Graphic Design / Art

Your brand can send multiple signals to people who then make judgements on you consciously and subliminally about you, your product or service. This then forms a basis of opinion. This instinctive process is what makes your brand so powerful. The key is to tap into what gives the customer the right reaction when presented with your brand.

All business and services have a unique personality, philosophy, beliefs and opinions this is what is special and exciting which is good because imagine how dull it would be like if every company was the same. These filter down from the start up management or owner of the business. You need to understand these fundamental things. Where do they see themselves, where they want to be and where the competitors fit in with this.

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Companies re brand for a number of reasons. It could be they have a 'home designed identity' and wish to have a professional 'makeover'. It could be adjustments are needed to move into a different market or has maybe taken on a joint venture so a hybrid identity is needed to move the business forward.

Re branding can be a very delicate and precise operation. The legacy and tradition has to be honored and retained. If this is mis-calculated alienation from an existing customer base can happen. The skill is to retain the companies strengths and historical values that have been successfully built up over the years. Being able to capture this essence and create a new and exciting image that really delivers the desired outcome is paramount. That fits seamlessly into their marketplace now and continues to increase the revenue of the business now and for years to come.

Once this has been achieved consistency across all media is essential. Applying this to websites, stationery, exhibition, brochures and even internal communications within the company to entrench the brand and value with the staff as well.

The most crucial part of a branding is it will often be the first or only impression that you leave with most of your future clients.

Branding is the process of creating a specific strong, memorable image and identity for your business. Using good design techniques and responding to clients objectives including perception and using it to your advantage, positioning in the marketplace and so on. A strong identity should be memorable and have total flexibility to work through all media from letterhead through to on screen promotions (small on a website). How many times have you received a fax and can barely make out the logo because the designer has not taken into account that every logo should work in black in white as well as colour across all media. The goal is to come up with a 'sell' line or strap line that expresses your business or service completely.

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A good brand should inspire loyalty and confidence in your company by evoking emotion and specific responses and be remembered from your target audience.

It is a good idea to find a design company that you want to create all of your materials as well as develop your brand. That way you know the designers working on your materials have a firm understanding of your brand as well as developing style guides across all media. If however you need to bring marketing in house get the design company to provide design guides and templates for non-designers to adhere to. Also by using one design company you can almost certainly negotiate a discount for giving the complete design account to them.

Make sure that the design company you choose to take on your design handles it in house and does not rely solely on freelance design support. Make sure you speak direct to the designer when briefing your chosen design company and not an account handler, sales or marketing person. Because they will brief a designer and there will be a lot 'lost in translation'. When I was employed with design agencies, account handlers would take briefs then go for lunch then come back and forget to tell me the important parts of a brief. Which would be remembered one hour before the presentation.

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Make sure that you receive all the original design files on CD when jobs are complete. Also, find a company that has been around a while, so that you know they'll be able to keep creating your materials into the future and won't just disappear as so many have.

In a creative environment getting good commissions and concentrating solely on the creative process and their passion for design and art. This can be achievable but other skills need to be acquired.

You will become a marketeer, start to looking for areas where you can make your art sell. For example galleries, ebay etc. You will learn negotiation skills and start talking in marketing terms. You will find yourself when you are in bookshops and the library strangely being drawn to the business section. Also you will find that suddenly you have to become an accountant. Start learning about tax and spreadsheets.

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The Freelance life can turn into a nightmare if you don't keep a keen eye on the finances from day one. A good business plan and realistic financial goals will help you no end. You have to be very focused. I find that I would get so wrapped up in the design side of things it is so easy to forget the other things. I reckon a freelancer spends about 25% of the time on the design work and the rest of the time sorting out all the other logistics that go with running a business.

For some people they have no choice but to enter the creative design world as a freelancer. Maybe your work is of a nature that does not fit in with the 'right company to work for structure'. You might be a graduate who has had a creative director saying "you have no experience, we need people who will make money from day one and I have no time to show you". I was told that when I left Art School. You may have been have been redundant and have a some redundancy money and thinking you will go for the freelance way of life. You might be tired of working for companies and just need to go it alone.

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I think that most work comes from referrals and repeat orders. It has certainly been the case with me and the companies I have worked for. So it is important to give that extra effort with every commission you take on. Friends and family are good starting point. Show them what you can do and get them working as a mini sales force. They will be keen to help you out. For example a few years a go I put my details on Friends Reunited. I got contacted from someone I was at school with. He had a company and was starting others and I managed to get to design the Logos, promotional material and websites for the companies. Also he has referred me to other companies. Network with as many people as possible.

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Building a good contact directory sounds like common sense but can be neglected. I made this mistake, I used to write numbers down on small pieces of paper and lose them. People would say "I might be interested in six months time so call me then". You need to store these reminders. Names, Email contacts etc. A program like Filemaker Pro would be a good way of doing this.

Email spamming is not a good idea, If you want to do an email campaign to promote your work I would recommend setting up a email permission based newsletter for subscribers from your website. Another good way of getting contacts is to call companies that you want to do business with and ask who is the Marketing director or the best person to send promotional material to. Then follow up with a call to try and arrange a meeting.

Once you are face to face you can show them what you are really about. Also it will give you a chance to suss them out also. They might necessarily be the right client for you. Get in touch with as many business schemes and free courses as possible. Princes Trust and Business link are good for the UK.

Gordon Powles is a Graphic Design Graduate and the founder of Gordon Powles-Media a design consultancy that specialises in Graphic Design and Promotional Marketing. With over fifteen years experience in the Graphic Design arena working for a variety of blue-chip and small business helping them to achieve their business goals.

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5. Capture Emails by offering a something.

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.

To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you're done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you're creating a unique graphic, you're defying the very purpose of using a web template -- saving time and effort.

However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site's theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don't redesign the whole template.

In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.

Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the Internet. However, Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here's a simple breakdown.

The good:

Interactivity

Flash's Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more woes over how a certain css code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real "movie files" that are raster based and hence much larger in size.

The bad and the ugly:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You'll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn't have the player installed.

Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn't be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphic

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

A lot of online business owners start with no money. They have to do everything themselves -- the preparation of a product, the development of a marketing strategy, the actual building of a website to cater to their product's marketing needs. As their business expands over time, they will find that their simple "homemade" site might not be enough to cover everything, and they will have to take a day or two away to simply dedicate that to the website expansion.

Sounds familiar? Chances are, you're someone who started everything with no money too, so you're pretty skeptical when it comes to giving away your money in exchange for something that you could have done yourself. However, there is a lot more to hiring a designer than just finishing up a job that you don't want to do.

When you hire a web designer to do your job for you, you are doing more than just handing over the "dirty job" to someone else. In fact, by paying a little money, you can let the designer worry about the little annoyances that always evade the main picture and only come haunting when you're halfway through the job. That way, you will be more focused and have more time to spend on your actual business strategy.

On the other hand, the designers you hire a professionals so they are good at what they do. By outsourcing your web design jobs to them, you won't have to worry when problems surface because you can always get them to fix it for you. Again, they will be able to pin point the problem and fix it faster than you probably will be able to.

Also, the work you pay for will turn out more professional than what you can achieve because the designers have been doing it longer than you have. After all, they do it for a living so they have to be good!

So, remember to not just work your business, but grow your business too!

Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in web designing.

Every individual would definitely want their website to look good, if not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.

Color Schemes and Themes.

When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.

Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, thatís only if you know what you're doing.

Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitorís needs.

So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.