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.

If you want to email to a list of people you have four options:

You can email the list to one person at a time
You can send the email once and then ‘Cc’ everyone else
You can send the email once and then ‘Bcc’ everyone else
You can use a third party service

The first will result in insanity, the second in trouble, so in the worst case please go for the third option or even better, take some time to do it professionally and go for the fourth choice.

DIY Email Marketing

A great way to market yourself quickly, efficiently and cheaply is to send emails out to lists of contacts. But beware, a well meant email to a list of people can get you into deep trouble with everyone from your contacts to the law.

Today we received just such an email from an independent HR advisor. She was launching a new website and wanted to promote it to her list of contacts - not an unreasonable thing to want to do. The email was very personal in tone “…Dear friends, family and others…” and so we thought it was from someone we knew but couldn’t really remember. Eventually it dawned on us. We met her about a year ago at a networking event, exchanged business cards and nearly did some work with her, but didn’t - in fact she was pretty rude and had a very high opinion of herself. But that’s another story.

The one thing that stood out was the Cc box on the email. Along with our email address, was another 500 or so. Bad news. So, skimming over the subtleties of good practice this is about bad practice.

Cc Vs. Bcc

If you want to email a list of people you have four options:

You can email the list one person at a time.
You can send the email once and then ‘Cc’ everyone else
You can send the email once and then ‘Bcc’ everyone else
You can use a third party service

The first option is hopeless. It will just take ages and you will be sectioned eventually.

The second option is bad form. Everyone gets to see all other email addresses, it breaks the Data Protection Act, it can get your IP address blocked as a spammer, others on the list can start to spam you as well. Most people do not want all this stuff so you can annoy people as well.

Third option is Bcc which is not bad. It is the same as Cc but each of the recipients can’t see all the other addresses the message was sent to other than the address in the ‘to’ field. Which is why most people send them to themselves and include everyone else on the Bcc list.

The fourth option is probably where you should be aiming. options like Constant Contact or MaxBulk will ‘tutor’ you as you build the email in how to use it to best effect.

Why is Cc a problem?

By Cc-ing to an open list of over 500 other people it laid us all open to receiving more unsolicited information from others on that list. There is also some invidious software out there which targets these types of emails and then scrapes this type of open data from emails and makes it available to spammers. The original message itself, as an unsolicited and unauthorised circular, is a type of Spam. To make matters worse, it is an offense under The Data Protection Act. Holding people’s data, even in a computer address book, is covered by the Data Protection Act. The privacy of that data must be protected, unless the individual has specifically authorised circulation of these details to third parties.

Additionally messages can go viral. If an original email to 500 people is found interesting enough by 10% of those people to send it to 50 others and then 10% of all those people do the same, with just two cycles of ‘forward message’ your email address will be in the hands of 15,000 people. On the plus side, if you get this right, then it is a very effective form of marketing, but that is a different matter known as viral marketing!

On the minus side, if just one of those 15,000 people is in the business of spamming then everyone on the list will get yet more endless junk email. Names are a commodity and they can be bought and sold to hundreds of thousands of spammers who will produce millions of unsavoury, sordid, and otherwise unwelcome messages.

Just pursuing the nightmare scenario, many (some say most) PCs are infected with malicious programs that strip email addresses from computers to send automated emailouts, which can also house viruses and ’spyware’. There is a statistic I read recently that an unprotected computer attached to the internet will have viruses and spyware on it within 20 minutes.

Certainly we go back to our original advice. If you are sending out to a few dozen people, the use Bcc. If, however you want to start email marketing and you are envisaging a professional approach, you can use a company like us or as a DIY option use a tool built for the job. MaxBulk for Macintosh is good, Constant Contact is a web based option, but any search on Google will provide plenty of choice.

Web sites text needs to be easy to read
Your visitor should not need a map and compass to navigate a web site
Web sites should be designed, not painted
People need to find web sites easily

Web sites text needs to be easy to read

Select text and background colours very carefully. Certain colours and shades camouflage each other. Font selection needs to come from a narrow collection of ‘system fonts’. These are the fonts already on your computer. They vary between users, although there is a core of about fifteen fonts which are on just about every computer and these are known as system fonts.

Some fonts can be a little tricky to make out. Broadly speaking, serif fonts like Times or Verdana (i.e. with little ‘flicks’ on the ends of the uprights) are easier to read. Dark-coloured fonts against a light background also tend to be easier to read. These are only rules of thumb, our own website being a case in point.

Text size is an issue. Obviously small sizes are difficult to read and large sizes tend to be a bit ‘in your face’. It is not a precise science; every individual user has the ability to set their screen resolution to a range of settings all of which render text differently, but large enough to read easily with headings emphasised slightly either through colour, size or styling (e.g. bold).

People do not, by and large, sit down to read a good website. They go, get information and get out. Bullet points are hateful things in brochures and on PowerPoint, but they are effective on websites. Small paragraphs are good. Chunked up information, made up of self-contained points each making sense on its own or as part of a greater weight of prose, is good - almost modular in structure. Highlighted content allows visitors to do what they are already trying to do i.e. scan the screen, pick up words and phrases that resonate and then read around those phrases.

Your visitor should not need a map and compass to navigate a web site

Your site should have what we call ‘information architecture’. That is a structure that makes sense and can be put in place before you start building. There is an 80 : 20 rule with websites. 80% of what your visitors need to know will be available to then within 20% of the content of your website. The key thing is to make that 20% easy to find.

Your users should set this agenda. What they buy is not necessarily what you think you are selling and why they buy it is usually not a given.

In general terms, make sure that your links are clear. Make sure that your labelling is descriptive and make sure your structure is straightforward.

Buttons or Tabs can be used to highlight certain levels of links, and smaller links can be used for more general stuff.

They say three clicks is the optimum - if it is important then getting there in one click is essential. Secondary information can be a click or two further away.

Web sites should be designed, not painted

Web sites are communication tools. In most instances, a web site works best as a simple platform for displaying information, goods and services. If it tries to be a work of art, science, wonderment or magic it will fail as a communication tool and instead of looking impressive or clever, you will come across as self-indulgent.

Presentation is important and the skills of a creative graphics and interaction designer are essential. A good designer will recognise the imperative and channel their creativity in support of the objectives.

Images can and do say more than words. Typography is an important aspect as it layout, user journey and creating a sticky site that people want to stay on. These are elements of design which are absolutely essential to a website.

In general a consistency of design throughout the site is professional and also maintains the same standards and protocols of hierarchy, navigation, links and presentation.

People need to find web sites easily

Everyone has developed an obsession with Google. Search for something like ‘tee shirts’ in Google will return over 5 million responses. Everyone selling tee shirts wants to be on page one, preferably at position one. Dream on!

You can do it against a more focussed search like tee shirts in nilsville (or wherever you live) and you might get to the top of that search (in fact I suspect that this page will do it against that exact search).

Before you get featured on Google, you need to get on to Google and start reading about how to get up the rankings. We will be publishing one of our free guides on the website in due course.

Web sites should also be promoted offline through the usual marketing channels. The web is usually seen as a great way to access loads of new people from all over the world. Well maybe, but not immediately. At the outset, it is a great way to make a second, third, fourth, etc., sale to existing customers. These are the people who already know you, already like your things and have little resistance. The first ting you should do is write, email, phone, send leaflets and post cards to existing contacts. You should include your web address in your other marketing materials, from letterheads to brochures to TV. While all this is going on, you should put some effort into search engine optimisation. I suggest you do what you can yourself 9through your designer) before going engaging a professional SEO firm.

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 recently featured as the key marketing contributors in the BBC debate on Middle Age consumers. The debate was featured as a topic for discussion on BBC Hereford and Worcester on Howard Benthams Breakfast Time show. David Yates, Managing Director of Creative Thing talked of the difficulties in defining middle age.

“Middle age is almost an obsolete term. The current crop of people between the ages of forty five and seventy were originally responsible for redefining the way we now see the world.

“The generation who reinvented themselves as ‘teenagers’ in the 1950s are now in their seventies and are reinventing old age. They don’t tend to sit around complaining about the weather, they are off on cruises or climbing up Machu Pichu. Hot on their heels are the 60s Generations. These people are now in their sixties themselves but are fit and healthy. They have high expectations and by and large, retain many of the values that they helped to establish back then – certainly they are still refusing to fit into a middle-age stereotype.

“And every decade seems to follow the lead, even Punks are now in their fifties!”

David Yates went on to say that middle age was not so much a niche marketing concept as a mass marketing one. Thanks to the baby boom, the majority of spenders out there are middle aged. They hold fairly consitent opinions and in some respects they behave similarly to each other.

“One example is that they are more likely to respond to information through traditional routes such as graphic design and even web design. These can presented by companies in the form of brochures or advertising materials and sites. Marketing to the middle age consumer is just marketing - full-stop. Marketing challenges are more accute when trying to understand the current crop of sixteen to thirty year olds.

“They have seen it, done it, played the video game of it, MSN’d their mates about it, swapped text messages about it, chatted on the web about it, and moved onto the next thing before they even get the tee shirt to prove it!”

“What do these people need marketing messages for? They are not inclined to be consumer fodder and have a more jaundiced view of marketing. They operate outside of middle aged conventions and they own all the information they need or, indeed, trust.”

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.

Website Design is apparently

The graphic design and coding of web pages, full websites and interactive web applications.

It’s a bit like the story of the man in a hot air balloon who descends and hovers above the ground to ask a passer-by where he is. The passer-by thinks for a moment and then tells him he is standing in a basket, strung beneath a hot air balloon, about twenty feet above the centre of a field. All the information is entirely accurate and totally useless.

While the question was open to all sorts of interpretation, the answer was completely obtuse. In web terms a better way of understanding where it all fits in is to couch the questions differently.

What can you do with a website? What can a website do? Why have a website?

All these are better questions.

What can you do with a website?: You can communicate, transact, manage, administer, promote, brand - the list goes on…

What can a website do?: Talk, listen, sell and buy.

Why have a website: Apart from the expectation, you can make everything you do right now more effective through using a good website well.

If e.g. you advertise online or in magazines, then a website can make that more effective. It extends your message beyond the quick hit and into the extended proposition.

If you retail, a website will help you to sell more goods to your existing customers, and allow you to approach them directly with offers rather than waiting for them to come into your shop.

If you have a service there is probably an expectation that you will have a website. Without a product you only have your ‘brand’ to show and people will form opinions about that and you based on it. Certainly it will be the primary source of research for any prospective client. You can organise your key messages in an unambiguous way, present them properly and leave the right impressions and information with the world outside.
Creative Thing is a unique design firm offering a variety of services from basic Website Design to low cost self-managing websites. We can provide complete e-commerce website development through our own sunsidiary company Starteshop from as little as £199. We have created and launched hundreds of successful websites, for many different types of businesses. We have the creative talent of a successful graphics agency, the technical knowldge of advanced web developers, the know how to get your site performing in Search Engines, and the ability to take your business and develop a compelling web proposition to move it forward.

Our website design clients range from small start-up companies to large corporations and everything in between. With our combined experience in graphic design, website development and e-commerce sites, you can be confident that whatever your project demands, our web developers can deliver.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »