There are lots of ways you can advertise your business over the festive season. Here are a few ideas:

1. A corporate Christmas card is a firm favourite. What better way to remind your customers about your business, either with a printed card or a digital e-card?

Once you have your branding in place, we can strengthen it by ensuring all of your advertising is consistent and "on brand". This allows your audience to easily recognise your adverts.

Whilst the adverts remain recognisable, it's important to ensure they still look fresh. Changing elements of the design will help with this. We can change the way the images are included, the main colours used, and we can add new elements for events such as Christmas or a sale.

Incase you prefer a written version, I thought I'd include the information from my 'Branding: The Design Process' social media reel here.

First I ask about your business, what makes you unique, your company ethos, colours you like or don't like, styles you like. I ask for links to your website or social media to get a feel for your business. If you'd like to go ahead, I ask for a 50% deposit before starting the design work.

I'm a little late in sharing this with you, how is it March already?! But today I thought I'd share Pantone's colour of the year for 2022.

I love Pantone’s website for exploring new colours and checking shades of different colours, and this is also a fab way to see which colour will be (or they predict will be) 'on trend' each year. The Pantone experts carry out extensive research around the world, looking for new colour influences in all areas of design, art collections, fashion, the entertainment industry, popular travel destinations, new technology, materials, textures, social media platforms and upcoming sporting events.

Here are six more design tips I've recently shared on social media, I hope you find them useful!

1. Optimise readability

Do everything you can to ensure the content of your design is easy to read and understand. 

Think about any colours you’re using, make sure your text can be read easily against any background colours. Ensure it’s large enough and bold enough, and a font that’s clear and legible. Look at your headings to make sure they stand out and make your design easy to follow. Use images to break up text, but don’t position them to interrupt the flow of the text, ensure everything works well together.

I thought I'd share a few more design tips today. This time I'm looking at how many fonts you should use, the visual hierarchy within a design, and the use of space within a design. I hope you find these tips helpful!

I thought I'd share four of my top tips with you today, I've shared these over on my social media pages over the past few weeks and they've been well received, but it's nice to keep them in one place here on my website too!

Social media is such a valuable tool. Whilst we’re used to using it for keeping in touch with friends and sharing moments of our personal lives, it can also be invaluable for business. What other service can, for free, put your business in front of potential customers world wide? Are you using it to your advantage? Could you be doing more?

Memorable

Your logo should be memorable, you want your audience and potential clients to instantly think of you when they see your branding. Often fairly simple, uncomplicated logos can work well to ensure that they are recognisable. Think about the logos of the big brands you can instantly name - what makes them memorable?  

Branding

The Oxford dictionary defines branding as ‘the activity of giving a particular name and image to goods and services so that people will be attracted to them and want to buy them’.

Branding is often seen just as a visual identity, a company’s name, logo, packaging design etc, and whilst this is true, and these are the things customers will recognise a brand for, it’s so much more than that! Your branding is your ethos, your personality, your USP, the thing that makes you stand apart from other similar businesses, or similar products. 

When I begin working on a logo or branding project with a customer I ask for information about their business, about their company values, what the company name means to them or why they chose it, how they wish their company to be perceived, and anything else they can tell me about their business. I visit their website and social media accounts to get a feel for their business. This helps me to design a visual representation of their brand that’s inline with what they stand for.

Branding can change how people perceive your business, it can bring in new customers and a larger audience, but it can also do the opposite if it isn’t inline with what you want to represent.

I thought I'd share some advice about image resolution, about why it's important to ensure images are high quality, why not to enlarge an image, and why cropping images can be helpful. I hope this is useful! 

Resolution

Image resolution is the number of dots or pixels per inch. The higher the resolution the better the quality of the image. It’s important that a photo is good quality (high resolution) to begin with, as its resolution can’t be improved further down the line. It’s also important to think about how you store or transfer image files; for example sending an image via Facebook messenger or uploading and then downloading an image from a social media platform will decrease the image’s quality. Ideally an image would be 300dpi, but for use onscreen 72dpi is usually high enough resolution.

Networking

If you’re self employed, surrounding yourself with a network of other self employed people can be one of the most powerful tools you have! I’m so grateful to have such an amazing network around me, plus friends and even acquaintances who recommend me to their friends, or to people looking for design services. The more people you know and can connect with professionally the better! 

I’m very much looking forward to getting back to an in-person networking meeting tomorrow, after months of not being able to or meeting online, I can’t wait!

Here are six reasons to hire a graphic designer!

I hope you’ll find these interesting!

Marketing goes hand in hand with graphic design, often in a larger company we’ll work as a team, with the marketing department. 

Today I thought I’d touch on the ways you can improve or work on your marketing. Of course, as a designer, the aesthetics and styling of adverts, flyers and other marketing items is very important, but you also need to think about the wording to use, your target audience or ideal client, where to advertise, and how often to communicate with your audience. 

Native files are ‘working’ design files, saved in design programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign etc, which still include layers, editable text, and working design elements. This is in contrast with the artwork files I described in a previous post, which are usually files with outlined text, and/or flattened images etc to ensure the file opens and prints as expected, regardless of use of fonts etc.

Native files are not usually something that a customer will want, most customers who commission a design project do not have the skills or programs needed to do the work themselves. The artwork files supplied are usually perfect for a customer’s requirements, providing the ability to print without a problem, and also editable, to an extent, if they moved to use a different designer in the future. However, there may be occasions when a customer will ask for native files.

I thought I'd talk a little about file types, as it might help you to understand what files you're receiving either from myself when I send over finished artwork, or if you're not a customer, from your own designer. 

When I send over design files, there are always several different versions of the file, depending on what it is, what it will be used for etc, and I always try to keep my customers informed so that this isn’t overwhelming, but I thought it might be something I could talk about on here too.

I'm going to talk about jpegs, pngs, eps and pdf files. I’m also going to talk about the importance of outlining text, which kind of links into this topic, but might take a little explaining!

I’ve been asked what got me into design, and to be honest I’m not 100% sure at what age I knew about graphic design, it feels like I’ve always know it was a job option, but I’m not sure all children would know about it! 

My dad owned a packaging company, and so I think this is where my interest and knowledge probably came from. I remember visiting the factory and seeing Easter egg boxes in production, I imagine I probably asked whose job it was to design/make those, so maybe that’s where it began. My dad was an accountant, and my mum had worked in a bank before my brother, sister and I were born, so it wasn’t something I found out about directly from their jobs, but maybe there were graphic designers in my dad’s company, or maybe they worked with designers. I need to ask my mum!! 

If you’re a customer looking for a designer, my advice to you would be to look through several designers’ portfolios, look through the work they have done in the past, as well as finding out what file types they will supply you with, what design programs they use, and what qualifications they have. 

There are many people offering design services who are not qualified graphic designers, and whilst this may be fine for a project you are looking for, or if you’re working to a budget, you may be wise to check out the quality of their work before committing. You may also find that you’re not supplied with files that are high enough resolution to print at a large scale, or aren’t vector files, for example.

For a graphic designer, or for anyone in a creative role, a portfolio is essential! We used to rely only on physical portfolios which we’d take to job interviews and largely ignore whilst we were in employment, but now online digital portfolios are so easily accessed that a potential client or potential employer can have a great view of your work before even making contact with you.