101 Sale

Posts Tagged ‘graphic design’

The current recession is causing a definite shift in consumer behaviour. During the boom years of the past decade, we saw a huge number of small startup businesses trying to compete with the big boys. Many of these websites have gone local to global in a very short space of time, thanks to their prices. Then consumers were used to choice and less demanding of reliability in their brands, they wanted the cheapest items and they wanted them now. Things have changed however and hundreds of website companies are going under, the fall out of which is a growing lack of customer confidence. What this means is that people are going back to preferring known and recognisable brands, even if it means spending a little more.

Although in times such as these when people are worried for their jobs or loosing them, some start to consider their dream business online and of being their own boss. Research from Barclays last year showed that there were 98,000 start-ups created in the UK within a three month period, despite the credit crunch. It can be a thankless route to success. When you take into account that around 80,000 new businesses failed during the same time period, kind of puts it into perspective doesn’t it!

I believe that most new online business fails due to bad branding. When a customer hits your website, what does your logo say about your business. It’s crucial to what people use to judge whether you are trustworthy or not. But it’s so often the case that startup owners put off paying professional logo design in the initial stages. All to often its “Lets see how many customers we can get before we think about branding”.Then they design one themselves in photoshop and thinking that looks fine, load it up to the site. Many go for free clipart template business cards and stationery design from somewhere like vista print.

This isn’t acceptable for a Brand. All web business now more than ever, need to look much bigger and much more capable via good marketing, to retain customers and encourage new ones.  In these anxious times the image of stability and reliability is more crucial than ever. Very small businesses need to look like a much bigger business, its possible. As i have mentioned, consumers are now more then ever going to the big brands for what they need. So basically, these days users care more about who a brand is and less about what they are, a good brand is much more likely to be recommended to friends than one that consumers are less sure about.

The bottom line is this. Bankruptcy will hit around half small business very early on in their life, usually within two to three years. Many experts say that one of the top causes of business failure online is bad marketing. A custom logo design helps you create the right image for this marketing to succeed. So do yourself a favour – start looking at some sample logos in your industry and see what the successful ones have in common.Finding yourself a talented graphic designer is key to your business, not only surviving but thriving in this current climate.

Web design tip number one – Use black text on a white background.

Web design that converts visitors into customers must make sure that any sections of text greater than 2 lines uses dark text, preferably black text on a white background.  For blocks of text in your web design you need to forget about fancy font colours and dark backgrounds in your attempt to achieve visual appeal.Not keeping your web design simple so that your message is easy to read is a major mistake made by many designers.

The web design reasons for it include…

In order for you to be able to make a sale to your potential customers.

1. It is important to make it easy for people to absorb the information on your web site. This is done with a clean well designed structure andand colours.
2. Research indicates that having more than a 15% background tint will negatively impact on the effectiveness of your sales message.
3. Your web design needs to be all about conversion and less about the branding.

If you are a small to medium business then selecting a dark text on a white background for main copy usage use is the most sensible and cost effective strategy to use.

Research your keywords early in the process.

A critical step in any internet marketing program is to research the most popular key phrases and target these in your web design.  Then once you know what they you need to make sure that these keywords occur on your website.

Being found in the search engines is the best way to grow your business sales.

Web design is often a less about the design, and more about the copy, because if the copy does not contain the frequently searched for keywords/phrases, then you are never going to get in front of a customer. So make sure that you know which keywords you should be being found for and place these strategically in your text throughout the site.

Web design tip number three – Make your website, visually appealing.

Some graphic designers may be worried that black text on a white background is inconsisitent with making your web site visually appealling.

The truth is that your web site needs to be found in the major search engines and for your information to be clearly communicated (i.e. easily read).  But you must also at all times present your information in a professional manner to engender the customer trust required in order to purchase from you for request information from you.

By the following of these three simple rules above in your business, you will benefit from more sales leads, signups and sales conversions from your web design.

Pepsi Logos over the Years (Youtube)

The globe has been plunged into the most severe economic crash of modern times. Global corporate giants are collapsing left right and centre. The ones who remain are being extra cautious not to keep spending ridiculous amounts of money on things like marketing campaigns. Right?

Not for Pepsi. The soft drinks giant are reported to have spent an incredible $10 million for their new logo design. Yes, you heard me right. Altogether Pepsi are spending a huge 1.2 billion dollars on the costs related to rebranding all their products.  Now if you’re going to spend that kind of money on a new logo, it’s gotta be incredible, right? Yeah, not so much. If you ask me, the new Pepsi logo is terrible. I concur with the recent article in the LA Times which said it has the air of one of those fake Pepsi knockoffs from Eastern Europe you find in discount stores. The lettering for the new logo, for starters, bears an uncanny resemblance to the one they used for a Diet Pepsi logo during the 80’s. Then we come to the motif of the logo. It’s hardly changed! Also, the design industry has, shall we say, been less than impressed by the results. The guy who set up design magazine Before and After, John McWade, said it was “static, empy and vaguely bland”. So what exactly have they spent $10 million on?

The responsibility for the new logo goes to leading design agency Arnell, based in NYC. Recently on social news site Reddit an anonymous user leaked out an incredible PDF document which was part of the design brief presented to Pepsi. The document, modestly named “A breathtaking design strategy”, is a 101 in advertising BS. According to this document, the new Pepsi logo has been inspired by the likes of the architecture of the Parthenon and the proportions of the Mona Lisa. The next step in this raving luncay compares the Pepsi logo with Planet Earth’s gravitational fields! It even goes as far as explaining how the new logo exerts a “Gravitational Pull” on shoppers in the supermarket.

Now that I’ve read this outrageous PDF, I get how it all worked. Pepsi came to this hotshot design agency and asked for a new custom logo design. The head honchos at the design agency heard cash registers going off in their heads.  First they got one of their graphic designers to throw together a few rough sketches and sample logos which eventually became Pepsi’s simple new logo redesign. OK so that was what, maybe a couple days work at most for a competent designer. However it would be ludicrous to try and give the Pepsi execs a $10million invoice for doing a couple of round cirlces with a slightly varying wavy line running through it, wouldn’t it? So they told their team to spend the rest of the time coming up with the most outrageous, masturbatory and extra-terrestrial justifications of the design. They cranked up the BS machine to the ‘it’s gonna blow!’ mark to show how this new logo is linked to THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR AND THE TIMELESS FORCES OF THE UNIVERSE. All of a sudden ten million sounds like small change! If only I could have sneaked into the meeting room when that was being presented. Sorry Pepsi, but you’ve been swindled!

At the present time, graphic design is swamping the field of advertising and a variety of other related areas such as television and website design. This article describes how graphic design has progressed into the alluring and influential art that it is nowadays. A number of the multitude of uses of graphic design are given too.

Blending Both Design and Production

Even when new production processes came into play during the Industrial Revolution, designing communication mediums, like books and magazines, was always a distinct job from the actual production. This implied that book publishers, magazine companies, and advertising organizations constantly had to employ art directors who would be tasked to bringing all visual elements into union. Design and production could never be a merged job.

Today {though}, due mainly to the technological developments currently accessible to designers, graphic design is both a design and production undertaking. Because of this, graphic design has matured into a field, art, and occupation all its own. In these times, its applications can be seen in virtually everything around us.

Graphic Design and Marketing

From notes to published mediums to web pages, graphic design can be applied in a countless number of fields. More specifically, marketing and branding appear to be maximizing the uses of graphic design – see web design fulham for many examples of this. Today, ad campaigns are heavy on creativity and, because of the expressiveness of graphic design, are occasionally even without words. Making sure that visual facets are all cohesive is thus especially important for companies to communicate their message.

Several Other Applications of Graphic Design

Graphic design isn’t merely about ads and posters though. It has also found its way into publications as well. Magazines and their page layouts submit to design processes. The treatment of each element on a spread has the primary end of generating uncluttered, cohesive layouts. Concurrently, graphic designers need to be sure to include creative elements that will aid in achieving a pleasing look and feel. Book covers likewise use graphic design.

In modern times, Internet pages are vital and graphic designers find tremendous application for their skills in web site design. The most challenging aspect of web page design is to fuse visual communication with interactive communication in order to enhance the visitor’s online experience. Designers have the objective of developing a site that is as visually alluring as it is informative.

Aside from all of the applications of graphic design previously mentioned, one can find the use of graphic design in clothing, corporate logos, invitations, posters, and a variety of types of print media. The development of graphic design does not show any signs of letting up. Technological developments, are undoubtedly continuously going to bring the discipline to even higher levels.

It is intriguing to see how web development has moved on over the years. The web has turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets into the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years. The web as a platform is a hollow dream no longer – you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host any sort of web page yourself and you can even get the data from a wide variety of other sources. Web development has created jobs around our country which is really helpful. Just watching the TV for five minutes these days is depressing enough – no jobs, un-employment crashes to a new high and the recession just gets deeper and deeper.

Moving web development on is a tricky business. When designing a site you now need to consider cutting edge graphic design and logo design. Simply building some for the web is no where near enough anymore, people want the full package. Unless you have a very compelling product or idea most clients will already have something in place web wise and chances are they have already spent a lot of money on it. Maintaining a website is much more common than creating something innovative. Yet in today’s modern web society just creating a site is not enough. You need your site visible to potential customers. How do you go around doing that? Keeping on top of web trends is understanding the logistics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is fundamentally tweaking your website to be visible with search engines such as Google and MSN Live! If you can get your site seen by these search engines the amount of revenue and visibility you can get from these search engines is incredible and it can completely revolutionise a business’s income.

So what about the future? Well if I knew that I would be on a hot beach somewhere soaking up the sun. However what I will say is that the way some web developers deal with market forces and business people is wrong. What matters these days is how fast you can do the project and how quickly you can get it onto the market. This goes against what I believe in as a web designer and I think businesses should stand up and fight against these ‘quick wins’. What do you think?