…from my nephew, Ben Pieratt:
Dear Graphic and Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities 
available to you.
You have an inherent need to solve problems, visually and conceptually. There is enormous value in this, but you may be misplacing your talents.
The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. The Western world is porting itself over to the web in mind and deed and is looking to make itself comfortable and productive. It’s every person in the world, connected to every other person in the world, and no one fully understands how to make best use of this new reality because no one has seen anything like it before. The internet wants to hire you to build stuff for it because its trying to figure out what it can do. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.
- Your press checks are bullshit
- Your personal logo is bullshit
- Your employer is bullshit
- Your studio is bullshit
The market is handing you steak and you’re choosing the gristle. The market is handing you gold bullion and you’re taking the nickel. As a designer, you enjoy building things for other people’s use. Your value is determined by the degree to which you can empathize with groups of people around a given topic. Historically, this relationship has required a large(r) company to act as mediator for the emotional mass-transaction. Companies provide you with an audience inasmuch as they have customers, and that’s enough for you because you just want to design stuff that solves stuff.
The internet kills all middlemen.
You now have direct access to the raw vein of popular attention. The pixels you’re pushing have a higher exchange rate than you’re giving yourself credit for*. No hounding client payroll, no selling other people’s stuff, no building other people’s wealth, no nephew’s cousins stepping in with the authority to change everything you’ve been working on.
If You Build It, They Will Come and Try It; and if you are keen enough to identify the opportunities that are being laid out before you by technology, then there is challenge and fulfillment and success to be had.
I run Svpply.com. I am its Designer. I used to design logos and now I design for the internet. Svpply is building a service which will redefine major components of the retail industry. Our team is figuring out how to do this together because no one has ever done anything like it before. No class of people has ever been offered an opportunity like the one you and I are being offered right now. If this kind of opportunity sounds even slightly interesting to you, then you should join a startup. You don’t have to know more than that.
The jobs are all out there waiting for you. They’re secure and fun and they pay competitively. If the thought of building something amazing for lots of people is interesting to you, You Should Join a Startup**.
You can find jobs at startups here, here, here and here. You should also just start sending your work to startups that you like. All of them are hiring or thinking about hiring.
If you have questions about this, feel free to hit me up. Additionally, I know someone specifically looking to fund good designers with good ideas, so let me know if you’d like an introduction.
Ben Pieratt
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
9 Comments on “Best Internet Manifesto I've read in a long time: Ben Pieratt spanks graphic designers”
I read your article elaborately very important points really are portraying would like to thank
Actually, I think Perry’s summary of the “rant” is far better than the actual post. Amazing how many people still believe the fallacy that Ben repeats: “The internet kills all middleman.”
Hardly true and easy to argue the opposite position.
Amazon is a middleman. Same for Groupon, Facebook, every affiliate marketers and even Ben’s own company svpply. All of them promote products on behalf of the manufacturer and take a transaction fee along the way. It’s not clear where svpply gets it cut (and likely they haven’t even figured it out), but will probably include advertising, referral fees and perhaps old-fashioned commissions.
If you buy into his “killing the middleman” logic, I don’t see how it follows that designers should join startups in response. How does becoming an employee enable someone to add addition value?
Perhaps if he argued for *starting* a business…
Sure amazon is a middleman ..but there is no middleman between amazon and the buyer..
The best way to save yourself from other middlemen is to become one yourself.
Great piece. I’m wondering… where are the online writing jobs? How can a fundraiser/communicator with a proven track record like myself find work providing content for websites?
@Michael:
Judging from your LinkedIn profile, by doing exactly what you’ve done for clients over the past two decades. Attracting prospects and clients through direct response, information marketing and social media.
The only difference is promoting yourself, not the client. Pick a market segment, put up a blog, post some useful information and announce your new venture to anyone who might be interested.
You have a tremendous advantage over most people starting out. In addition to knowing how to effectively use direct marketing, you can already write and promote with a track record. That’s huge.
PR is coming onto my calendar in Q4 this year. Get in touch through our website if you’d like to chat. I don’t know how to email you directly.
Cheers,
Chris
Agreed that most designers are selling themselves short and larger opps exist for designers. But I disagree that the opps only exist by becoming employed by startups or even established companies. I would have 5X the ebooks, products, websites, affiliate promos that I do now if I had a design background instead of having to pay for help to do designs for me. Designers should learn all aspects of Internet marketing to put food on their own table before trying to design for someone else anyway. You’ll find your employment opps will double if you can display success with using your own designs to promote your own products and websites.
Heya Marti,
I think the best example you can ever get that it is not about spectacular design but you know some basic stuff is exactly right now in front of your nose….
I mean LOOK at this website PerryMarshall.com… I love this site and because I am a SW engineer I know where and how to go… but honestly someone not as savvy as me would have trouble navigating this site at all…
and If I look it with the critical eyes of a designer I would say:
* Poor navigation
* Extremely cheap design (this is just a template)
* a full*of*landing*pages site
* High quality content
* high quality content
Still Perry Marshall is my hero, the best guy I have ever ever ever ever seen on the whole marketing deal… I know because I have been dancing slowly through the loads of emails I receive for the last 3 years and at every email I read I feel and know how efficient he is getting into my head, dismantling my fears and teaching me something out of it… and I am not the regular ACT NOW consumer… I act when I know I need the service which it is now… NOW I AM READY and Perry was there aaallll the time just waiting for me to be ready…. so by the way Perry soon you will get a consulting request from me to get me started on the right direction for my online business.
Keep the great job everyone
GS
One phrase caught my attention especially: “The internet kills all middlemen”.
The question is: What about search engines? Those centralized search engines are also a kind of middlemen.
At first glance, it seems like search engines will be the only centralized middlemen left.
But if you look closer, centralized search engines may be a temporary phenomenon, which will be killed just like any middlemen get killed by the Internet over time.
It’s really just a question of technology.
I contemplated for some time to create a distributed search engine which runs on many computers just like the seti-at-home project does.
When Google terminated my Adwords account, I reactivated my energy in that direction.
Just to find out that such a technology already exists. :-)
It just waits to be adopted on a massive scale.
It’s as easy as installing an application on your computer and/or your server.
You can check it out at:
http://www.yacy.net/en/
What do you think about that?
The only problem with a distributed search engine is, it seems it would be 100X more vulnerable to spammers. In my experience somebody always needs to be in charge.