Design that Works

At the heart of any marketing communications effort should be a respect for design that communicates clearly and effectively to bring you the results you are looking for, and your selected design agency should be familiar with all forms of visual media. Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. This all becomes even more important with 3D marketing of the brand such as brand environments, large displays, simple pop-up units or fully fledged exhibition stands.

Whether it’s uniquely different banner sign printing or exhibition stand design and custom built display solutions, you need to make a distinctive eye catching impression with an identity and execution that not only looks good in the medium it inhabits but is easy to erect and dismantle.

Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design. Aside from a design’s creativity and whether it captures the spirit of your proposition, its ability to translate across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. What looks good on A4 print materials may not be so fantastic by the time it’s enlarged to fit exhibition graphics.Equally, any logo or graphic in an exhibition environment can be enhanced by the clever use of lighting that can produce a number of different effects.

Portable Display Stands, Banners, Pop-ups, Modular stands and Shell Scheme Graphics all have their own unique requirements as to how strong they need to be and how long they should last. Design that works will take all those considerations into account from the very start. Point of Sale Material, Window Graphics and Signage have similar marketing functions to fulfil, but require entirely different lifetimes. These items are expected to last considerably longer than is usual for temporary exhibition materials and with POS are often left unmanned and need to work entirely alone. These products therefore need to be far more robust than temporary graphics, but still retain the same sense of style and unity of corporate design as all the other relevant items of marketing colleteral.

Technorati Tags: advertising, design agency, Marketing, print management, sign printing

Why First Impressions Are Important in Business

Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your design agency.The variety of different marketing channels available to any company today have their own specific demands and their own rules. What looks good on your business card or letterhead may not have the same impact on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online.

Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are some important things to remember when designing logos or corporate ID and here are some guidelines to a successful outcome:

A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator allows for much more flexibility in terms of colours and will give you a much clearer image especially if there is text in the logo and you want to be able to use it in large format. With this in mind, it is often not a good idea to use a photograph in a logo. If you can’t use a vector based program then design it as large as possible!

Stick to one or two fonts in your logo. Over-use of fonts will often leave a logo looking cluttered and unprofessional. Make sure that any text you want to use in a logo is clear and legible, otherwise don’t use text.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Remember that just because something looks good on A4 print materials doesn’t mean it will be so wonderful by the time it’s been expanded to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Your final design should be able to work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.

You may want to use the logo on black or white backgrounds or other different coloured backgrounds so the logo should work equally well as a stand-alone element or in a coloured box. Allow for the fact that your logo could sometimes be required to work in mono (single colour) as well.

You may have seen logos that you like but it’s important to try to make your logo as individual as possible. There is nothing wrong with using aspects from other logo designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.

Technorati Tags: advertising agency, business logo, corporate identity design, logo, logo design, print management