI and because everyone’s putting out so much content and there’s, you know, could potentially be better content than what you are putting out.

[00:31:19] Jim MacLeod: But you want people to have that brand recognition and brand affinity. because brand isn’t easy to right? Which everyone shifted over to performance marketing. But the reality is you need that brand to kind of sustain things. Especially as we get into this, you know, post Google post social media world where you’re not getting any traffic or anything from those sources.

[00:31:40] Jim MacLeod: You’re still getting some, but not like we’re used

[00:31:41] Jeff Sieh: right.

[00:31:42] Jim MacLeod: So now you need that brand recognition so that people are now googling you as opposed to googling the solution that you offer because they’re likely to not end up on your site after they Google it. So you want to be top of mind for when they are ready to buy, and that’s where brand comes in.

[00:31:57] Jim MacLeod: So yes, it’s not, brand isn’t, [00:32:00] we spent a dollar here, we get $2 here. But over the long term, you know,

[00:32:04] Jim MacLeod: the

[00:32:04] Jim MacLeod: brand really

[00:32:05] Jim MacLeod: helps pay off.

[00:32:06] Jeff Sieh: Yeah.

[00:32:07] Jeff Sieh: Um, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna jump into this, the AI question. ’cause it was really funny ’cause Jim, it always makes me nervous when designers come up to me after my talk about ai. I am like, oh, are we gonna, are we gonna have to like, I’m gonna have to run away from Jim, like, coming at me. But no, he was, he’s, he does a really great job in the book of using AI in the right way and using it as a tool and coming it from, just like how when Canva came out, things had to change.

[00:32:30] Jeff Sieh: AI is is forcing some change. So I wanna ask you guys, have you used any AI tools like Mid Journey Got it Baked in Firefly. For your marketing visuals. I mean, how many people are using AI to create that? I see,Dustin’s in here, the, founder and CEO and head cheese over at Magi, and he goes, his brand bucket list now is to own a color, which the way Dustin’s been going, he’s gonna have a magi color pretty soon because he’s growing like gangbusters over there.

[00:32:57] Jeff Sieh: Thanks, Dustin, for popping in. but have you [00:33:00] guys used any for your marketing visuals? I wanna know what, like what’s your biggest win and what’s your biggest frustration on creating those visuals with ai? I’d love to know, let us know down below, wherever you’re watching from, but let’s talk about ai, in the design stack.

[00:33:14] Jeff Sieh: So it was real, I had never heard anybody say this before, but you said that AI tends to average out, like kind of because everybody’s trying to hit the easy button and they’re, you’re hitting, you know, just the bare minimum of ai. So what is your checklist, Jim, for. Getting past average when starting with ai?

[00:33:32] Jeff Sieh: Like what, when do you abandon what you’re doing and move on to like Photoshop or something that you, you know, you mentioned before that you’re using it to create your graphics for your newsletter. So when do you go like, this isn’t working. I’m gonna go back to Photoshop or illustrate what I’m used to.

[00:33:46] Jeff Sieh: And when do you continue to use and on ai?

[00:33:49] Jim MacLeod: Yeah. The thing that I’ve seen is average inputs create average outputs. So you just put a simple, simple prompt in there, then it’s, you’re gonna get [00:34:00] simple, something simple back. Uh, I tend to jump around through different tools, so I now see AI is just another design tool. And I was working on a book cover recently where I did some rough sketches in procreate on my iPad, uploaded that to AI to come up with some basic imagery.

[00:34:19] Jim MacLeod: And then I brought that into Photoshop, did some manipulation there, and then I brought it into Illustrator, start laying the type on top of it. So that was my, kind of my design stack for creating that cover. And it was that, you know, the AI is, it speeds up the process of kind of concepting and coming up with the parts of the final pieces.

[00:34:43] Jim MacLeod: But it’s not, you know, I’m not gonna put out anything that’s just an AI output. And even with, with the newsletter, when once I get my image, I then bring that in Photoshop and I lay my personalized border around it and the title of my newsletter on top of it. Because it, you know, it’s, it’s one more step.[00:35:00]

[00:35:00] Jim MacLeod: But there are times where I will use generative fill if something isn’t kind of filling the space properly, or if I don’t like a section, you know, I’ll circle it and remove it. or if they output something that has text in it, that obviously is just random shapes that kind of look like letters, you know, I’ll get rid of that too.

[00:35:16] Jim MacLeod: But it, yeah, it’s rare that I’m using just one tool and, and it’s really not all that different from when I was just a straight up graphic designer jumping between Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign or Cork before that. And you know, it’s like, okay, I’m using all these tools, but now I have even more tools off to the side that will help speed up the process.

[00:35:36] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Dustin has a great point. he says, it’s like I always say, AI has to fill the entire canvas. If you don’t paint it, with your own words, the details with your own words, it has to fill it in with its own ideas and it’s usually not what you want. Right. So that’s very, very true, in that.

[00:35:50] Jeff Sieh: So

[00:35:51] Conor Brown: And I think. I think. that’s what a lot of people run into issue wise. You know, I think for a lot of marketers out there, they, they can’t start with with [00:36:00] procreate ’cause they’re not even at that level yet, right? So they do start with AI for ideation and sometimes as the basis of that graphic and then they take it and try to manipulate it.

[00:36:13] Conor Brown: I think one tool we talk about all the time is mid journey and how impressive that is, especially from giving you a plethora of options based on the input that you put in. But where it kind of struggles sometimes is finessing those options, right? It has an option. You, like, you take it, you ask it to make a simple edit and it kind of goes all cattywampus and, and changes everything on it, right?

[00:36:40] Conor Brown: So, Jim, how, how can you take those tools and really have the control and, and edit the path to keep the control. To what you want it to. Are there specific steps where you take it from Midjourney into Photoshop or Photoshop helps you with, with, with something [00:37:00] almost acting like a, a surgical tool. How do you go about that?

[00:37:03] Jim MacLeod: Yeah, it’s it. I’ve run into the same problems that everybody does where it’s, you know, it’s starting to get to where I want it to be, and then mid journeying just goes off on a

[00:37:11] Jeff Sieh: right.

[00:37:12] Jim MacLeod: and I’ll go back to a couple versions and I’m like, all right, let, let’s work from here now. And sometimes that’ll help and sometimes it won’t.

[00:37:19] Jim MacLeod: Sometimes I’ll take that image and then upload it to chat GPT or some other visual system. Try to try to manipulate things that way. And so, because some of them are better at having a conversation, you know, achi PD is really good with creating a conversation within, a design, whereas Midjourney at times will, it almost seems like it’s starting over from scratch based on the edited prompt that you’ve put in. So that can be challenging and, and yeah, sometimes they’ll get stuck in a rut. So I tend to use, when, when it comes to midjourney, I usually still use Discord for that because I have a bunch of different chats that I have for my different use cases. And if something [00:38:00] is just, you know, stuck in a rut somewhere and I can’t get out of, you know, I can’t shake something from five or six prompts back, I’ll then take that prompt, bring it into a new conversation and run that again, you know, kind of like clear out the

[00:38:14] Jim MacLeod: cobwebs a little bit.

[00:38:15] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. That’s, those are, those are great tips. I mean, we use Midjourney a ton. A ton. We roll a, so when you, I call it rolling ’cause it’s rolling the dice, like we roll a lot. Like I start with seven sets of four for any prompt, just because it helps me quickly get to where I want. but yeah, so we’ve got some, great.

[00:38:32] Jeff Sieh: Uh, this is Dustin says, he said, the hard part is most people don’t have the vocabulary to describe what they want. That’s why the prompt enhance button where AI can help you craft better prompts is very, very helpful. Very, very true. and Melanie says, I’ve been seeing there are certain kind of prompts you need to say to AI to properly get what you want.

[00:38:48] Jeff Sieh: Gemini, Google, a lot of people on socials are using it for content, but needs a certain prompt. and so yeah, that’s very, very good. And she’s got a follow-up question we’ll get to in a little bit. But yeah, this is not a [00:39:00] commercial for, uh. Magi. But one of the cool things inside of it is the way Dustin has built his interface and the way that he also, you can test out all these different models and you can have it write you prompts better and all sorts of things.

[00:39:11] Jeff Sieh: So I’m a big fan of Magi, especially when you’re getting started. But, one of the things that Melanie follows up with, and Jim, this is a great question for you, it’s like, how would you know what to say and how specific do I need to be? I feel like I, I bring tension and frustration when you don’t get what you’re asking for.

[00:39:27] Jeff Sieh: so how do you not fight against the ai, I guess is the, the biggest question Melanie’s asking,

[00:39:32] Jim MacLeod: Well, one of the good things is unlike a temperamental designer, AI’s not gonna get upset when you critique it. So that that already, you’re making things much easier there. But one of the tips that I’ve found is if I get to kind of a good place with an image or I find an image of what I’m looking for, I’ll upload that to Clutter chatt PT or something and say, give me the prompt that would create an image like this. And from there you can start to see pieces that you might not have [00:40:00] thought of. Like, oh, the camera angle’s here. Oh, the lighting is here. Oh, the resolution is this, you know, depth of field, or whatever it is, however they describe the video or the image, you know, that will start to show you what the AI thinks in order to create that.

[00:40:14] Jim MacLeod: And then if you take that prompt, make your own personal highest edits and drop it back into your mid journey or whatever other system, you’re probably going to get closer to where you wanna be.

[00:40:23] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And Melanie, there’s a great, uh, tool that I like to use called Gilbetree, especially for creating characters. that’s a GPT that’s inside of chat, GPT. And it’ll actually give you, a bunch of different variations and then also give you those prompts to try in mid journey, which is a lot of times when I get stuck, like, let’s say it’s, especially if an abstract concept, let’s say like networking.

[00:40:42] Jeff Sieh: Like how can you make that better? We’ve all seen the guy with the shaking hands and all this stuff around him, so how do you make that better? And so taking a tool like that. And like Jim was saying, dropping in there and having it describe it to you can save you a ton of time. So that’s what I like to do.

[00:40:56] Conor Brown: You know, we’ve talked a lot about two things. We’ve talked a lot about [00:41:00] Canva, and we’re talking a lot about AI now, and we’re gonna bring ’em together here, which is a like, what they have done with their AI features and tools, which gives, of course, Canva, non-designers, the design capabilities.

[00:41:14] Conor Brown: Right. but I think in the wrong hands, it can just make a lot of. Terrible things as well, so we have to put some guardrails on it. We’ve talked about this a little bit, Jim, but for those canvas centric teams, what do you think is the right way to invest in, in a pro build out of a Canva kind of,organization for your company when it comes to templates?

[00:41:38] Conor Brown: Are we locking ’em down? We’re avoiding those AI generated logos. Are we not even asking AI to, to create anything within there so we can make sure we’re sticking with our brand standards? How, how are you going about Canva with its AI capabilities?

[00:41:55] Jim MacLeod: I definitely recommend going with the pro plan, creating a bunch of templates and locking things [00:42:00] down so that people aren’t doing random acts of design all over the place because you, you can’t control what somebody’s creating, putting out there on their own. So if you can, if you can lock that down, you can ensure that everything is, is, is owned by you, by your design team, by your brand team, and you don’t have to worry about bad things being put out there.

[00:42:23] Jim MacLeod: And then the other thing that you kind of touched on was, you know, AI created logos. This is where a lot of people don’t understand that if you use Canva to create your logo, you can’t actually own that logo.

[00:42:36] Jeff Sieh: Hmm.

[00:42:36] Jim MacLeod: And, and because it’s, it’s generated by ai. I actually saw somebody on Threads yesterday. Who said, Hey, you know, I’ve got no, no budget.

[00:42:46] Jim MacLeod: You know, how do I get started with design and logo and stuff? And a lot of people are like, you know, talk to a designer, find a friend that’s a designer, but somebody said, canvas great for all that stuff. And I said, you know, you can’t actually own that logo. You can’t copyright that logo. And the [00:43:00] person snapped back at me, you know, saying like, it, it’s good enough.

[00:43:03] Jim MacLeod: And I’m like, okay, you’re as long as you’re clear. When you as a branding expert are telling the small business owner, just use Canva for your logo. It needs to be clear that you’re giving them bad advice and bad legal advice. ’cause they’re gonna listen to you based, based on your bio. But I’ve got a pretty strong rule about not arguing with ill-informed people that I don’t know on the internet.

[00:43:23] Jeff Sieh: right.

[00:43:24] Jim MacLeod: So I just said it, as long as you’re clear that they can’t own it, then, then that’s fine. But yeah, you need to be careful with what’s created using AI because it’s not ownable, not only from a copyright or trademark standpoint, but also you don’t know if the business across the street got the exact same output from that AI and is also going to start using that logo.

[00:43:45] Jim MacLeod: So there’s just a lot to consider when you’re using AI in these

[00:43:49] Jim MacLeod: DIY tools.

[00:43:50] Jeff Sieh: So let’s take that a a step further. So let’s say you get it like a logo. You really like, you made it with ai. Would the next logical step to be legal and to make [00:44:00] it copyrightable, would it be saying, okay, here to a designer, go, here’s what I like, this is what I want. Kind of, but can you make it so we can copyright it or, ’cause I think, ’cause there was even something, there was an AI artwork that they took into Photoshop and they changed it enough that it passed the copyright standards, at least in the United States, that they were able to manipulate it enough to do that.

[00:44:22] Jeff Sieh: So would that be the thing that you would want a designer to do if like, because a lot of times we’ll fall in love with a, a logo or we like aspects of it a lot. Was that what you would tell a somebody, who liked an AI logo that they created in Campa?

[00:44:35] Jim MacLeod: Yeah, it’s, it’s inspiration really. It’s, it’s no different than if you’re going to Google images and finding ideas, you know, like a mood board almost. But just know that what you’re, what you’re creating in Canva is just mood board material. It’s not the real final logo that you’re gonna actually be able to own.

[00:44:52] Jeff Sieh: Very, very good. That’s great advice. before we jump, into our last section, we only got a few minutes left, man, this stuff, Jim is like, I’m nerding out so hard [00:45:00] right here. It’s just so, I just love all this stuff. Um, If you wanna make something custom and all visual, marketing gold, then you need to check out Ecamm.

[00:45:09] Jeff Sieh: You can find out more about Ecamm dot com slash jeff. You can make custom graphics. They do have some templates you can start with, but then modify things to have your own show, your own unique style. Uh, you can do that really, really easily with Ecamm. So e km.com/jeff, save that 15% by using code Jeff. 15.

[00:45:26] Jeff Sieh: Alright, so let’s go really quick to, kind of almost like a speed round. ’cause there’s so many things I want to ask. I’m not gonna have time to, but talk about like a feed ready system of like these five, fixed elements you’ve mentioned to keep consistent across like your reels, your shorts, LinkedIn carousels so people can recognize you at a glance.

[00:45:44] Jeff Sieh: ’cause I think that’s all what we want. We want to stand out in the feed. We want people to recognize our brand. So what are those five things that we need to keep consistent?

[00:45:51] Jim MacLeod: It, you need to think about typography, you know, like what fonts are you using, your colors that you’re using, are you using photos, are you using product [00:46:00] photography? You know, like what, what, what do your visuals look like? And then how are things arranged within your palette? You know? And you just want people to be able to recognize those things and, and hierarchy, you know, how are people kind of scrolling it?

[00:46:14] Jim MacLeod: How are people visually scrolling it? And you know, those are kind of the key areas where you want people to lock those things down. And then everything else is kind of swap, swap the elements in and

[00:46:24] Jim MacLeod: out.

[00:46:25] Jeff Sieh: Got it. Great advice. Great advice.

[00:46:27] Conor Brown: I know there’s a million things that can impact the performance of one singular post. Right. But Jim, what’s your kind of checklist for when you do post something, you think it’s gonna be great, and then there’s crickets and it underperforms. What’s that checklist that you go back to and say, did I do this right?

[00:46:46] Conor Brown: Did I do that right? Could I have changed this to make this post a little bit better? What’s that checklist look like?

[00:46:52] Jim MacLeod: Yeah. A lot of it is kind of what I was just saying, where it’s, what is the hierarchy? What is the first thing you want somebody to see and understand, and then [00:47:00] what’s the second thing you want them to see and consume? And if you can kind of nail those things down then, and you did your design properly, then you can kind of keep going through to triage what the problem is.

[00:47:10] Jim MacLeod: But if your headline, you know, if you start with big, bold typing or headline isn’t, isn’t engaging, okay, then you need to go back and figure out the messaging. If it’s not legible at smaller sizes, you know, if the visuals of your typography aren’t legible, you need to work on that. Is your image not working because you’re using it in a region of the world where that type of person, it isn’t a, isn’t a common occurrence, you know, think about those sort of things.

[00:47:35] Jim MacLeod: And then, yeah, color, typography, the whole kind of layout. Are you designing to a grid? Like the, the grid system is something that, that comes along as you get better at using these design type tools. But things need to align and not be, you know, touching the very edge of the screen or the, the canvas, whatever it is.

[00:47:53] Jim MacLeod: And you want, you wanna make it easier for people to kind of skim around and, and see if they wanna stop and further [00:48:00] consume your, your content. And if things are all kind of cluttered and jumbled, then that doesn’t work as well. So think about the grid underneath also.

[00:48:07] Jeff Sieh: I am thinking of everything I’ve done wrong in my brand. Decide after reading this book. No, but it’s a good thing. It’s like the you do, it’s, he gives you great advice. So make sure you guys pick up this book ’cause. It is really, really good. really quickly, this is a great, great question by my friend, rich.

[00:48:23] Jeff Sieh: he says, would the same legal thing be true for Illustrator or Photoshop generated logos with ai? Because Adobe’s a different kind of thing when you, because they say they’re not training your stuff, on, you know, when you make something, they’re not gonna train on it. And they’ve supposedly paid for all of their stuff they’ve been trained on.

[00:48:41] Jeff Sieh: So would it be the same thing, Jim, for using Adobe products,

[00:48:46] Jim MacLeod: Not a lawyer, but I would say be careful of anything that is AI generated, and then using that for trademarks or copyright. it is interesting, Adobe stock, if you look there, ’cause they’re mixed [00:49:00] in, there are AI images within Adobe stock now. And so you need to be careful if you’re using something for, you know, an editorial use that you’re not using a fake AI image.

[00:49:11] Jim MacLeod: And then as you’re use, you know, if you go in and actually open up an image that you like down below it, there’s now a button to say, generate alternatives to this photo. So what is a real photo versus what is not? A real photo is getting blurrier, so hopefully the stock houses are clearer about what’s real and what’s not real as things move

[00:49:28] Jim MacLeod: forward.

[00:49:29] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, I’m hoping that they’ll have some sort of watermark that’ll be, you know, across everything that we’ll know instead of everyone’s trying to do their own thing right now, and it’s kind of confusing, but hopefully that will come, in the future. This is a great question by Amy. She goes, I do great with colors, logos, fonts, but I really want to use AI to replace the stock images that I repeat.

[00:49:49] Jeff Sieh: Any tips?

[00:49:50] Jim MacLeod: yeah. AI is great for updating photo imagery. When you are, when you have an asset that’s gonna be used, that’s gonna be translated or [00:50:00] localized, and it’s gonna be used around the world

[00:50:02] Jim MacLeod: because the reality is here in the United States, we’re a melting pot. We have a lot of different diversity with the audiences that we’re going after.

[00:50:10] Jim MacLeod: But if you go to Japan, you know there’s not as much diversity there, so you wanna make sure that. You know, your, the imagery that you have in your ebook or whatever applies to that particular audience. You know, the Middle East, same way, like there are certain things that you need to change for different audiences, and AI is actually a good way to update those assets without having to do a full photo shoot with, with different, different diverse people.

[00:50:35] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, you mentioned in the book and I thought it was really fascinating. I think, you know, in, in Western culture, we White is a symbol of purity. And then it was associated with death in another culture or something. So it’s, it’s, it’s really important that you nail this, especially if you’re trying to do a, like you said, a multinational campaign.

[00:50:51] Jeff Sieh: Was I correct in that? Did I say that right?

[00:50:52] Jim MacLeod: Yes. Yep. Yeah. If you watched Black Panther, Wakanda forever, right? There’s a big funeral scene and everyone’s wearing white. But [00:51:00] if you went to a funeral in Massachusetts and everyone was wearing white, you’d be like, what is going on? Right? Because it’s just, we use color in different ways, in different

[00:51:09] Jim MacLeod: parts of the world.

[00:51:10] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, that’s a great point. So, so much good stuff in this book, folks. You need to go get the Visual marketer. You can get it on Amazon. I have two copies. I have this copy. And then, what I love to do is I always buy a digital copy because I use a tool called Read Wise because I take notes in the, my Kindle Edition.

[00:51:27] Jeff Sieh: So everything I highlight, it pops over to Notion in a database that I can just go in like, what did Jim say that was so good that I can use in one of my presentations? Oh, and I can, it’s all in my database. So, I know Jim, you’re a big fan of. Notion as well. so it’s great to, when you’re starting doing research and learning new things, it’s such a great tool, so read wise and notion, but go get his book folks.

[00:51:50] Jeff Sieh: It’s, it’s really awesome. So much good stuff in here. I’m, I’m learning so much and I’ve nerded out about this stuff for years, but, it’s making me a better marketer as well. So make sure you [00:52:00] guys do check it out. Jim, is there anything that we forgot to ask that we should have asked you that you think that is really important for people in this age of ai?

[00:52:08] Jim MacLeod: Just be careful with what you’re putting out there. ’cause it’s so easy to put out bad content if you’re not paying attention. You know, like you, you can generate an image and there might be something way in the background that you don’t see that something nefarious got in there and, ’cause we don’t know what any of this information was trained on, right?

[00:52:24] Jim MacLeod: So be careful with what the output is and look closely because you don’t want some PR nightmare because something was hidden in the background of one of your social media posts.

[00:52:33] Jeff Sieh: Alright. Well for the last, uh, couple minutes, I would love for you just to tell people a little about your book and why they should get it. I mean, the floor is yours. Let us know what you got in this book and why it’s so good.

[00:52:43] Jim MacLeod: thanks. yeah, I think it’s gonna be tough to, to top what you were saying and, and the praise you were heaping on the book, but this, the idea behind the book was, I’ve talked to so many marketers who said, my job would be so much easier if I had your design skills. So what I did was basically put those [00:53:00] things together.

[00:53:00] Jim MacLeod: Is that okay? How do I teach the basics of design to marketers, people who are using Canva, people who are using ai, people who are maybe dabbling with Photoshop illustrator, but don’t really know the depths of it. And I don’t get into the depths of those, of a lot of those tools, but I explain, what’s a vector?

[00:53:16] Jim MacLeod: What’s a ra? You know, what are the basics of typography? What’s currenting, what the, you know, the space between the letters. So I explain those things so they start to be able to see. What they need to make better designs for when they’re

[00:53:29] Jim MacLeod: making their own designs.

[00:53:31] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, so is the best place to pick this up at, jim mcleod.com? Is that where the best place to get it?

[00:53:37] Jim MacLeod: Yep. Yeah, there’s a link from there to book jim mccloud.com or Amazon is always the, the easiest for most folks.

[00:53:44] Jeff Sieh: so, to go there. So jim mcloud.com and it’s spelled J-I-M-M-A-C-L-E-O-D. So jim mcloud.com. Make sure you guys who are listening on the podcast, go check that out. Conor Brown, the unsinkable, Conor Brown. What is [00:54:00] going on with you, my friend? What’s, what’s happening in the world of vacation kingdoms?

[00:54:04] Conor Brown: So much going on. I have a couple fun trips planned, for the rest of the year. So follow along at Vacation Kingdoms across social media, and we are well into Q4, which is hard to believe. So I want to hear from you. Where do you want to travel to in 2026? Shoot me an email, Conor, C-O-N-O-R, at vacation kingdoms.com.

[00:54:26] Jeff Sieh: And as always, I’d love for you guys to join my newsletter@jeffc.com slash news. We have fun every week, in the, uh, email community. So make sure you guys go check that out, jeff c.com/news. And with that, thanks again to our folks over at Ecamm for sponsoring show Ecamm dot com slash Jeff. And with that, we’ll see you guys next week.

[00:54:44] Jeff Sieh: Thank you so much. Bye everybody.