This employee handbook issued by Disney Studios in 1943 stands out in stark contrast to the sternly written handbooks given to new hires by companies today. Yes, it was for Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. And, yes, times were more innocent back then (notice the male worker ogling the female). But the Disney handbook managed to cover everything from workplace dress code, safety, sick leave (10 days a year for women; five days for men), pay day, personal mail and terminations in a friendly, good-natured tone. It communicated a sense of the corporate culture and brand personality and a spirit of camaraderie.

Companies today often argue that they need to spell out personnel rules and policies in no-nonsense legalese because people are more litigious than ever. That may be true, but typically an employee handbook is one of the first documents a new hire receives. It would be nice if it was designed to be more welcoming and more reflective of the qualities of the brand, instead of getting right down to brass tacks and talking about criminal background checks, firearms and drugs at work, and whistle-blower protection.

When Dutch financial company SNS Reaal produced an online only annual report, it had its designer Fabrique summarize the salient points in a simple 2 and a half minute film. No fancy computer graphics, no elaborate sets, no fuzzy corporate-speak, just three ordinary-looking people walking viewers through who they are, what they do and how they performed in 2010. The complete annual is presented just as simply, incorporating functions that let readers make a custom pdf of just the pages or paragraphs that they want to keep for reference. The first test of transparent reporting: make it understandable.

Editor’s Note: This snippet is from “The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money: How to think about it. How to talk about it. How to manage it.” By Illise Benun, founder of Marketing-Mentor.com. Published by HOW Books, 2011. It’s a book we highly recommend because it is filled with practical, knowledgeable advice, and encourages designers to respect what they have to offer and to find clients who feel the same. From time to time, Ilise has said we can reprint sections.

Over the past century, dogs and a few cats have been a favorite image to appear on postage stamps. Worldwide, there are now more than 4,000 stamps featuring dogs. Perhaps coincidentally, both the UK and the U.S. are issuing commemorative stamps showing rescued animals. The British Royal Mail has just issued a set to mark the 150th anniversary of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. All of the pets on the stamps were abandoned by owners and “rehomed” by the charity.

This year the U.S. Postal Service has chosen animal rescue shelters for its 2010 “social awareness” cause, and will release its “Adopt a Shelter Pet” series on April 30.

The postal service has much preferred pictures of dogs over cats. That’s ironic, because when was the last time that a cat bit a postman? In the UK, cats didn’t merit their own set of stamps until 1995. In the U.S., a cat made it onto a stamp in 1998, but had to share the stamp panel with a gerbil, goldfish and Bassett hound. The USPS did finally put a dog and a cat from a rescue shelter on a first class stamp in 2004, but only to encourage spaying and neutering. While we are pleased that the Royal Mail and USPS are paying attention to animals in need of a home, we must add, it’s about time!

For most companies, the problem with radical differentiation is the “radical” part. If nobody’s doing it, you’d be crazy to do it yourself, right?

What stops most companies from zagging is the cloud of uncertainty that follows innovation. In an effort to remove the cloud, marketers often conduct focus groups, which, while helpful in some situations, are notably unhelpful for encouraging innovation. This is because radical differentiation doesn’t test well in focus groups. When you ask people what they want, they’ll invariably say they want more of the same, only with better features, a lower price, or both. This is not a recipe for radical differentiation. This is a recipe for me-too products with pint-sized profit potential.

A better way to judge a new offering is to map customer feedback against a success pattern. When you draw a chart with two axes, one for “good” and one for “different,” you can see how your business concept stacks up against other successful zags. You also begin to see why most companies are fooled by focus groups.

On the chart, the “good” axis can include any attributes that customers typically value: quality workmanship, good aesthetics, low price, high functionality, ease of use, speed, power, style, and so on. These are the qualities on which most offerings compete. The “different” axis is for any attributes that make an offering, well – different. These can include attributes that customers may characterize as surprising, weird, ugly, fresh, crazy, offbeat, novel, and so on.

As with other charts of this type, the best place to be is in the upper-right corner – in this case, where good and different combine to create a successful zag. Classic examples are the Aeron chair, Citibank, Toyota Prius, Charles Schwab, and Cirque du Soleil. However, successful zags usually test poorly with consumers before they’re launched. They fare pretty well on the “good” axis, but then attract so many negative comments on the “different” axis that their companies get nervous and reject them.

Not surprisingly, where companies find the most encouragement is in the upper-left corner. Offerings here test extremely well, and the “good” comments are rarely undermined by negative comments such as “weird,” “ugly,” “offbeat,” or “crazy.” But the reason customers don’t make negative comments about offerings in this corner is that there’s nothing new or different to dislike. So while offerings in the upper-left may test extremely well, there’s little chance that they’ll lead to radical differentiation.

Offerings in the lower left corner, where “not good” meets “not different,” test fairly well with customers, since there’s not much to dislike or misunderstand about them. While this can encourage companies to proceed, in the end these offerings fail because there’s either too little demand or too much competition.

Offerings in the lower right corner usually don’t get off the ground at all. They’re perceived from the start to be dogs – and guess what? – they are.

What makes the good-different chart tricky, though, is that some of the potential winners in the upper right corner look a lot like the dogs in the bottom right corner. The line is often blurry, and the consequences for making a bad call can be extreme. It takes an experienced innovator to know the difference – someone who can match customer comments to a previous pattern of success.

When BMW decided to launch the Mini Cooper, piles of research showed that Americans had no interest in the ultrasmall car and only wanted more SUVs. Despite this “fact,” the zagmeisters at BMW stepped on the gas instead of the brakes and motored straight into profitable new market space.

The intrepid folks at BMW had a lot in common with physicist Niels Bohr. Many years ago one of his colleagues was invited to deliver a controversial paper to a group of scientists, including Bohr. Immediately afterward his colleague asked Bohr how the paper was received by the other scientists. He replied, “We all agree that your idea is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough.” The Mini people were crazy, too. Like a Fox.

This was a decade when everything as we knew it became obsolete, from newspapers and fax machines to analog TVs and dial-up Internet connections. Like Midwesterners say about the weather, if you don’t like it, wait 15 minutes, it will change.

It struck us as appropriate when Design Army, a creative firm in Washington D.C., emailed out a screensaver clock for its season’s greeting. Forget a calendar, that’s too slow. This clock rolls out the time in hours, minutes, seconds and 1/100th seconds. As Design Army says about its gift of time, “make every second count.” Our sentiments exactly. Don’t blink, you might miss something important.

Downlaod Design Army Screensaver

For the past three years, Johnson Banks in London has done a year-end clean up by recycling their old magazines and passing them along to friends and clients in the form of Christmas greetings. This year the UK design firm ram-punched the shape of a snow man. A tip they passed along is that Design Week “punches brilliantly.” It could be the weight and uniformity of the paper that cuts clean, the vibrant ink holdout on the sheet, or good design karma projected from the magazine.