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A lot of emphasis is put on websites, whilst they are an important part of your overall marketing plan it shouldn’t stop there. The most important thing to do is to identify and target a specific audience.
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Dog-lovers rejoice. K.W. Doggett Fine Paper launched their 2011 calendar last night and it’s amazing! Each month of the year has been illustrated by a different artist using dog-related phrases as the starting point for their creations.
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Like all geeks, we’re excited to see how the iPad revolutionises epublishing, but that doesn’t mean we want real books to disappear. When the Australian Poetry Centre asked us to design the covers for the New Poets Series, we jumped at the chance. This is just a sneak peek of the finished product – the four poets will be reading from their four books at the Goolwa Poetry Festival “Salt on the Tongue” this long weekend. If you’re in Adelaide and you like poetry, check it out. By the way, we can’t take credit for this fantastic cover illustration for Chloe Wilson’s “The Mermaid Problem” – it’s by Remie Cibis.
It’s hard to capture the coolness of these cards in a photograph. Michael’s fantastic new business cards are printed on a heavyweight card with a matt coating and a spot varnish for the web address on the back. We are going through a major photography phase at the moment. We can’t take credit for the photo on back of the Fitzroy Stretches cards – it was part of a photoshoot for the Fitzroy Stretches website – but it shows off the Revolution wedges that Fitzroy Stretches is known for.
Look what the Easter Bunny brought us… business cards! We love getting deliveries from the printer. Seeing something we designed become real is a kick. Plus, it makes it easy to think of something to blog about.
Rebecca is a speech pathologist so we thought is would be fun to use quotation marks on her business cards. We saved a few trees by printing the business cards on 100% recycled paper and the cards are uncoated so Rebecca can fill in the next appointment details on the back. Let’s get talking!
Sometimes tv teaches you things. Many years ago when I was starting my first real job, I remember hearing the advice (possibly on Oprah) that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Designers get to wear jeans to work, but the advice is still relevant when it comes to what we do for our clients. Even if you’re a small business, there’s no reason why you should look like a small business, and we’re here to help you dress to impress.
If you’re serious enough to spend money on a logo and business cards, go the extra step and have them designed by a graphic designer rather than doing it yourself. You might have to spend a little bit more money for the design, but a (good) graphic designer will produce a result that is much more professional and will impress potential new clients. Plus, the graphic designer will probably have a print contact so you’ll end up saving on printing costs. By giving serious consideration to what your brand and printed collateral say about your company, you can start to attract the kind of clients you want.
Julia at Formbar Creative Clay creates amazing works of art in the form of handmade ceramics and she asked us to design a little info card which explains how to use her kitchen graters. We came up with a design which worked well for the grater bowl and grater plate, but could also be extrapolated in the future for the other beautiful items Julia makes and sells at her shop. Because we gave the idea room to grow, the grater cards were soon joined by a card about Julia which has the same simple aesthetic and looks like it belongs to the original set. We also designed specialty stickers that adhere to Julia’s ceramic creations.
Fitzroy Stretches have been manufacturing stretcher bars and stretching canvases for years and we wanted to do something fun with their full page ad in the Australian Art Collector magazine to let the world know that they were adding custom framing to their range of services. On a sunny Melbourne weekend after a flash of inspiration, we came up with the concept “F is for Framing” and wandered the streets snapping photos of the letter F. The advertisement needed to be bright and engaging, but maintain the Fitzroy Stretches aesthetic of strong original imagery.
Fitzroy Stretches liked the idea so much that they asked us to rework the “F is for Framing” ad to appear in the December/January issue of Art Almanac and as a banner image on the Fitzroy Stretches website. The artwork files below show the progression of the design across the different instances.
The Australian Poetry Centre is a Melbourne-based not-for-profit organisation that promotes the work of Australian poets. We designed and printed a promotional postcard to announce the launch of the Almeida Children’s Poetry Collection. Using “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the postcard, rather than a more obscure poetry extract, made the card accessible to a broader audience. If you take a close look at the multi-coloured text, you will notice that we used a photograph of book spines as a background image.
With bottle green as a starting point and the mantra “keep it simple” ringing in our ears, we introduced a modern feel to Amy System Solutions with the clean text treatment. It would be impossible to sum up what Charles does with a job title, but problem-solving and critical analysis are essential to his various contract roles. When we discovered he completes The Times cryptic crossword each morning, we knew the perfect way to make his business cards both meaningful and memorable.
