While your bridges and towers soar, your social media bores. What happens when an architecture or engineering partnership’s commitment to strength, utility, and beauty falls short digitally—adequate but hardly excellent? There are still many who could care less: “Our reputation speaks for itself.”, “It’s only a portfolio.”, It looks on a par with our competition.”, or “We’re not in the…
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Advocacy for Architects
Social media advocacy marketing just doesn’t work for design firms. The content being posted is just too subtle, or too confidential, and the stakes far too high. After all, what employee of an architectural firm in his right mind would risk blogging, sharing, tweeting or posting about a project voluntarily on his own Facebook page, or Twitter account? It’s…
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Where designers go for antiques
by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home / Connecticut | November, 2016 How do you separate the super serious designer from the merely serious? Had you been at the opening of the R.T. Facts Gallery on 8 Barns Road in Kent, CT one Saturday night in June, the difference between super serious and serious would have been as…
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Major Mashups
by Louis Postel as seen in Showboats International, November 2016 The Modernism Moment looks here to stay for mega yacht design from hull to hardware. The clean lines born of Modernism’s form-is-function aesthetic just makes so much over-arching sense, especially at sea. Efficiency, elegance, and a low-key elitism continue to find inspiration in Le Corbusier’s Vers Un Architecture of 1923,…
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Mapping Social Media | Graphisoft USA
by Louis Postel for Graphisoft USA | July 2016 How the AEC Community is discovering new ways to build business on Main Street Part One: First stop, Pinterest. “I know at least half my advertising works,” said the prosperous business man. “The problem is figuring out which half that is.” For AEC professionals charged with allocating resources to promotion and…
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How Does She Do It
by Louis Postel, originally published in New England Home | August 2016: In Our Backyard The eye moves up the curtain in search of where its pattern repeats. Finding repeats becomes a kind of game. Where to find the next line of peacocks, trellises, and inky down strokes? – It’s a visual game that can become a needless distraction.…
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New Partner Feels Lost
Dear Louis: Are we a professional organization, or are we a business? As far as our architectural practice is concerned both models seem to be trading in degraded currency. I find myself wracked with anxiety over this question, as I nurture our ideas and projects, often rooted in strange places with strange languages throughout the world. While I am amassing…
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High Meets Low in Monaco
by Louis Postel in Showboats International, September 2016 Princess Grace Designer George Stacey Who invented who took two seemingly irreconcilable ideas — casual and chic — and put them together to revolutionize the interior décor and furnishings? Arguably, it was George Alford Stacey (1901-1993) who decorated five homes over 28 years for Monaco’s patron saint, Princess Grace, including the Palais…
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Why Can’t We All Have 100 Acres?
Liliane Wong runs the Interior Architecture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence where she has been teaching since 1998. Though there’s no apparent connection between her early interest in pure mathematics and what she does now, it’s not hard to imagine one. “I was interested in describing the changing shapes of clouds as they moved through…
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Uncollected Fees in Philadelphia
Dear Louis: Did you go to the AIA Conference in Philadelphia this year, and if so how was it? Our firm was all set to go but ultimately we had to cancel because someone snatched the zero-energy condo we wanted on VRBO. Jerk — not you Louis, him! Needless to say, I remain your most devoted fan at Fat Daddy’s…
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Publish My Project!
Dear Louis: I’m feeling pretty down about a snafu here in our design studio, and I am hoping you can help me out. Eighty-six days ago exactly – I counted – we sent photos of a zero energy, a shingle-style project we did to glossy Magazine X, hoping to get it published. Despite our follow up calls and ever-so-polite inquiries,…
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Welcome to the New New England
Wealthy people from abroad, high-tech entrepreneurs, thousands of moneyed folk are discovering New England: its frothy mix of culture and clam chowder. Not only are they discovering, they are settling in – buying up houses, condos and pied a terres, recharging that culture as they go. Designers and architects are adapting. The design vocabulary of new money’s characteristically baroque, artistic-leaning…
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Low Engagement
Why this column on marketing your firm and your projects through social media? We’re glad there’s so much great work coming to this blog, but we also worry that all that fine work might not be getting the amount—and especially the kind—of publicity it deserves. Social media offers an unprecedented opportunity to get the word out about architecture. It’s…
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Social Media Marketing Tip 109: Getting Great Clients
Follow these three simple steps to attract the perfect client through social media. Though they may sound absurd, they’ve worked for others. 1, Picture a perfect albeit flawed client, and write about him or her or them in a stream of consciousness style. Here’s an example of how this might begin: “My ideal client lives five miles away from my…
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Cliché Riddance
This coming year, let us resolve to make even better use of social media in engaging others and building relationships critical to our business. Moreover, let us acknowledge that social media itself is changing, and that quality content is steadily eclipsing the many marketing gimmicks out there meant to automatically increase our volume of “friends” and followers. One prompts us…
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Trade Only Tip 106: Social Media Leadership in 2 Steps
Ideas about leadership are changing fast. From the Lee Iacocca “my way or the highway” model, we are recognizing the immense value of the leader who quietly makes a safe space in which to work and to get a job done right. We are talking about the kind of design professional who can orchestrate colleagues, partners, clients, subs, vendors, craftsmen,…
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Latest Workshop Feedback
Interior designers like most visual artists think in color pictures. Louis Postel’s course on social media encourages… Posted by Postel Ink on Saturday, November 21, 2015
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Design Mindsets
Postel on Social Media in Graphis Softus Blog
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Trade Only Social Media Workshop Registration Links | Venegas, Roomscapes, Wolfers
Register for Venegas Nov 17 Register for Roomscapes Dec 2 Register for Wolfers Jan 13, 2016 ➡ .2 CEU ➡ limited attendance ➡ $59.00 ($69 for credit) per workshop
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Feeling stuck around Social Media?
I have been writing and blogging about design for over twenty years and I can still feel that way – blocked! That’s one of the reasons I started the Writing Well Workshop Series, Part 2 of which is How to Make Friends and Influence People through Social Media marketing. (Nov 17 at Vanegas, Suite 620 in the Boston Design Center.…
