Sara Leisinger of Who’s Lance Digital Media can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Sarah Banowetz of Banowetz Marketing can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Our guest today is Devin Green. Devin can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. He can also be found at DevinGreen.me
Transcription:
[Announcer] Welcome to Sarah Squared, the podcast for all things marketing, business growth, branding, and social media. Sara Leisinger is the owner of Who’s Lance Digital Media, serving start-ups and solopreneurs. And Sarah Banowetz owns Banowetz Marketing, a full-service agency located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Together, they make up Sarah Squared, dedicated to the inspiration, motivation, and education of growing companies.
Sara Leisinger: Welcome back to Sarah Squared and yet again, I am a lonely Sara this morning, but it’s only because my partner is so successful, no I don’t know what that says about me. I’ll think about it later, it might hurt my feelings now to think about it. This morning, podcast first of all, hi YouTube. Grab your cup of coffee, because it’s that day, you need to. We have Devin Green. I have really been looking forward to interviewing you Devin.
Devin Green: I have been looking forward to this interview all week as well. It is something I’ve been wanting to talk about and yeah.
Sara Leisinger: And yeah.
Devin Green: Yeah.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah. Devin is the guy that coined the term “Empathic Design”. Cool. I’ve been able to watch Devin in process of doing this, with a few of clients Devin and I collaborate quite a bit. The deal is this empathic design, I really think that it’s going to set the world on fire. Now can you explain the concept not only to me but also to everybody in the audience.
Devin Green: Empathic design. The concept is to take your client’s full wellbeing of how they look at, do things and represent that into a design, whether it be a website, a logo, a flyer, you just want to take their key qualities and put it onto digital or regular paper paper.
Sara Leisinger: Very cool. When you’re doing that, this is like, this is one of the coolest things that I’ve ever heard. You’re taking them as like a holistic person and basically putting it into art.
Devin Green: You described that very well. Yeah.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah. I hear I’m pretty good with words.
Devin Green: Me Not so much.
Sara Leisinger: Well. The truth is, you need both marketing and design to make your full fledged marketing strategy work because people are visual. You have to do things like they see the vision first, you have to show them what the vision is, And a lot of it, if it can be wrapped up into a logo, what do you do that very well by the way.
Devin Green: Thank you.
Sara Leisinger: Is necessary and fantastic and it makes your marketing going from, to like great. It’s great. Like, walk me through the process of what that looks like with a typical client. How would you really get to the heart of them, to bring out that design that perfectly suits them?
Devin Green: The trick of empathic design and asking them what you need those questions is, is ask little questions but ask questions that are like get the client to … what’s the word? Express themselves. When someone ask you tell you about your business, you’re going to tell them every single aspect of it, because it’s your pride and joy, is what you do, is how you do things.
If you word your questions in a way that you can get all of that information, write it down and then constantly oversee that information while you’re designing, that will help your design process a lot better than just like saying, yeah, I just want this color and I want this and I want that, stuff like that. It’s one of those things that you have to take in account to … what’s the word I’m looking for? Better the design.
Sara Leisinger: Absolutely. If somebody were wanting to like see some of your portfolio, where would they go?
Devin Green: You can go to my website, It is Devingreen.me. And all my websites are up on there. Some of my logos, some of my artwork is on there as well. I do have prints as well, if you guys want to buy them. Those links are in the artwork section so go ahead and check them.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah. Will actually link them in the description so you guys will have them. Okay?
Devin Green: Awesome.
Sara Leisinger: And then the other thing about this is, you actually run more than one company, yeah. Can you tell us about those?
Devin Green: I actually have two other companies. One, I have a podcast, I’ll talk about that one first. It is called the Innovative Creative. And the purpose of this podcast, is to help clients and designers better understand design using all alternative way of thought. And usually when I talk about these questions that people give me or I’ll write the questions there, all the episodes that I’ve had so far, they go into detail, they talk about their passion, they talk about what they do, they talk about how they do it. And it’s been a blessing in disguise because I’m learning stuff as I do this as well.
Sara Leisinger: Cool. Aren’t we all.
Devin Green: And I just want to bridge that gap between clients and designers to help them understand design a little bit better.
Sara Leisinger: Okay. Cool.
Devin Green: And my second company, well this one I started seven years ago, it’s called Style Clothing Co.
Sara Leisinger: Yes. Your new season’s coming out, I’m so excited.
Devin Green: Yeah, it’s going to be really great. Speaking of which, I’ve got a meeting this weekend too, so I’m going to get that [crosstalk 00:05:22].
Sara Leisinger: Can we release the name of it?
Devin Green: It is called Dopamine Trenches.
Sara Leisinger: I’ve seen a couple of the first designs on these guys. I still want that jacket. I still want that jacket so bad. I feel like we can rock paper scissors right now and I could win and then I could have that jacket.
Devin Green: I don’t think that’s a good idea. But essentially, Style Clothing Co, is a clothing company made to be versatile. I want to say, our slogan is to create a lifestyle that embodies unity, respect & individuality.
Sara Leisinger: Cool.
Devin Green: And we like to do through clothes. What we do is we create, like I said before, we create clothes that are versatile in every aspect. You can add it to maybe the blazer that you’re wearing or you can add it to your workout routine or you can add it to like your skater outfit or something like that.
Sara Leisinger: Right.
Devin Green: It’s very versatile. We typically tried to choose …what’s the word I’m looking for? Like neutral colors so that way it can-
Sara Leisinger: It’s very clean design.
Devin Green: Yeah. Very clean stuff.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah.
Devin Green: And yeah. It’s been a long time coming. Season three has been in the works for counting two years.
Sara Leisinger: Come on.
Devin Green: And it’s been an adventure. And I’ll be honest with you guys, the reason why I haven’t released it yet, is because we were still trying to find ourselves during the company release and that’s the reason why we wanted to like figure out what we do, how we do it and what problem are we solving.
Sara Leisinger: Right. Exactly. The next thing that I’m going to talk to you about is just like design wise, how you position people to win. Like in terms of your design, I know your business is dual sided, so you want to help people increase their understanding of design, local business owners increase their understanding of design. But you also want to help designers, so how are you helping people to win?
Devin Green: One thing I do is I mentor. Right now I have a mentee. His name is Akira. He has learned so much just from doing things.
Sara Leisinger: Akira’s awesome. Yeah.
Devin Green: Yeah. He’s one of those types of people is like a sponge, so like he absorbs everything.
Sara Leisinger: He really does actually.
Devin Green: Another way-
Sara Leisinger: Shout out to Akira.
Devin Green: Yeah. Akira’s awesome. If you can’t remember his name so Shakira without the s.
Sara Leisinger: Never really know that she can dance like that.
Devin Green: But the other way I’m trying to help people win is-
Sara Leisinger: Sorry. Start again.
Devin Green: The other way I’m trying to help people win, is to represent their brand in the most solid way. When someone sees a logo near, far, up close, I just said near far, but when someone sees that logo, they immediately recognize it. They don’t have to like, see what it is. They don’t have to do this, they don’t have to do that, it’s just automatically there. It’s like telling the brain, you’re basically with design, you’re telling the brain to say, okay, how can I make this way more rememberable for other people.
Sara Leisinger: Very cool. Again, one more time, if somebody wants to check out your work or if they would like to get ahold of you, what is the best way to do that?
Devin Green: If you want to check out my work, that’s devingreen.me. If you want to check out my podcast, that’s devingreen.me/fm. And if you want to check out my clothing line, that’s styleclothing.co.
Sara Leisinger: Awesome. And we’ll actually link all of these into the description for you guys to have them. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Devin Green: Yeah, no problem.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah, you didn’t bring your coffee, so next time that has to be a thing. I don’t drink coffee alone. Drinking alone is bad.
Devin Green: Sad. Sad day because it’s not actually coffee it’s macho, but still is so good.
Sara Leisinger: Thank you guys for joining us today on the podcast and on YouTube and we will see you next time.
Devin Green: Peace.
Sara Leisinger of Who’s Lance Digital Media can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Sarah Banowetz of Banowetz Marketing can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Our guest today is Devin Green. Devin can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. He can also be found at DevinGreen.me
