Finding Real Deal Graphic Design Services

These days there are a lot of sources out there for graphic design services online. Perhaps too many. This article covers some useful need-to-knows about graphic design services and what to look for when ordering a logo design, brochure design or any of the countless reasons to order a graphic design service for your company or organization’s imaging needs.

Graphic design services these days (like any services these days) have been on a downward slide for some time now (in this Designer’s opinion). Take logos for example. I can’t tell you how many logos I see out there featuring a swoosh or swipe looking graphic that shoots out as though orbiting the text that makes up the logo. I would like to tell you that the Designers who created the thousands of swoosh logos out there, utilized this staple of design because it was the best solution for their client. I can just hear them stating how this simple element is really a complex and developed “less is more” approach to their client’s design and worth every drop of the hundreds of dollars they are charging for it. I would like to tell you that but unfortunately that is just not the case.

I’m not saying that if you have a swoosh in your logo then you got scammed by a false Graphic Designer looking to make a quick buck on a simple design that catches your eye. In fact I have even used a swoosh or two in my designs (though usually at my client’s request and certainly not as the only element in the design). What I am saying is that when you look at how many logos out there feature this graphic swoosh element it becomes quite obvious that a great deal of graphic design sources these days are just trying to get their orders filled as quickly as possible without actually putting thought into the purpose of the design and the needs of the client. It is sad but true that most companies of any kind in this day and age are focusing more on looking like a company rather than actually being a company. How many times have you ordered something only to find out later it was just a gimmick designed to get the sale.

So how do you know if you are hiring a real Graphic Designer focused on doing real design work and not just one of the many impostors out there trying to look like they are putting the time and thought into your design that you are paying them good money for? A good place to start is the facts.

When you are online looking for a Graphic Designer, do a little reading. They should have an About Page, a resume or some form of credentials available on their website. If they don’t then its time to leave that website. I do not recommend testimonials because these days there is no way to verify where these wonderful comments came from. Stick to the facts and information that can be verified if need be. If you are paying hundreds of dollars or more for design services then you had better see some years of experience on that Designer’s resume. Where did they get their education and did they actually even major in Graphic Design? What does their job history look like. Have they really been a Graphic Designer at every job in their resume? It is worth it to do a little research because chances are you are going to need more design work done in the future and wouldn’t it be great to have a Designer you can depend on?

Next take a good look at their design portfolio. Do the designs look similar to each other? Maybe the elements of the designs look different (because they are for different companies) but are they all arranged about the same with the same kind of type used? Are they just putting swooshes on everything? If so then you are most likely at the site of one of the impostors who uses visual gimmicks to wow their clients and get the sale.

Beware those graphic design websites offering promises that are too good to be true (if something sounds too good to be true…). If you are paying only $50 for a logo then your are most likely getting a pre-made graphic or clip art with your company name stamped on it to make the sale. If they say that countless designers will be working on your project then chances are you will never speak directly with those designers, or you will be paying for countless designers, or they are just using visual gimmicks to get the design sold so they can move on to the next client as quickly as possible.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Feel free to try these graphic design gimmick sites yourself. But don’t say I didn’t warn you if you find yourself with designs that are not working as you expected or Graphic Designers charging you for even a simple adjustment to your design. Gimmicks are used all over the world these days so don’t be surprised if the design that you though really popped, ends up blending in like one of those swoosh logo in a sea of thousands of swoosh logos!

For well thought out and fully developed graphic design services please stop by my website at:. You can view some typical prices, check out my credentials and portfolio or request a quick quote. Also, your first design with me will be 50% off the design fees.

May 21, 2012 – 12:08 am Categories: Design Services | Post a comment

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The Package IS the Product

The Christmas season is upon us, and children young and old take great pleasure in wrapping gifts for loved ones and friends.

Now, a little family history here… my mother, Head Wrapper of our household at Christmas, was not one to ‘fuss’ with wrapping to make gifts look like those found in store displays.

As a Capricorn born in the Chinese Year of the Goat, “pragmatic” should have been her middle name. No sense investing a lot of time in making it look ‘perfect’. Or buying expensive and difficult-to-maneuver foil paper and wrestling with superfluous curly bows. She had four kids ranging in age from two to 15 ripping everything to shreds inside 10 minutes on Christmas morning. So why bother?

Heck, larger gifts would get wrapped in the Regina Leader Post Sunday comics.

Wha-a-a-at? It was colorful!

To this day, I admit, a certain amount of Mom’s practicality has rubbed off. Although my husband refuses to let me wrap anything in newspaper, I do tend to save the ‘fancy’ paper for special gifts. If it’s REALLY special, it gets a stick-on bow! Ooooooo…. the anticipation to open THAT one…

A-HA! There it is.

YOU know what I mean! You see that one gift under the tree, the one with the Martha Stewart treatment. The big fluffy bow atop a thick foil embossed paper with the hand-made card… and YOUR name on it! And you just KNOW it’s THEE gift!

The packaging influenced your opinion of its contents!

Think for a moment, back to this Christmas shopping season. How many times did a package influence your decision to buy?

An episode of “The Shopping Bags” in 2007 looked at the effects of packaging on our purchasing behavior. And no surprise to this designer, research indicates that consumers are heavily influenced by the packaging of products.

It’s the kind of subtle nuances that experienced designers know get results. In one case, tasters said that the pop from a can with more yellow on it had a more refreshing taste. And that when sampling canned meat, tasters thought the one that came from the can with the photo of the meat – with a spring of parsley on top – tasted more homemade.

In their own live case study, the ladies conducted taste tests of various ranch salad dressings. When the samples were ‘blind’ (tasters could not see the label) tasters showed a preference for a store brand over leading national brands.

But when tasters saw the bottle displayed, over half chose a highly recognized national brand name dressing, simply because the packaging was more attractive. They expect that the national brand is the better quality product.

So what does all this mean?

Package design is not just about fulfilling a function, or even about making something look nice.

It’s about building a brand.

“Packaging will become even more integrated with the product in function, branding, and merchandising,” says Duane McDonald, Senior Manager of Package Production at Kimberly-Clark Corp. “It has to do its part in delivering the brand promise to consumers. Graphics and aesthetics will be more important.”

Robert Henry Hall, Vice President of Brand Development at Boston Beer Co., describes this brand promise as “an emotional benefit of style. The design makes the consumer feel a certain way through the product and package use.”

From(2005)

Building a brand is really about creating an experience for your customer.

Remember that ‘special’ gift under the Christmas tree? The one that you just know is THEE gift, meant especially for you, the one you just KNOW you’re going to love, with that ‘extra personal touch’ added to it to make it stand out? THAT is the sensation you want to create for your audience. The “I-just-can’t-WAIT-to-see-what’s-inside!” feeling.

A good package design doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money, or be wasteful in its excess. The key to great package design is to make sure it gives a hint about the wonders that await inside.

If you are creating a product that will require packaging and labeling, put pragmatism aside. Spring for the foil embossed paper and huge curly bows to give your customers that ‘wow’ feeling of anticipation. Get a professional designer to create the package that ignites that emotion.

Unless of course you want to give the impression that your brand is about finding new ways to reuse the Sunday funnies.

May 21, 2012 – 12:08 am Categories: Design Services | Post a comment

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Trade Show Banner Stands

It is a known fact that no business can operate in isolation sans quality product management and advertising solution. It is for this reason that advertising is necessary and for that purpose, business organizations keep chalking out various product promotion tactics. Tradeshows have become an important place for advertising, so it has become essential for the business houses to utilize this opportunity for maximum returns.

With thousands of other stalls in a trade show, it is very important that your business stall should stand out to attract more people and for that, you need attractive banners. You can easily be noticed and benefit from brand building with the help of a striking banner. You can use the trade show banner for display or even as stand-alone message equipment. The most cost effective trade show banner is those that use one stand.

The banner stands are lightweight and are generally made up of light aluminum or plastic thereby making them highly portable and easy to assemble within few minutes, therefore, this banner can drastically reduce the cost of transportation and labour charges as your staff members can easily assemble them. The banner stands can generally support banners which measures eight feet wide and six feet tall but there are many banners, which are adjustable, so you can fix the banners according to your requirements. the logo or the message of the business house are generally imprinted on vinyl or some other flimsy material, which can be attached to the banner stands so that the banner can be properly displayed.

As per the size of the display, the banner stands can double the space of you trade stall thus separating other surrounding tables from your table. This is very beneficiary for your business, firstly you will be left alone and secondly, you can entertain your customer at you stall, without worrying about the time. Thirdly, it will be easier for you to hold the attention of the people when they will be confined to a space. In order to get maximum returns from your marketing strategy and to beautify your trade show stands you should use the effective displays such as the Pop up Trade Show Displays, Tabletop Displays Panel Display Units, Modular Displays, Fabric Displays and Portable Podiums Tower Displays.

The banners are the best way to promote your business with logos and messages of your product and services in a trade show. In addition to this, the trade show banners are cost effective as they can be used repeatedly. The different types of banner stands are the outdoor, scrolling, retractable, standard and telescopic. Most of the banner stands are highly flexible and can support banners of any sizes and shape yet they are portable and stable. Apart from the trade shows the banner stands can be used in retail showrooms, churches, career fairs, lobbies, events, seminars and conferences. Next time when you set up a trade booth make sure that you use the best banner stands to convey the message of your company more effectively and thereby gain higher returns from the marketing strategy that you have set for the trade show.

May 20, 2012 – 10:32 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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Are You Ready for Direct Response Radio Advertising?

These Six Questions Tell You How to Make the Answer “Yes”

Direct response radio advertising is an amazingly under recognized way to grow a business quickly and profitably. For one thing, it’s fully accountable, so every dollar spent can be tracked to the revenue it generates and unprofitable spending can be eliminated. In addition, it’s extremely scalable. Once you figure out what works, you can increase your revenues and profits simply by increasing your media spend. It’s nearly as easy as stepping on the gas pedal. Direct response radio advertising is truly a powerful engine for profitable growth.

When it is done properly.

Most of the time, radio advertising is not done right. The first step in “doing radio right” is not to do it until you’re ready. The questions in this article will help you determine whether you’re ready to take advantage of direct response radio advertising. If you’re not ready, this article will tell you the steps you need to take to get ready.

Do you know how you will define success?

How much, in profit, is each customer worth to your business over the course of that customer’s relationship with your company? This is the customer lifetime value question and it is vital to know this before you go into direct response advertising. Why? Because the definition of success in direct response radio advertising is acquiring a new customer at a cost that allows for a profitable relationship with that new customer. If you don’t know the lifetime value, you cannot know how much you are able to pay to acquire a customer.

Think about the day when you run your first ad schedule on a station. The results come in. How do you know whether they are good or bad? Are they good because there is revenue? Are they good because the phone is ringing or because visits to the web site went up? These are not sufficient to understand and evaluate the performance of your advertising. You can only evaluate advertising performance within the context of your customer lifetime value.

But knowing your customer lifetime value is not enough. You have to break this down into the metrics that you’ll use to evaluate and manage your campaign. These metrics are part of the formula for lifetime value, metrics like “cost per lead” (CPL), cost per order (CPO, also known as CPA or cost per acquisition), conversion rate, and average revenue per sale. Do not begin a direct response radio advertising campaign (or a business of any sort using any kind of demand generation tactics) until you know your business profitability metrics very well.

Are you prepared to test?

We have often heard people say “We tried radio advertising and it doesn’t work for us”.

Here’s the problem with that statement: Developing a profitable direct response radio advertising campaign isn’t something that is accomplished with a “trial”. It is far too complicated an endeavor, with far too many variables, to assess its effectiveness for your business with a “trial”. There are creative variables and media variables, and together they present a daunting number of possible combinations to achieve success.

To properly assess the potential for direct response radio advertising to generate profitable new customers for your business, you must approach direct response radio advertising with a testing mindset. That calls for a patient, methodical approach.

What does this mean for you? It means that you need around $20,000 to test multiple ads over a 4-8 week period before you’ll know which approaches will (and won’t) yield more profitable results. Don’t go into direct response radio advertising with a “dabble” mindset. Go into it with solid business goals: a) To assess the potential of direct response radio advertising to drive profitable new revenues, and b) to understand which approaches – both creative and media – produce the best results for your company. While you’ll generate revenues and profits during the test, the real benefit of testing is in the learnings that can be applied to a larger campaign over a long period of time to drive significant sales and profits.

Do you have a compelling offer?

The offer in your direct response radio ad is one of the most important elements for success. But why do you need to be thinking about that before you even approach radio advertising? Isn’t that something your radio advertising agency should come up with? Well, yes, but… The “but” here hinges on the fact that any offer must be something that’s possible given the business profitability structure, and possible given the systems and processes that run the business. These are constraints that only you know about. It will take time to alter existing systems or processes should that be necessary to support a compelling offer in your advertising. Your agency might recommend you give away a free DVD player with each order. That would drive a lot of orders, but would they be profitable? You need to define the playing field for the agency and then engage in the dialogue of getting the most out of what’s possible given the constraints.

What is a compelling offer? It’s different, it’s relevant, and it’s meaningful. A free complimentary product or service is a good example. For example, if you’re marketing a skin care product that fights acne, you can give away a skin softener product as a bonus. Others use free trials with conversion mechanisms. These can work well provided the product performs as promised. Still others employ the ‘risk free trial’ approach, which essentially positions the 30 day money back guarantee as an offer – a “risk free trial”. The possibilities are many.

Is your business infrastructure set up to support direct response advertising?

The most important aspect of preparing for direct response radio advertising is ensuring you’re ready for the volume of leads and orders that can result. The easiest way to project this is to know your CPL and CPO projections (see above) and then assume a specific weekly media spend. For example, say you’re running $25,000 in media per week in direct response radio. This is considered a relatively small campaign. If your business model shows that you expect a CPL of $15, then you’ll be driving 25,000/15 = 1667 calls per week. Can your sales call center and fulfillment center handle this volume? More importantly, can they handle more, because when you’re profitable while running a $25,000 weekly radio campaign, chances are you’ll soon want to grow to five to ten times that size as soon as you can.

There’s another vital piece of infrastructure you absolutely must have in place before you begin direct response radio advertising. It is a firm requirement because without it you’re wasting your money and ruining your reputation with the vendors you’ve hired to help you build the campaign. That requirement is excellent data collection and transmission to the radio media buying department at your radio agency. By this we mean that you absolutely must have a mechanism for capturing the lead, order, and revenue data by the unique identifier (such as the toll-free phone number) for the media buy that generated the call. If you’re sending calls to a call center, this is no problem. They understand this need and are already set up to accommodate it. If you’re trying to take calls in house, most of the time you’ve got work to do to ensure you can provide your media company with the information they need on a timely basis (usually first thing every morning). If you are sending leads to a web site, which is happening with increasing frequency, you must set up data capture and transmission mechanisms via a web tracking software program like Google Analytics before the campaign begins, preferably before you even contact a direct response radio advertising agency to get started. It’s amazing how many times we’ve been told that this tracking mechanism is in place and that we’ll get daily data exports from the web tracking software, only to begin the test and find out we won’t be receiving data for many days and what we do receive will not be complete.

Are you aware of your biases and assumptions?

This question probably sounds a little different than the rest but it’s well worth spending some time on. What you must understand is that you, the client, lead the show. As the agency, we will tell you want we recommend based on our expertise in the field of direct response radio advertising. It’s up to you to make sure we’re making those recommendations with all of the necessary information. Biases and assumptions can damage this important aspect of the client-agency relationship.

Biases and assumptions underlie beliefs you have about key campaign questions like why your customers buy from you, or what appeals in advertising will resonate with the target audience. If you inject these into the process as facts, your agency will likely take them as such. The agency is unlikely to argue strongly with you – - it’s just the nature of the “the customer is always right” tendency in client-agency relationships (as well as many others).

Let’s say you’ve been advertising online with banners and pay per click (or with TV or with print – the medium doesn’t matter). You want to test radio. One common mistake is to do a survey of your existing customers and ask them why they buy. The results show that the reasons these people buy match up very well with the appeals in the advertisements that you’ve been running. You conclude that the exact same approach will work in radio and you require that approach be followed by the agency. But you’ve overlooked the fact that your survey was very biased. Why? Because the people you surveyed were prompted to become customers by the ads you ran. Of course you’re going to find people who validate the ads you’ve run – they responded to them to become customers! The non-biased way to do a survey is to collect data from a random sample of people (not current customers) matching the target customer profile.

Notice the point is not to eradicate your biases or assumptions, but to become aware of them. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of biases. However, if you’re aware of them you can then test them methodically and you won’t be in danger of leading your agency down the wrong path – one that often leads to the failure of radio campaigns.

Are you different?

Me-too products or services don’t work, period. In direct response you find this out quickly. You must be different. One important twist to this is that you can be different in any one of a number of different ways. As a certain marketing professor liked to say “you can innovate anywhere in the value chain…the more places the better”. Did Dell Computer make innovative new computers? Not at all. Dell found a way to put computers together faster, with higher reliability and at a lower cost than any other PC maker. That, among other things, translated into a super low cost structure which meant Dell could beat competitors on price and still make more money than those competitors. There are other examples. Maybe you’re marketing a product in the diet aid category. There are “support” food programs (Weight Watchers), pills (Trimspa) and informational/diet regimens (the Atkins diet).

Do you have to have the latest breakthrough pill to compete? That would be nice but there are only so many of those to be discovered. So you can be different in another way. Your spokesperson could be a celebrity. Your marketing angle could be radically different. Your offer could be unique. Your cost structure or overall business model might allow for an incredible free gift or a very low price. Your customer retention program might be so strong that you can give away a free trial to acquire large numbers of customers. There are many, many ways to be different. How you’re different – while important – is still second to the fact that if you’re a me-too product you’ll not last long.

May 20, 2012 – 10:31 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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It’s An Absolute Disgrace – Advertising Agencies Are Getting Away With Murder

Well… with downright Robbery at least!

Why are they allowed to get away with no accountability at all?

The pollution of advertising messages is getting worse, despite supposed claims to clean the problem up.

And now there’s even more bad news, a major study on Internet clutter finds the more ads on a page, the more click through rates, brand impact and product information declines.

Because Advertising Agencies have no answer to the problem of advertising’s increasing ineffectiveness, the solution now is an increasing stampede to any new destination, like mobile phones where the greatest risk lies for a new avalanche of commercial content.

Whilst all this is taking place a big assault on television is underway, by, for example Google.

And all of this adds up to…you’ve got it, more and more clutter.

So whilst more and more marketing monies are poured down the black hole of TV and Internet advertising, there is another threat from the rackets and scams of the digital Mafia.

The problem is so dire that hackers are now conducting online auctions for people’s personal details. It has emerged that there is an $8 billion on line black economy centred on credit card theft, corporate blackmail and insider share dealing.

Do you want your advertising to appear in such an environment? Meanwhile Advertising Agencies are leading the rush, together with increasing the clutter, onto that totally unproven, and highly suspect medium, the Internet.

Even that well known advertising personality, Jerry Della Femina is on record as to questioning the value of advertising on the Internet. Jerry has played an enormously influential role in the history of advertising. He states “I don’t know any advertising agency that has mastered the Internet yet. Being able to understand it and sell products on it through advertising creates resentment, working to shut down attention rather than elicit interest.”

For Media Companies the problem of clutter raises complicated questions of economics, Media companies and their associates won’t look at it because they don’t think in a multimedia way. Advertising will have to try and deal with the problem.

And the new media has the potential to deliver even more saturation, clutter and intrusiveness than traditional media, so the new media will only worsen marketing resistance.

Any time there’s a new destination for people, the assumption is they’ve got to find a way to put some ads there. That’s only going to make things worse.

Under the headline “The Money-waster That Marketing Ignores” AdAge had this to say about Clutter’s drain on advertising effectiveness.

“Clutter, the rising blizzard of commercial messages sweeping through TV shows and other traditional and non-traditional communications channels, has become a blinding, deafening force heavily cutting into the overall effectiveness of advertising..

Yet little is being done to quantify the massive financial drain of clutter on marketing campaigns or organise a practical solution to the problem. Advertising Age paints a bleak picture of an industry apparently determined to ignore what may be its largest single money-waster!

However, the truth is that the interruption advertising model that supports television is broken, and without the utility that is currently found only on the Internet, TV will eventually become completely unsupportable.

People don’t like to watch ads. The combination of the Internet and DVRs have opened up a Pandora’s Box… People know what life is like without the traditional advertising model, and there’s no going back. They will willingly sacrifice some production quality if doing so means they don’t have to be interrupted. Trying to force people to accept interruption is only going to turn them off more.

The death knell for the advertising agencies?

Advertisers in the US will, for the first time, be able to see how many viewers have watched TV during ad breaks thanks to more detailed viewing data to be released by Nielsen Media Research from next month, according to reports.

According to the Financial Times, Nielsen will provide US TV networks with accurate data on how many viewers continue to watch channels through commercial breaks.
Nielsen said the new audience ad data would make a “big change” to the US ad industry, allowing broadcasters to access the average audience rating for ads during a programme, but it would not rate the success of individual ads.

The changes are being tipped to substantially alter the relationship between broadcasters and advertisers in the US ad market, which is worth $70bn (£35.6bn) annually.

Sara Erichson, general manager of national services at Nielsen, said: “There have been increasing calls from buyers and sellers of advertisers to look at the audience ratings and not use programme ratings as a proxy.”

However, the new data could divide the industry, with some advertisers supporting calls for more accurate information on the performance of TV campaigns, but others fearing a dramatic loss in coverage if networks decide some ads are making viewers switch off.

There is, and has been for some years, a very simple solution to the ills that beset the marketing and advertising industries. In the past the advertising agencies have shunned the solution because it does not rely upon creativity, reach and frequency, the current model so beloved by the advertising industry.

It is interactive marketing communication, in one fell swoop Clients could solve all their problems and assist existing media to solve theirs at the same time.

Interactive advertising is richer than all other forms of marketing communication, and it is becoming increasingly clear that it is only a matter of time before Clients embrace the business saving life force of interaction!

Choose your own commercials anyone?

Interactive TV will immediately halt the interruption model on which television is based, that is interactive marketing properly executed will make advertising on terrestrial TV become richer because of the very nature of Interactive Marketing Communication.

Existing terrestrial television need no new technology imposed upon it to create immediately highly successful, totally accountable advertising “Events.”

May 20, 2012 – 8:55 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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Helpful Outdoor Advertising

Over the years people have gotten busier and busier, spending larger amounts of their time outside of their homes. As technology has advanced and become more accessible, people are also in more control of what advertising they consume, and more options mean they can choose to be picky over what they do expose themselves to. This means it is becoming increasingly difficult to advertise to new customers and to peak the interest of potential or unlikely patrons. In order to get around this difficulty, businesses need to include promotional tools in their advertising campaign that are much less controllable by consumers.

Controlled Advertisements

Internet, radio, television, newspapers, flyers, and magazines all fall under the “highly controllable” category. Our homes are our castles and consumers are becoming experts on how to be in command of the media entering their domain. So what are ways to reach potential consumers without trying to break through the ever tightening security around their house?

Breaking Through the Barrier

The best way to beat the problem of trying to “break through” is to wait until the potential customer comes out and leaves the security of his house. Potential customers come to your business every day when they drive by your place of business, usually on their way to a destination other than your company. Those who drive by either don’t need your services, or don’t know your services are there and readily available. For these reasons, companies use outdoor advertisements such as billboards, signs, banners, and flags, trying to attract attention to their name and business when potential customers are outside of their protective “castle”. But here presents another problem. Consumers may not be able to select the advertisements they are being exposed to, but they do experience a sort of advertisement bombardment fatigue. They are so used to seeing “SALE” in big red letters and billboards crammed with information that while they may drive past it, that doesn’t mean outdoor advertising truly registers in their minds and memories.

Customers Come to the Advertisement

The answer to this problem is to be unique and unusual. Businesses are always looking for creative advertising and effective outdoor advertising, and that is more important now than ever before. So what is the best way to stand out from all the other advertisements people drive by? What communicates the most amount of information in the least amount of (driving-by) time?

Outdoor Advertising

One of the best ideas is to use custom banners, custom signs, and giant inflatable advertising balloons. Anything custom made is much more unique and creative than a lot of advertising competition. Custom banners and custom signs can communicate a specific, clear message with enough detail to attract attention and pique interest. Custom banners and signs can also be made in custom shapes so that they compliment pre-existing business signs, the space available, and current advertising campaigns. For something a bit bigger and even more eye-catching, the best option is a custom giant inflatable advertising balloon. Consumers are used to seeing lots of billboards and signs, all 2-dimensional forms of communication relying solely on picture, color, and text. But a giant inflatable advertising balloon has the option of being made into any 3-dimensional shape in addition. It doesn’t get more unique or creative in outdoor advertising than custom banners, custom signs, or giant inflatable advertising balloons.

May 20, 2012 – 8:55 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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Hire a Graphic Designer Or Your Nephew Judd? Tip #3

Everyone has a computer and everyone knows someone that claims to be able to save you money by creating your advertising for you. We’ve got a name for those that take on the task of creative development that shouldn’t – it is called Nephew Art. You have planned your advertising to get you the most bang for the buck and now you decide to cheap out and get someone untalented to create your ad – it’s crazy – don’t make the mistake.

Having spent more than 20 years working with graphic designers, interviewing hundreds, and viewing the work of thousands, I can assure you that it is an area where you should invest some time and money. It doesn’t mean that you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an agency but you should take the time to find a designer that you can work with who is talented, open-minded, creative and has an eye for marketing. When working with an agency, you get Creative Directors, Art Directors, Copywriters, Account Executives and Media Planners all working together to give you the best product but for most small businesses, it will be you working directly with a Graphic Designer – so you both need to fill a few shoes to get great work.

Graphic Design ties together words, images, size, colors, fonts, space, borders and more. The challenge in advertising design is to take the artist and tie them together with the marketing initiative. True Graphic Designers are Artists first and foremost and sometimes have a tendency to drift away from what the ad needs to accomplish and instead end up designing a piece of art. Keep your mind on what you want to accomplish and encourage the Graphic Designer to be creative – discuss what you want to accomplish first and then discuss the finished design as a team. A collaborative approach works well, but only if you allow their talents to shine, be heard and evolve.

When working with a Graphic Designer make certain they understand what you are trying to accomplish, your timelines, budget and vision – then let them do their thing. Find a graphic designer that you can work with long term. The longer you work together, the less you have to discuss what you want because the brand becomes a collaborative understanding between the two of you. Your company brand will begin to evolve whether planned or not from what is designed.

In the case of internet advertising, most often it is meant to provoke a click which would lead to your website where more information is available. You and your Graphic Designer should answer these questions before deciding whether you created something that is good and ready to be uploaded:

Does your ad stand out from the page?
Does it grab your eye and capture your attention?
Is the message quick, simple and clear?
How are the colours and fonts for clarity?
Can the message be seen and understood or does the brain need to read it?
If the customer is motivated to click – will they find what they want at the other end?

Find a good graphic designer that you can work with – they’ll give you better value in what you deliver to the public in the way of advertising. Allow your Nephew Judd to look up to you because you make good business decisions without ever having to fire him for incompetence.

May 20, 2012 – 7:18 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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Improve Your Online Visibility by Creating Impressive Banner Advertisements

Online banners have been introduced and employed in the market to promote the online business. These banners are used for the purpose of advertising the offers or goods and services of an organization. An entrepreneur uses this form of marketing in order to popularize the products and services of a company. These banners are instrumental in generating the interest of among the customers towards the products of a corporation. It plays a crucial role in establishing the brand image of a company.

A marketer can create an attractive and mind-gripping advertisement. Designing an attractive banner does not mean that you use a pop-up and completely obstruct the visitor from viewing the web page. There are many marketers who create an advertisement that turns out to be a distraction for a web visitor. One should be able to easily recognize your company through the design elements of a banner. This is done so that the company’s name can be easily remembered and recognized.

If a customer can easily recognize the name of an organization, it becomes convenient for a customer to grasp and remember the company name. A customer can then recollect the name of an enterprise at the time of making a purchase. The colors of an online banner advertisement should be able to communicate the design of an organization. The selected shade should match with the logo of an enterprise. The color combination of the online advertisement should match well with the shades used in the company website. A visitor may click on an advertisement and he may find a website in entirely different color. This may not leave a favorable impression on the mind of a customer.

The matching of color combination is for a proper synchronization of the advertisement as well as an advertiser’s website. A marketer needs to constantly and continuously tweak the banner advertisement. These regular modifications are done for making a banner look perfect and not obsolete with the passage of time. One can also design banners with the availabletool available on the web.

May 20, 2012 – 7:18 pm Categories: Advertising | Post a comment

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Importance of Packaging

Packaging industry has seen a tremendous shift from ordinary packaging techniques to tailor made shapes, sizes and designs. This shift is meant to fulfil the marketing strategies of firms as well as meeting the demand of innovative designs by the customers. Packaging ensures protection of the products that are meant to be distributed in the market for the purpose of sale or storage. Some of the common packaging products include boxes, envelopes, cartons, cans, bottles, bags, wrappers and containers.

In today’s world, packaging is considered as a mode of competition due to the fact that consumers have become more affluent. Another reason is their increased reliance on processed food items and manufactured goods. Companies have started finding ways and techniques to sell their products through better designing and packaging. Strong and attractive packaging designs and labels not only protect the products from breakage and damages but they are also helpful in grabbing attention of the end consumer. Packaging techniques like clustered packaging ensures that less time and manpower is used for packing and labelling of products.

Packaged delivery services started gaining importance in the early twentieth century, a time which was characterized with the advent of attractive, durable and modernized parcel and mailing boxes.

Increased dependence on packaging of products has seen a rise in the demand of availing more delivery services. As a result of this, delivery of products through mailing boxes has gained importance as it is seen as the most durable and safe way of packaging. Mailing boxes ensure tamper proof, attractive, cost-effective, recyclable, and convenient way of packaging a product. They are available in various sizes, shapes and designs in order to cater to the needs of the customers.

The size, shape, and strength of mailing boxes depend on the items to be packaged. For example, packing fragile items like glassware and vases requires extra protection in the form of double layering or extra thick walls. On the other hand, narrow boxes would be used for packaging a flat item like a mirror.

May 20, 2012 – 5:42 pm Categories: Design Services | Post a comment

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Mixing Impeller Design is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Solution

In commercial agitation equipment, the mixing impeller is the component that applies force to the raw materials being combined. In other words, the impeller is the physical part of the agitator system that directly interacts with the raw ingredients and forces them to combine with one another until the desired end product is created. There are many different types of impeller designs available, and each is better suited for certain scenarios than others. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to selecting the right impeller design for all situations.

The type of mixing impeller used for specific industrial applications will depend on a number of important variables, including the types of ingredients being combined, the desired final end product, the viscosity (or “thickness”) of the combined materials, the size and shape of the vessel used for the mixing process, and environment considerations inherent to each production area. In addition, it is important to consider whether more than one product will be produced with a given mixing system so that the impeller selected is suited for each product. Without question, matching the right mixing impeller design to the correct job type is important to achieving a successful outcome.

To help illustrate this concept, consider a common hand-held kitchen mixer. In this scenario, the two rotating “beaters” that mix or blend the wet and dry food ingredients together represent the mixing impeller. In this example, the open cylindrical shape of the beaters is well-suited for the job it was created to do. For starters, they are substantial and durable enough to combine wet and dry ingredients together effectively. Plus, they can also be used for a number of different types of food ingredients, from egg whites to much thicker concoctions. Yet, the blades themselves are relatively thin with adequate openings between them. This prevents too much batter from clumping up and getting stuck inside the cage-like design. This reduces the amount of wasted ingredients and makes cleaning up less tedious.

Further, the shape of the blades enables them to reach the bottom and sides of a standard kitchen mixing bowl. This further reduces waste by allowing them to combine more of the available ingredients into the batter being formed. One small consideration with this configuration is that it is often necessary to ‘scrape’ the sides of the mixing bowl with a spatula in order to integrate all of the available ingredients. This clearly adds a step to the process, but easily remedies the problem. Given that the overall design of hand-held kitchen mixers has remained largely unchanged over the last century or so, it is safe to say that the beater design performs as intended.

Of course, a hand-held kitchen mixer offers an extremely simplified example of how the design of a mixing impeller needs to take into account the tasks it must perform. However, this comparison does illustrate some of the key considerations industrial designers and engineers must address when designing mixing systems for commercial applications. Given the much larger costs and broader ramifications of creating a mixing system for industrial use, it is that much more important that each of these variables is thoroughly considered, analyzed and tested before a final mixing impeller design is implemented.

May 20, 2012 – 5:42 pm Categories: Design Services | Post a comment

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