Starting your own business (or working for a small business) has it’s benefits.  Benefits like a nice work environment and frequent company lunches just to name a handful.  One of the few things that small businesses take for granted is how unprofessional they look when they send you a price quote or invoice from a ‘Gmail’ or ‘Yahoo’ email address.  To this day I still get clients that have emails that use such services.  Not only is it tacky, but your business instantly looses credibility every time a new client sees it. Read the rest of this entry »

Who uses animated gifs anymore?  Seriously?  With flash finally being widely accepted in all sorts of media, what purpose does the old dinosaur that is the animated gif serve these days?  To be honest, there’s not much use for them anymore.  However, there are still instances to this day that I must resort the “old ways” in order to make a client happy.

One such instance is the “Broadcast email”.  Most people in this industry are familliar with services like “Campaign Monitor” and “Constant Contact”.  These are services that will parse your html written code into beautifully rendered emails and then blast them to a defined client list.  These services are great because you can use html and static images to portray your ad to the world. Read the rest of this entry »

To this day, there are still graphic rules that should not be broken.  For example, resizing a 100px wide web photo to fit a 2 foot wide printed space.  Talk about jagged edges.

We all have had the client that pushes for a photo that they only have a low res version of, and with enough kicking and screaming their once beautiful website or brochure now has an ugly pixelated image right smack dab in the middle of it all.

So how do we tackle this issue without breaking the golden blowup rule?  We BEND the rule a tad. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I had a client inquire as to how to make a proper representation of a color that you can’t find in any color book.  We’ve all been there.  You’re getting your files ready to send to the press, and during pre-flight you remember that there is a Spot-UV or a Spot-Glitter area on the design.  You start to have a mini heart attack as to how to identify such a custom color so the printer cannot screw it up. (Oh, they will.)

In Adobe Illustrator there are only two color types.  Spot and Process.  Making a custom process color is easy, but you don’t want your printer cranking out 4 extra plates and charging you hundreds of dollars for one little mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

Once in a while, I’ll get that email.  You know the one, the one with the 50MB attachment.  Or I’ll get that phone call from a client as to why their massive emails keep bouncing back.  It’s no wonder attachment sizes have grown over the years.  With everyone and their mother packing a 15 Megapixel camera for daily use, it’s inevitable that email boxes get clogged daily worldwide.

So how do we solve this dilemma? Read the rest of this entry »

Has this thought ever crossed your mind?

“For the same price as 1 full color ad in a magazine,  I can run a grayscale ad for 3 months!”

If you’re a designer, most likely not.  So why is it that this train of thought is so popular among clients?  In their mind all ads are equal, so the cheaper the better, and we all know that is not often the case.

A few years back I had a great client, but he loved to get as many ads in as many magazines as possible, so all his ads were grayscale.  In his mind he was saving $600 by not using color.  After some major convincing, he now understood the real reason why full color ads cost so much, and more importantly, why they have more of an impact than their grayscale bretheren.

When you have a client that is hellbent on getting 6 ads for $1000, this could make for some frustrating times.  You could just make the ads for him and be on your merry way, or you could do what’s best for your client, and inform them of the psychological impact a full color ad can have. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahhhh Adobe Flash.  A tasty beverage that provides eye candy to your website, but can be equally poisonous if you overdose.

Too often I see websites (and website templates) that are pure flash, with little or no html content.  Most of these sites have beautiful motion between ‘pages’ and look exactly the same on every web browser.  What’s not to love?  To the normal human, flash is great.  To the search engines, however, flash can be a real nightmare.

I’ve had some clients request a site created entirely in flash, only to come back months later and ask me to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their site because it’s not getting enough hits.  It is at this exact time that I fear the most.  That is, the task of informing the client that their website is in no way search engine friendly.

This is where Designers and Developers go their separate ways. Read the rest of this entry »

It never fails.  Once in a while I have a client that paid top dollar to have another designer kick out their corporate identity package, only to find that the files were made in Photoshop.

Why is this bad?  Take that PSD (Photoshop Document) to a T-Shirt printer, or a Business card printer and you may find out the following.  Photoshop makes what designers call “Raster” files.  Raster files are pictures that are made up of many tiny dots (or pixels) that when seen from far away make up a picture.  Photography for example is “Raster”.

Read the rest of this entry »