Archive for the 'Branding' Category

Branding Your Social Media Profiles

We covered it well in our post last week on Brand Consistency, but the amount of people that skip easy branding opportunities really blow me away – and one of the most commonly overlooked online is Social Media Profiles.  Social Media is so prevalent now a days too, I find more and more often I […]

Brand Consistency

Tell me, is it just me as a graphic designer that notices it or or does poorly designed marketing material make you twitch too? Whether it’s noticing a bad advertisement in a local newspaper while reading an article or the very obviously not-customized twitter background for a self-proclaimed “Social Media Expert” I find myself twitching […]

Holiday Season, Great Time to Work With Your Graphic Designer!

It’s the holiday season – parties abound, gifts need to be found and purchased, houses need to be organized and cleaned for the holidays – our to-do lists get awfully long and scary this time of year!  We’re often so busy the last thing we often think about is ourselves or our company, but why […]

New Twitter Header Image

One thing that always keeps us on our toes is how quickly technology changes – and that goes for Social Media too! Twitter has added a new header image. Not only does it look great on your profile page but it plays quite nicely with mobile devices where before there was little way to personalize the look of your twitter on mobile devices.

My Pet Peeves With Bad Graphic Designers

In a previous post I’d talked about My Pet Peeves With Bad Web Designers, this time I wanted to do the same for Graphic Designers. Through working in the industry there are a few things that drive me up the wall that are often very simple to fix or change but some designers just don’t do it! Here are my top 4:

How to Customize Your Twitter Background

One of the things that we’re always preaching about is consistency of your brand throughout your different marketing materials – and that includes online avenues as well. From your website to Facebook to Twitter, you need to make sure that you have a consistent image. One thing that I see far too often is people just using standard Twitter backgrounds and a poorly chosen headshot for their profile image. If you’re a small business person the different places that you interact with your customers, business associates and other important contacts are ALL important. We’ve talked about Personalizing Twitter a while back but I thought I would tell you how you can create and change your twitter background.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Design Programs Now Affordable!

While thinking about what to write this week I was thinking about what sort of things have made my life easier as a designer, and the software that I use came to mind. I have been using Adobe products for over 15 years, and Macromedia as well before Adobe bought them, and the different they make for my final products designed for clients are huge. I don’t think that I could function as a designer without Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. So when my version from a couple years ago started to get very dated I was not looking forward to having to pay the huge amount for an upgrade – but then Adobe introduced Creative Cloud.

Branding – More than just your Logo

When I’m out networking and doing my “elevator pitch” one of the things that I mention that I do to explain graphic and website design more is branding. What tends to come to most people’s minds when I say that is, “Oh, okay, she designs logos” – but it’s so much more than that! One thing that’s really important when designing is to develop your brand – a look, feel, colours, even a font that you use universally throughout all of your points of contact with your clients.

Importance of Vector Version of Logos and Graphics

One thing that has come up a lot for us lately and that we’ve touched on partially before, in our post Logos – Importance of a High Quality Logo, is the importance of vector graphics. Your logo is something that people see everywhere to represent you, so you want it to look the best, right? So why would you only have a bad copy of it as the only copy you have? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed a bunch of logos for different companies for projects and left sourcing out a logo online or if they email me something it’s a file that’s been copied, copied and copied and is now such poor quality.

Google Takes Doodle to the Next Level

Well Google has done it again, another great and unique “Doodle”. They’ve altered their home page graphic for their search engine in homage to Robert Moog