Responsibilities:

• Design and produce art and copy layouts for material to be presented by visual communications media, such as books, magazines, newspapers, television, electronic media and packaging
• Design media in a wide variety of styles that correspond to the clients needs
• Interact with fellow artists and report to Design Director
• Adhere to client budget and time constraints
• Present new ideas to members of the team
• Monitor projects through all phases of production
• Develop designs that are on strategy and reflect brand’s personality

Qualifications:

• Four to five years of work experience
• Experience in Photoshop (photo retouching) and prepress skills strongly encouraged
• Ability to conduct press checks
• Knowledge of current graphics software (Adobe CS5 Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)
• Knowledge of traditional graphic skills
• Minimum of a Bachelors degree or equivalent business experience preferred

If you’re interested in joining our creative team, submit your resume to melissa.wheeler@luckie.com.

Luckie is an idea-obsessed 140-person agency with offices in Birmingham, San Antonio and Atlanta. Our clients include AT&T, Schick, Little Debbie, Regions Bank,Glaxo Smith Klein, Gulf Power, Asheville Tourism, Alabama Tourism, Bayer Advanced and Chick-fil-A.

Edward Bowser is Community Manager at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

You don’t have to be a supervisor on the org chart to be a manager. We often find ourselves managers of a project, business objective or cross-departmental committee.

So now that you know you’re not excluded from my question simply because you don’t “manage” people, my question still stands: What kind of manager are you? Command and Control or Servant Leader?

Envision a room full of tables, chairs, bags and various other items on the floor. Picture yourself with an employee and one goal – get your employee to take 200 moving steps in 1 minute without hitting any objects. The only physical action the employee can take is the steps. He/she cannot remove objects nor take any other action without permission. There are other managers and employees in the room attempting to achieve the same goal. This sparks your competitive nature, your drive to be the best. There are two ways to approach this problem:

Command and Control

If this is the path you choose, the pursuit of your goal looks like this:

• You tell the employee the goal is to take 200 moving steps in 1 minute
• You stand behind the employee and start the clock, forgetting to give permission to the employee
• Follow the employee around saying, “stop,” “left,” “turn,” “faster, faster, faster” and more than likely “look out” and “oops … sorry about that.”

While you might last through the exercise I can assure you that the employee is exhausted, you are hoarse and there is no chance in this lifetime that your company will think you need any more employees. And, oh yeah, your employee is asking to be transferred to the department below!

Servant Leader

While others immediately begin at the task stage, you spend some time talking with your employee. You talk not only about the goal, but about the key skills necessary to achieve the goal, like the size of the steps or what suggestions the employee has about the obstacles.

As others around the room struggle to achieve the goal, your ability to engage your employee in a dialogue prior to the exercise results in a much different experience. Your employee takes very small, forward steps as you lead him or her around obstacles. When the minute is done, you’ve achieved far more than the goal – you’ve got an employee who enjoyed the process as well as the shared success of hitting the goal with you.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think it’s that simple to manage people. But the next time you look at the group you are working with, wondering why you are the smartest person in the room and why no one can achieve the results you can, ask yourself, “What kind of manager am I?” If we move so fast to the task stage, we miss the opportunity to develop employees. I contend that it is the situational, one-on-one coaching and mentoring that trains an employee more than any seminar or book. The chance for an employee to see you in a problem-solving or strategizing mode teaches the employee more than simply controlling behavior to get the job done.

Melissa Wheeler is Human Resources Director at Luckie & Company. You can contact her by email.

Photo credit: bbum via Flickr

As an intern in the Digital Content Department, you’ll work full-time at Luckie’s headquarters in Birmingham, Ala. We’re looking for someone who can start yesterday, so be sure to get your application in pronto. Your daily tasks will include helping research and create branded content for Facebook, Twitter, websites, apps and more. You’ll learn how to coordinate and implement a digital content calendar, and you’ll be an active member of brainstorming efforts for our many client brands.

Qualifications

• A proven track record of strong, accurate, engaging writing
• Excessive attention to detail
• Proven experience creating content for blogs, Facebook and Twitter — not just your personal accounts
• Strong initiative. You won’t be given orders, you’ll be given problems to solve and ambitious goals to meet

To apply for this internship, email your resume and five samples of your digital writing ability (articles, blog posts, web projects, social media channels you’ve authored, etc.) to melissa.wheeler@luckie.com.

UPDATE: This position has been filled. Thanks to all our great applicants for your consideration.

Edward Bowser is Community Manager at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Luckie is seeking a Desktop Support Technician who will be responsible for providing hardware and software support to end users. Strong candidates must possess exemplary troubleshooting skills that include network protocols, hardware diagnostics, client operating systems, and standard office applications. They must operate, maintain, and troubleshoot network server hardware, operating systems, and application software.

Day-to-day duties will include configuring and installing operating systems, desktop applications, and network software, as well as verifying applications and wireless and LAN, connectivity. Courier runs to clients and assisting with office supply pickups also are required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent
• Experience with: Windows XP and 7 operating systems, Macintosh OS X Snow Leopard operating system, Windows Server 2003/2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, PC and Macintosh hardware, smart phones, Local and LAN attached printers and other PC Peripherals , Microsoft Office for PC or Mac (2007-2011), Adobe Creative Suite
• Must have current, valid driver’s license with clean driving record
• Exhibit troubleshooting skills that include network protocols, hardware diagnostics, client operating systems, and standard office applications

If you think you have what it takes, submit your resume to melissa.wheeler@luckie.com.

UPDATE: This position has been filled. Thanks to all our great applicants for your consideration.

Edward Bowser is Community Manager at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

That wasn’t the first occurrence. There have been times when I planned to share a typo-filled article that contained useful or interesting information only to stop myself mid–keystroke. By sharing this piece of information, would I have been sending the message that I overlook – or worse, condone – this lax approach to written language?

It’s no secret that typos can cost money. In 2010, an extreme downward spike in the stock market was blamed on the word “million” being accidentally entered as “billion.” And in advertising, agencies and their clients must eat costs associated with correcting mistakes.

But how do typos affect the overall perception of a company and reception of the message?

I took an informal poll of my Facebook friends, and most shared my fear of being seen as careless by association. They also expressed that typos reflect a lack of concern on the part of the message source, leading to their own apathy toward that entity.

This belief falls in line with findings from Stanford University’s Web Credibility Project, part of the school’s Persuasive Technology Lab, which explores how computers and other devices change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Researchers with the project suggest that typographical errors on a website can be just as detrimental to a company as legal and financial woes.

In marketing, advertising and public relations, dollars and reputations ride on attention to detail. What if the article I thought about sharing was a Facebook ad or a blog entry on a company’s website? How would typos affect my desire to share the information? How would it affect my impression of the company? How likely would I be to do business with that company?

We’re all guilty of common typographical errors – “causal” instead of “casual,” “hear” when we mean “here,” leaving the “l” out of “public.” But with the Internet and the dawn of new media messaging, mistakes are easier to make because:

• The Internet propels people to prioritize quantity and quickness over quality.
• Spell check is still considered by many as the last line of defense. (It isn’t.)
• Internet language and the casual nature of the medium influence people to overlook mistakes in emails, texts and online conversations. Unfortunately, this spills over into professional communications.

On the bright side, if an error does go public, the interactive nature of digital media makes it likely someone will spot the error and it will be fixed with haste. At the same time, it’s easier than ever to avoid careless mistakes in the first place because:

• Answers are at your fingertips. Tripped up by “effect” and “affect”? Google it.
• You can share and edit documents with others through services like Google Docs.

I receive texts written in Internet slang and emails with disclaimers lamenting the size of the iPhone keypad. And I admit to playing fast and loose with the English language on GChat. But in the digital age – where memes are just one mistake away and clumsy ads become late–night fodder – there is even more at stake for those of us who manage messages for clients, as well as for businesses handling their own websites and social media. But where there is more at stake, there’s also more opportunity to succeed.

I challenge us all to rethink how we approach language, accuracy and accountability in digital messaging. Just like checking yourself in a mirror or tasting a pie before you serve it, the series of checks and balances that exist day to day should carry over to our written communication, whether to clients or co–workers or to cousins who send endless links to lolcats.com.

Read aloud everything you write, avoid Internet slang when you can and take a second glance before hitting send on your next email. Your work will be all the better for it. Keep the disclaimer if you must.

Molly Folse is Digital Content Coordinator at Luckie & Company. You can contact her by email or follow her on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Matt Schilder via Flickr