I’ve heard a lot of businesses say that advertising doesn’t work for them. But the truth is that they skipped over the first few levels. First you need to get your name out there. Not by purchasing ads, but by getting press, talking to people, telling people your story and partnering with other organizations.

Once you’ve established a presence in your community, then you can start advertising to spread the word to other people and to keep your business fresh in the minds of the people who already know about your business. For example, a new restaurant first wants to get press in as many papers, websites and magazines that they can. People will read an article by a reporter talking about how great a restaurant’s food is and then be more inclined to want to check it out. “Hey, let’s try that new place near Rittenhouse. Phila Weekly said they have great desserts.” Then, the restaurant might want to set up a table at the Spring Festival to give out samples and invite organizations to hold their event there. THEN, once a good amount of people have heard of the place or tried it out, they can continue to remind people they’re still open by advertising.

There’s just one catch, your business has to be good. Offer a bad product or lousy customer service and no one will be referring you or writing good stuff about your work.

Even if you’re not a professional designer, I’m sure there are occasionally times when you could use a program that’s a little bit better to design in than Microsoft Word. Quick flyers, personal invitations, thank you cards, whatever it might be, it might benefit you to download a program and learn the basics. There’s the basic text tool, arrows for moving things and the color box. When the time comes that everyone in the office is going crazy because they need to change a brochure at the last minute and the designer is not responding, you can save the day.

The recommended programs are expensive, but sometimes you can find deals for older versions. Or you can jump straight down to the free programs. They don’t have all the features the recommended programs have, but you can do basic designing and editing of images.

Recommended Programs:
• Adobe Photoshop – Photo Editing
• Adobe Illustrator – Illustration and Logo Design
• Adobe InDesign – Layout Design
• Adobe Dreamweaver – HTML Editing
• WordPress.org – Website Creation

Free Programs:
• GIMP – Photo Editing
• Inkscape – Illustration and Logo Design
• Scribus – Layout Design
• Text Wrangler (MAC only) or OpenOffice - HTML Editing
• WordPress.org – Website Creation
• Transmit – FTP

Tip:
• If you’re using an Adobe program, look to their website for free tutorials. For all other programs, look on the website your downloaded the software from for a Getting Started guide.

Although you may have to pay an extra cost to have the digital version made, you’ll save considerably on having fewer copies printed and cut back on the waste of creating so many print materials. The catch is that people could be viewing this file on a screen as small as an iPhone or as large as a 28″ iMAC monitor. There are a few things to do and consider when making your file so it can work on any device.

1 – Save your file as a PDF in RGB. RGB stands for Red Green Blue. This color combination is used when viewing a document on a screen. To do this, I am assuming the file was made in InDesign which is the most commonly used layout design program. When in InDesign, go to “print”. In the setting box that appears click save as postscript file. Then open Adobe Distiller and create a setting that is RGB. Carry your postscript file over to the Distiller window. If you’re unfamiliar with this process, a more detailed tutorial can be found on Adobe’s website.

2 – Make sure your file is under 10MB. Since people will be downloading this from the web, you want to make sure the file is not too big or it will take too long to download. You can control your file size by adjusting the settings in Adobe Distiller. Image quality can be changed from “maximum” to “high” and image resolution can be changed to between 150-250. Ideally you want your file to be as small as possible without losing so much image quality that it looks blurry on a 17″ computer monitor.

3 – Check your file on a large screen and on a phone for image quality and to make sure your colors appear correctly.

1. Take a deep breath and move on. When you design, put all you have into it. You have to design for greatness, but after you send it off to the client, let it go. No project is going to look exactly how you want it to. Changes are going to be made. End of story, now let’s move on.

2. Client projects are what keep you employed. If it weren’t for the clients, you wouldn’t have a job right now. They need you and you need them. Be grateful they’re there.

3. Don’t get caught up in the complaining. A lot of design firms have a big, open office space that make it easy to have conversations about the annoying things clients do. Don’t get pulled into these conversations. This is possibly the most difficult thing to do, but an absolute must. As soon as you get pulled in, it will be difficult to get out. Negative thoughts breed more negative thoughts.

4. Call the client. If a client requests something that is so ridiculous you want to scream, call them. Take this opportunity to get to know them and find out what the ultimate goal of their request is. Together, you might be able to come up with a better solution. Even if they still want their request made, I have always found that talking to a person is very calming. It reminds you that the person is just a person.

5. The client is not trying to make you crazy. Clients have other concerns when viewing a design other than making it look amazing. For instance, they might have a sponsor whose name has to be prominent on the page no matter how ugly the logo might be. Again, refer to #1 and get over it.

6. Like where you work and who your clients are. When the majority of your time is spent designing for companies you love, the occasional client project that’s a headache is a lot easier to deal with. When I worked for a company who I had ethical issues with, I found myself always finding fault with client feedback.

7. Charge what you think a project is worth. When I hear a designer complain about a client request or hear a company complaining that a designer took “forever getting back to us”, often times the project was done pro bono or for very little. Your service and quality should never decrease no matter the project cost. If the client is trying to get you to charge less, let them know that the decrease in cost means you will spend a fraction of your time on it and it will be low on your priority list. Otherwise, charge what a project is worth and do your best every time.

I often hear companies saying it’s hard to find a dependable designer – someone who listens to them, who gets back to them in a reasonable amount of time and who doesn’t say “no” or complain a lot when you ask them to make changes to a design.

It seems simple, but there are a lot of designers who are not like this. I like to call these designers the diva designers. They’re concerned with making a great design, but often the purpose of the project and the client’s vision are forgotten in the process. However, I’m here to explain where this diva designer syndrome comes from. Most of them aren’t born this way. It comes from working as a full-time designer and getting frustrated with the client-designer relationship. Luckily, there are things you can do to suppress some of the symptoms.

To the client that doesn’t want a diva designer:

1- Treat the designer as an expert. They most likely went to school to learn color theory, typography, communication, marketing and composition. They know what makes a design eye catching and successful, listen to their suggestions.

2- There is a difference between hiring a designer and hiring someone who knows how to use design software. When you hire a designer, you are asking for their creativity. Therefore, offer suggestions for how you would like a design to be changed, but do not tell them exactly what to do. Being too specific often frustrates designers because sometimes your suggestion isn’t the best solution. Therefore, they spent too much time trying to force your solution to work or figuring out a better solution and having to explain to their boss and you why they disregarded your instructions.

3- Be honest with the designer. It doesn’t matter if you start a sentence with “This looks great!” if you’re going to follow that comment with a page of changes that will make the design look nothing like the original concept. The designer will figure out that you don’t really think it looks great.

4- Don’t be mean. For example, a comment I received from a client said “can you design this more?” This comment tells me that the client doesn’t like the design, but doesn’t offer any suggestions as to how to make it better or why they don’t like the design. It also implies that I didn’t design it in the first place. Avoid using words like bad, boring, or, my personal favorite “not design-y enough”. Keep the criticism to a minimum and focus on how to make the design better.

5- Know what you want and make sure it’s not what someone else has already done. One of the worst ways to start a project is by telling a designer you don’t know what you want or that you want them to copy what someone else is doing. Every design tells a story, know what you want your story to be.

Stay tuned, because the next blog will be written to the diva designer on how they can get over themselves and stop acting like a petulant 3 year old.

My first reaction was, “A graphic designer at the top of list of people they need help from?” Lawyer and accountant I get, but when you’re trying to save a school, you’re going to fight back with a cute logo and website? Of course it is! The reason why is because this project will depend greatly on how much support (aka donations) the organization will get from the community and the best way to collect support, update supporters on the status of the appeal, tell their story and share upcoming events, is with a website.

It’s interesting to see design help be at the top of the list of  things you need when starting an organized group, but also refreshing. I’ve found that since social media has become so popular, people are understanding the immense value of being searchable and communicating with people via the web.

Have you green roofed your ride yet? The above drawing is by Sarah Wilgus, a first grader who lives in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia. She labeled the drawing “Sarah’s Green Dream”. Her dream is to put green roofs on cars and buses.

One thing that has come as a result of talking about sustainability is the idea that we should bring green back to our lives. Cold, hard surfaces are being replaced or covered with living walls, green roofs and planters. Why not put it on cars? Philadelphia (and the morning traffic report) would be a whole lot greener and the air a whole lot cleaner!

Device Essentials reported that 6.7% of U.S. Internet traffic comes from devices other than computers. 4.6% of all internet traffic comes from mobile phones. 1.8% comes from tablet computers and other devices such as web-enabled game consoles makes up .3%. 91 million US consumers access the internet through a mobile device. Although 6.7% is fairly low, that’s still a lot of people.

The most important thing to take away from all these statistics is that you need to know why someone would want to view your website and what they’ll be doing at your site once they’re there. For example, a fine dining restaurant knows that most people are going to their site to see their menu, hours and location – all information that can be viewed quickly and is often needed at the last minute. They also know that many of their customers have a smart phone. Therefore, it’s very important that their site look best on smartphones and iPads. A business such as mine, where clients viewing my site are probably at their desk researching potential design firms, will want to see a site that looks good on a full size screen. If you’re a company that works with designers, such as a printer, you want to be especially aware of the fact that many of your clients will have an even larger screen.

In an ideal world, your website would look amazing no matter what device it was viewed on, but nothing looks perfect 3″ big and 27″ big. That’s just reality. Test your design on all devices, but be sure you know your ideal customer and what their internet habits are so your website will look it’s best when it matters most.

I saw this ad in a graphic design magazine a few weeks ago. It seems silly to make a campaign for paper, as if it’s a product people don’t know exists. And then there’s the message…

I decided to recreate the ad with text that I thought was more specifically what they were trying to say.

As someone who does not like the fact that the paper industry is the third biggest polluter in North America, I’d rather see an ad that educated designers about what they’re doing to make the paper industry not so harmful. Or maybe educate designers on how they can make better decisions when purchasing paper that is better for the environment.

A woman with an online store was explaining to me that there’s a growing interest by American consumers to buy products made in the USA. She then explained to me that in order for an item to have a “Made in the USA” label, only 35% of it needs to be from the USA. The obvious concern with this is that a made in the USA label is a little misleading if 65% is coming from another country.

More importantly, her concern was that people are assuming if a product is made in the USA, it’s actually better. Many people think that if an item is made in India or China, that it must have been made under poor conditions. However, this isn’t always the case. The woman explained to me that they sell a necklace where the beads are made by women in a village in India. The process they use to make the beads is very efficient and eco-friendly. Selling these beads allows the women to support their family and a village’s lively hood depends on this product.

This conversation led me to wonder what can be done about this? As consumers, how are we supposed to know whether a product was made in a sweat shop or under fair conditions? This led to our “responsibly” idea.  Manufacturers would have the option of putting “Responsibly” in front of the country their product was made in. If they can pass regulations to prove the item was made under responsible conditions, why not?