Some clients, especially those that do no business over the web, question the need for a website or an SEO effort. But they seldom question the need for local publicity. My wife writes magazine articles. One recent assignment had her seeking out local farms. They were hard to find, in part because few had any web presence. After all,...
Get a group of designers talking and eventually you will hear the complaint that “clients don’t understand design.” In the eyes of many designers, this leads to unreasonable and downright ugly requests regarding colors, logos, copy, and anything else that will ruin their perfectly good designs. While I am sympathetic to this lament it reflects two problems. The first...
Oh, the dreaded question that always comes up in the initial meeting with a prospective client. After more than 7,000 creative projects, that question still sends panic through my veins. Here’s my advice: never state a deadline. That may seem strange coming from a 35-year veteran of the design and publishing business, but understand what goes into a deadline....
Any design student that has ever taken a class on Print Production has most likely tackled projects that requires a creative solution for a very tight budget. What’s amazing is how quickly we forget those lessons once we start working for a company with vast resources or for clients who have very deep pockets. I’ve been guilty on many...
A quick glance at graphic design job ads on Monster will teach you that, at the entry-level, there is little difference between the role of Graphic Designer and Production Artist. Aside from the fact that most of the responsibilities involve creating sales collateral, client inserts, and applying logos to various things — in other words, “designing” within predetermined formats...
At a time when people love to proclaim (with varying degrees of sincerity) that advertising is dead, while the web assaults us with popups of dancing mortgage-rate ads, you may be looking for evidence that sophisticated, nuanced use of color, words, and image still rise above the pack. Uwe Stoklossa’s recently published book pays homage to classic and surprising...
Constrained by language. If my language doesn’t have a way to express the thought or feeling that I really want you to understand, I borrow a word or phrase from another language. We’re all used to that. But when it comes to using design applications, we just can’t do that (at least, not very easily). If I want to...
Any time the graphic design field is being discussed, the topic of fees invariably comes up. We had a question the other day from a reader who asked “How can I convince the client my services are worth it?” Another lamented, “I’m uncomfortable about telling people what I charge.” You aren’t alone. Many people aren’t comfortable telling clients what...
How much is that logo worth? $500? $5,000? $50,000? $500,000? There are designers and brand developers at each of those price points. But, how much is a brand worth? How about $66,434,000,000? That’s Google’s brand valuation – the amount of its overall value contributed by its brand. Don’t have $66.4 billion? General Electric’s brand is valued at about $61.9...
Today my projects required me to use both InDesign and QuarkXPress, and I began to feel a little bit bilingual. I can’t claim to be bilingual in any other sense, but I’ve noticed that those who are truly bilingual will sometimes have moments of forgetting that they’re speaking one language and use a word from a different language: forgetting...
