Creative Made - Business Graphics. Done Right.

Why do restaurants have horrible websites?

CreativeDirector — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:32:43 +0000

Farhad Manjoo at Slate put together a great article on restaurant websites, and their lack of meeting customer’s needs. Essentially, restaurants want to entertain and entice the customer – but are missing the critical needs of the customer. What’s on the menu, how pricey is it, what’s the atmosphere? This can all be shown without extensive flash animations and over-complicated design. Read More

Creativity, from Calvin & Hobbes

CreativeDirector — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:38:45 +0000

Trending – Create movement in logo designs.

CreativeDirector — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:26:16 +0000

You’ve likely noticed that many fast-food chains have rebranded or recreated their logo. In fact, in Southern California I had no idea many of the antiquated logos were still around – until a trip to visit family on the East Coast where I saw many chains still had the old logos up, and you really notice the difference of the new branding. New, brighter colors, more exciting artwork, and of course the slanted look. They all have a slant, which gives a feeling of movement, which is always the goal of fast-food.

Commercial Printing

CreativeDirector — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:39:39 +0000

Why work with multiple vendors, when you can get it all from one place. We’ve partnered with top printers in the nation to not only get you local, US made service, but at the best price around. Call us for a quote.

The blunt truth, from across the pond.

CreativeDirector — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:15:14 +0000

Working as a designer for over a decade, you get to work with all different types of clients. While each experience is different, many share some ill-attributes. Overly-controlling, insistant on their input, and honestly design-inhibiting. Which means only a select few get the best out of their designer.

Yet, most of the time we designers never set ground rules. Especially not as blunt as my friend Dan here has put it. And I have to cheers him for putting it together so well – don’t be insulted, look at is as good insight.

Designers have a lot to focus on. The target audience, the design, the architecture to function properly, staying under budget, the list goes on and on. All the while keeping the client whom is paying our bills very happy; to the point where it can hurt your project. In truth, many clients don’t have faith in their designer – and we constantly get clients who put their own opinion in as if it were the greatest ideas ever. Then are confused why their work isn’t in our portfolio, and doesn’t look as good as the other projects we’ve done.

Have faith in your designer – we’ve gone to school for this, we’ve been doing it forever, and every waking hour is spent thinking in a design mentality. You will always get a better product if you let the specialist do his job vs. micro managing.

http://www.alittlebitofsomething.co.uk/

Some of my favorite clients to work with have been fellow artists. They understand we have a specialty, which is what they’re hiring us for.

Some helpful ground rules:

1 The logo doesn’t need to take up half the page. Yes, you want to be known, but look at any corporate website for a company pulling in millions each quarter, and notice the logo is not a billboard on their homepage.
2 You don’t need the brightest complementary colors. You want to get someones attention, but that doesn’t mean you want to look like a fast-food restaurant. They choose their colors to get you to come in hungry and leave immediately – is that part of your business model?
3 Your artwork doesn’t need to have every graphic effect possible. It’s the best way I can put it for a trend going on right now – jelly logos, lots of shadows, emboss everything or gradient it. Around the year 2000, this trend started where logos started looking like they’re wrapped in cellophane. Yes, it was a trend, trends last ~10 years, and the movement is on the way out. You don’t want to look dated in a year or two.
4 You don’t need to put in your opinion, just to add something. Everyone likes to have their voice heard, and put in insight. But quite often, we’ll show a design looking only for approval, only to get a myriad of subtle changes that really adds up – in your final cost. If it looks good, approve the design and let us continue to design beautiful work. Chances are all your subtle changes will frustrate the designer and the project will suffer – the design we painstakingly laid out is getting butchered because you want to add “your own touch” – or worse, you don’t know what you want, so you want to see how something looks 15 different ways while you figure it out.

Google Web Fonts

CreativeDirector — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:48:13 +0000

It’s no secret that the web has taken leaps and bounds since it’s inception. Even in the last 2 or 3 years, websites have become drastically more impressive. With Web 2.0 design, and backend technology like CSS3 getting more and more powerful – one area was lacking. Typography.

Launch into Web Fonts – in years past, the only fonts that would display natively on a web site had to be installed on the viewers computer. This limited you to about 6 fonts that were guaranteed to display properly. But the future is upon us – With the @font-face line in your style-sheet, attaching a font located via server will display that font natively on any supported browser across the globe.

This technology has existed previously, but always with limitations. Mainly, fonts are copy written artwork which you must purchase to use – and many owners don’t want the font displayed across the globe for free. So, we designers paid royalties or use-fees for a limited selection of fonts available.

Google to the rescue! With a new web fonts API, and attractive live-preview selection tool, Google Web Fonts offers a large selection of free fonts for use by anyone, on any web site. At CreativeMade, we’ve been using Google Web Fonts since it’s inception, and highly recommend another great solution from Google. Thx Google!

Web Font Sites:

Identify That Font

CreativeDirector — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:02:30 +0000

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Feedly

CreativeDirector — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:16:28 +0000

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Branding & Identity

CreativeDirector — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:22:05 +0000

Whether you’ve just started your business, or it’s been years and your logo is lacking – we’ll set up the full identity to your company with breathtaking results. Your logo, stationary, business cards, and more can all be much better with our help.

Marketing

CreativeDirector — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:20:11 +0000

You’ve got to reach your customers. But how? We design top-of-the-line postcards, door hangers, fliers, and more – along with helping you on social marketing, search engine optimization, and web marketing / analytics.