Getting published in the press is a time-honoured and effective way to promote your work as a designer. It contributes to building your reputation with your peers and clients.
However, when choosing which outlets to try and get published into, one should be careful to choose only reputable press organizations, as less reputable ones can be more detrimental to your images and reputation in the long run. Here are a few things to consider when deciding:
Choose print over digital when possible. Despite the print media impending "death" being called out almost seasonally, print media still has something that digital media has very little of it at all: quality of content. While the quality of print media varies wildly, the fact that they have a limited number of pages to fill, forces them to edit and curate their content, naturally ensuring that what they're offering is of a certain calibre. Print also carries more weight in people's minds. Maybe it's the tangible nature of a magazine in your hands, who knows?
Conversely, digital media suffers no real estate restrictions and on the contrary, the more stuff they put out, the more eyes they can get on their content. Because of the nature of online media, they have every incentive to produce more in the hopes to release that one-in-a-million viral piece. Inevitably, their focus on quantity over quality has an effect on the weight of a project published online - frankly, it's not that hard to get published on Archdaily or Designboom since they are always craving for good content. In short, they want traffic and you're looking for quality and those two outcomes are directly at odds with each other.
Choose outlets where your clients "hang out". If you do a lot of corporate interiors, being published in Interior Design is good for your prestige, but none of your potential clients read it. You're much better off aiming for perhaps less prestigious outlets, but ones where your clients are more likely to read. How do you know, you ask? You'll have to do some research, but where I'd start is with your own client and ask them directly what publications they read.
Think of new and innovative ways to promote your firm. There is an onslaught of new media platforms that have been grossly underestimated by designers. I'm looking at you podcasts, vlogs and other internet-age forms of content consumption. Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world carries a huge amount of clout and I foresee his platform becoming more powerful and trusted than traditional media in the future. If you get on his podcast - good luck with that - you will have more work than you'll ever be able to handle. But even short of that particular podcast, every niche and industry has its own cherished podcasts and these can do wonders to promote your firm. Just remember to aim for those your clients are likely to consume, not those your peers listen to, which is a mistake that I see being made time and time again.
Now go forth and spread the gospel. Watch out soon for a companion piece on how to talk to the press.
Hit me up here if you need help with figuring that out. We've helped many clients in the past with great success by doing all of the above.
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