Every year we produce tee shirts which we give away at networking events, to clients and friends. It is a great way to market the company, particularly if the shirt is something more than a big business card. We try to give ours a little style and desirability to it. This year we have gone for what one of the designers called “Techno-surf”.

Anyway, we like designing tee shirts. It demonstrates our graphic skills and allows us a little freedom in terms of design, what we do and why we do it. It also generates a bit of work in the form of tee shirt designs for clients.

It has to be said that every year we get people asking us if they can have one. Last year we had to stop because it was costing us a fortune. This year if you like the tee shirt then let us know. If you are a client have one or more with our compliments. If you are a friend then you can probably have one if you pester us enough. If you are a relative, wait until Birthday, Christmas, Passover, Ramadan, etc. If you are anyone else we can sell one to you at about £15.

All tee shirts have been made by our wonderful clients and friends Squat Orange If you don’t want one of our tee shirts, you will want one of theirs!

Summary:

Discover. Take an overview of brochure design.
Target. Who are you communicating with?
Objective. What are you trying to achieve?
Simplicity. Say a few things well rather than many things badly.
Lines and boxes. Be cautious over using lines and boxes.
Use negative space.
Stand out from the crowd.
Use colour as a weapon.
Choose the right paper.
Proofread! Check for phrasing, spelling and grammar.
Good luck

A company like Creative Thing will put a great deal of effort into professional brochure design. However, like most things, 80% of what it takes to make an effective brochure is down to getting a few basic elements right. So, if you want to go it alone, follow the tips below and you will be well on your way to creating a professional brochure design.

Discover. Take an overview of brochure design. Collect and examine brochures from other industries, competitors, anywhere at all. What you should be looking for is how designers give brochures their appeal, how they present information, what elements are in theses brochures, what size they are and so on. With a range of brochures in front of you, you will develop a sense of what a good brochure looks like, what has wow factor and what is effective. This of course is subjective. You can get a few friends and colleagues involved and see if you can understand what they like and don’t like.

Target. Who are you communicating with? How do you want to come across to them and more importantly how do they want you to come across? You can select a font which is serious like Times, Modern like Futura, strong but neutral like Helvetica, childish like Tekton and in doing so you give your brochure a character or a voice and this will alter the way the reader approaches the brochure. Don’t use more than two or three fonts – it is messy and distracting. Use one for main body of the text. You can use another or a variation of the same font for headlines and perhaps another for more detailed information. You can do simple things like vary the font size to emphasize importance. One professional tip is to not mess with alignment, underlining and so on. Symmetry in typography is not the same as balance in design. Use it with caution.

Objective. What are you trying to achieve? Generally you will achieve your objective through helping you customers with their objectives. In our own client presentations we often find ourselves saying that we do not design brochures for our customers, but for their customers. In the same way, you brochure is less about what you do, than how to make your customers lives better.

If you want a sales brochure then you need to make sure the products are presented in that way with all the buying information at the reader’s disposal. If you want to inform people of a range of service lines, make sure that this is clear. Your objective will be achieved if you present your reader with attractive and viable options to improve their lot.

Simplicity. Say a few things well rather than many things badly. Consider your objectives and then create a ‘Brochure Checklist’. This should list all the necessary information and and highlight it in order of importance. We call this ‘information architecture’. The more you consider how to elevate the important content from everything else, the more effective your brochure will be. Similarly, simplicity in use of images is important. When you choose images you should do so either because they illustrate your product or support your proposition. But there is a balance. Images should focus the reader’s attention, rather than distract it.

A good idea to handle all this is to make block type sketches and experiment with where pictures and words will go. Create a ‘flat plan’ or diagram of all pages and allocate where each element will go. Try repositioning things to see how your design is affected.

Lines and boxes. Be cautious over using lines and boxes. These elements can be used to separate components on a page. But if you have too many components and therefore boxes, frames and lines, then you end up with a confusion of crazy paving. If you find yourself having to do this, you may be better advised to get more pages and spread things out a little more.

Use negative space. Designers of all types talk of ‘positive use of negative space’. Apart from sounding very pretentious, it means that space is a good thing and you should not rush to fill it up. It can also be used to emphasize things better than lines or frames. A big space round a small picture gives it a great deal of poignancy. Small blocks of text on uncluttered pages does the same, particularly if the font is subtle and the colour not too bold. It is the essence of high quality where the designer is prepared to throw loads of page real estate at relatively little content. It makes it seem very exclusive and expensive.

The negative space in a design alters the tone. It can be the difference in design terms between a gallery and a junk shop. Same basic content, different sense of value and expectation. It is like a person shouting in a noisy room. What they say is lost amongst the background noise. But people will strain to hear a person whispering in an quiet room.

Stand out from the crowd. Marketing people talk about things having ’stand-out’. You do not get noticed by blending in. The cover of your brochure will need stand out, as will the important elements within the brochure. You cna do this with size, colour, space allocation, typography and so on. But if it is important, you want to make sure it get seen.

Use colour as a weapon. Colours cna be your greatest weapon when used correctly. Thye are also problematic, complicated and interesting things. Some colours go together and others do not. You can have background colour (the colour of the paper) and coloured elements on that. Try looking at a colour wheel to get an idea of colours that work togethe.

Lack of colour can also be effective. In a world where there is so much colour and detail, black and white can offer stand-out.

Choose the right paper. A brochure is also a tactile thing as well as a visual thing. This is important. It will be held and therefore the feel and weight of the brochure will make an impression on the reader. Paper comes in all sizes, weights, colours, and textures. Recycled paper can make a point about your business as well as adding a distinctive feel to your brochure. Glossy or matt. Perhaps some tracing paper inside the brochure, heavy paper stock or perhaps thin paper. All of these add different dimensions to your brochure. Get some samples form a printer or an art shop and feel free to use them creatively.

Proofread! Check for phrasing, spelling and grammar. Unlike a website, you cannot cheaply alter the mistakes once they are printed. Run the entire thing through a spell check in your computer. Then you need to proofread your design repeatedly before going to print. Then get your mother to do it, your spouse to do it, anyone in the office and also do it all over again yourself. One tip is to read lines backwards, it often highlights errors. Finally take one last critical look at the entire brochure, look, feel, layout and so on, hold your breath and send it to print.

Good luck

Before you start try the following advice.

Make sure you have something like Microsoft Publisher on your PC or iWork on your Mac. You can download trial versions of InDesign or Quark Xpress but there is a bit of a learning curve with these.

Get to know where you can source royalty free pictures. morguefile.com and istockphotgraphy are good places.

Get a range of prices from a printer for different sizes, pages and types of brochure. Digital printing from high street printers is often the most cost effective for low runs. You might want to consider online services such as Lulu.com as well.

There are a range of skills that go into creating an advertisement. Apart from graphic design, artworking and other design skills, there is a way of thinking about how you make advertising an effective form of marketing. This involves psychology, research, ergonomics and usability. You can spend years studying entire degrees in advertising without doing much more than scratching the surface of this. However, like most things there is a Pareto aspect to advertising. About 80% of an advertisement’s effectiveness is achievable by getting a few things right.

What Are You Talking About?

The foremost rules of advertising go as follows:

1. You can say one thing well
2. You can say two things half as well
3. You can say three things badly

Most of the SME advertising work we do is initially a matter of unclutttering messages and isolating what is really important In other words, implementing these rules. And it is a difficult thing for an advertiser to accept. There are usually lots of good things about a product or service. It is tempting to list these and give them all equal billing because they all seem equally important. Adverts built on this basis tend to look like public service notices. You see no one thing for all the other things competing for attention.It is important to find the one thing that is most compelling about your service or product, say it concisely and emphatically.

Make Space

In doing this you should also allocate about 60% to 80% of your available space to saying this. Look at any quality advert and you will see a single thing said in headline format consisting of a few words and supported by a single image.

Tell people what to do

Amongst the few sentences you might include beneath your headline, typically to expand upon it, you should also tell people what to do next. In the trade this is known as a ‘call to action’.

4. Include a call to action

It might be to phone or go to a website, or to go to a shop, but tell them to do something.

Get Noticed

The next thing to remember is that an advert is designed to be seen. Hence rules 5 and 6:

5. Design an advert to stand out

With an advert, you are trying to be noticed. You use words and images to do this and you use size, style and colour within the words and images. A very conservative advert will leave you looking apologetic, characterless and completely camouflaged. Conversely, an outrageous ad might need to be tempered. You could get noticed for the wrong reasons. But on the whole, advertising is not for shrinking violets, it is about getting noticed.

6. Give your advertising a chance to be seen

If you cannot afford:

1. A decent sized space
2. The ‘right’ publications
3. Regular advertisements over a reasonable period of time

Then don’t waste your time and money creating an advert in the first place.

Size is not everything, but it certainly is something! Below a certain level you will just do more harm than good.

The right publications can be a difficult call. Advertising sales people are good at making whatever they’re selling sound like the right publication. It is usually important to make sure you buy for your own reasons rather than be sold to for their reasons.

In any event, you probably know where you should be advertising. You will know your market, the trade mags and your local publications and which of these will be relevant to your audience. But, on the whole, mass circulation to an irrelevant market is likely to be expensive but not necessarily effective. It is best to find a publication with the right readership and reasonable circulation.

the expensive side of advertising will be purchasing the space. However, you often need to apply some frequency to give your advertising a chance of working. You will need to chip away at a market. A one-off advert in a publication for anything other than a time limited special offer, is unlikely to pay dividends. It is as well to maintain a consistent presence. It will lower resistance to your brand because you will become a familiar name and lodge yourself in people’s consciousness. People are more inclined to buy something that they have heard about than something completely new.

When asked to present at a recent business forum, we were asked if we thought advertising was some type of Rocket science. Our response:

“Advertising is not rocket science, it is getting people to show up to the launch, expecting to pay for the pleasure of doing so.”

Creative Thing is always trying to see the world from someone else’s perspective. A typical graphic design agency approach is to second guess the clients. Creative Thing are the graphic design agency who research our customer’s customers. Ultimately they are the people deciding to buy and they are therefore more important to a designer than the client!

Graphic design starts at the very moment a company starts. Most people are thinking about their logo before they have worked out their pricing strategy. And that is a telling thing. The way you present yourself to the world will determine the way your customers perceive you.

And then life takes over. While creating your own newsletters and business cards may have seemed like a necessity when you first started your company from your kitchen table, continuing to do so limits your potential business.

Like it or not, people’s opinion of your company is often made in the first few seconds, and during that time nothing has a greater impact than the appearance of your marketing materials. You may have the best products in the world or offer customer service that is light years ahead of your competition, but unless your communications come across as being from such a company, people are not going to believe you. You can shout it from the rooftops, but you may never have the opportunity to prove it.

This is where the services of a professional graphic designer come in. Much in the same way that you hire an accountant to handle your financial matters or a solicitor to handle your legal matters, putting graphic design in the hands of a professional will return a far greater profit than the money you try to save by handling it yourself.

There are many details to graphic design that may not be apparent to someone outside of the industry. Choosing colours, fonts and images can often seem simple but this is because people often choose what appeals to them. To take it a step further, there are many nuances to the layout of a marketing piece that have a tremendous impact on it’s effectiveness. True graphic design is about creating something that will illicit a particular response, whether it be to convey a message or to persuade a potential buyer.

Creative Thing offers a complete range of graphic design services, from print media such as brochures, posters and signage, to logo design and web site design, as well as everything in between.

Graphic Design Worcestershire – was where we started. We now have clients across the world from next door in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire in the West Midlands to Tasmania and Sydney in Australia. We work with companies and individuals of all sizes, one-man-bands up to MOD and government contracts. Small companies, start-ups, SMEs and multinationals whether it be around our own region in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire and the West Midlands or further afield.

I read a recent definition of Graphic Design:

Graphic design is the process and art of combining text and graphics and communicating an effective message in the design of logos, graphics, brochures, newsletters, posters, signs, and any other type of visual communication. Today’s graphic designers often use desktop publishing software and techniques to achieve their goals.

Examples: “A brochure that makes watching water boil seem exciting or a business card that entices the recipient to call instead of toss owe at least part of their success to good graphic design — it doesn’t matter if they were created with the latest hot software or an old ink pen.”

I can’t help thinking that this is incomplete. We may be based in Upton Upon Severn a small backwater that makes the news annually when the river floods, but graphic design is a universal experience which makes our view as valid as anyone else’s and more valid if you look at the experience we bring to graphic design – even from Upton Upon Severn. (more…)

Web users take just 50 milliseconds to like or hate a website.

From an article originally by Michael Hopkin in Nature News

Researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

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The reason we started Creative Thing is because there was a huge gap in the market for properly designed communication tools, constructed properly with research, and a proper design process. The reason this gap exists is because so many people think that graphic design is an artistic exercise. Something to do with making things look ‘cool’.

This is wrong.

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