A good graphic designer is one of the first people you should talk to when you want to start professionally branding yourself. Like I said in my other posts, it’s not all about the logo and identity but those things should reflect your brand message uniquely. The logo, message and identity form the foundation from which all of your branding is visually built on. Being able to go back to that foundation will save time in the future when you build further. Strategically guided design positions an organization to set off a very desirable change reaction: Positive impressions created higher perceived value which in turn boosts sales.

It’s important to be happy with your designer though. They have the experience but remember this is YOUR company. Designers thrive on feedback and good design doesn’t happen in a vacuum, don’t just say “oh make me something that looks nice” this is YOUR company and it represents you. Be involved in the process. Your business is personal, it means a lot to you and denying that is denying your brand. You are paying the person, make use of them. You should be happy and you should find a designer that asks the right questions and makes you feel at ease.

Like most professions, A designer produces the best results when working with a prepared client. Ask yourself before you begin, what hurdles is your company looking to overcome? What isn’t happening now that design can fix? Is there a conversion that needs to take place or a message that needs to be said? A good designer can help you determine specific solutions but they will need you to first articulate the problems and an approximate budget.

You are not expected to know everything about small business design.

This is what a skilled graphic designer brings to the table. The profession of graphic design is as rooted in strategy and skill as anything else we are likely to encounter in the business world. In involves the carefully considered combination of text and images, of data and strategy, of message and medium.

Every aesthetic choice—color, type fonts, images and structural elements—should be specially tailored to the emotions of the audience you are attempting to reach. What type of emotion are all of these elements inciting in your audience? This doesn’t require a whole lot of delving into psychology. It’s simply about understanding the obvious emotional needs of your end user, plus a few fundamentals about good design.

Working with these combinations, a good graphic designer makes the complex clear. They literally can transform intangible assets like spirit, attitude, trustworthiness, innovation and dependability into tangible visual elements that people immediately understand. A good designer take their job seriously, respectfully collaborating with their clients to create the best solutions for business.

Whether your business needs to sell services, promote new products or just create good will, a skilled designer can marry your company’s objectives with an artistic sensibility that translates into measurable results that impact your bottom line.

Design is not just about putting a coat of paint on something, it’s about making form and function come together so every part contributes. Design is about finding solutions, whether it’s how a effectively to design a showroom that moves the most people through efficiently to creating a website that drives visitors to a specific conversion. A good design can make all the difference once a client arrives at your website to continue on within it. How you interact with your customers is crucial to your brand and the designer should sit right between you, making sure that the customer gets the information they need efficiently and uniquely.

Why is having a professional opinion important?

Like any profession it’s important to talk to someone who has experience with the intricacies of combining business and design. When you have a design created, subjects like legal Issues need to be considered. Can your artwork be trademarked? If you just use clip art it can’t and not only do you run into legal issues but you also aren’t making images for your brand that are completely unique.

So how do you find your designer? LOOK. Check out advertisements for local companies that you admire, especially ones not in your field, look through your junkmail and direct mail pieces. Then contact those companies and ask for a referral. If you do that you’ve already taken a first step and found a designer who suits your style. Another good place to find designers is through AIGA, a professional association for designers. You can find a national directory of members of AIGA online at www.aiga.org.

The dangers of using “design contests”.

Some things to be wary of are “design contests” Let me explain what I mean by this and how it can go bad: What does everyone think of Nebraska’s 2010 state fair logo? I don’t know about you but I think it looks unprofessional, cheap and not a good reflection of the fair or our state. It’s not just me, this  “logo” has become mocked statewide and is a prime example of bad decision that involves creative social media. What happened was that rather than hire a designer they created a contest where anyone could enter and the winner was paid a prize. No creative brief was established that clearly laid out the challenges and expectations from the perspective of the client. No professionals were approached. The result was this horrible logo and when they introduced it, people flooded their Facebook page expressing their disappointment and mocking the logo. In this case the viral capabilities of social media provided the exact opposite kind of publicity they wanted.

What this amounts to is soliciting to have people work for free with the vain hope their logo may fit the bill and be chosen. While it’s possible that it may have resulted in a decent logo there are many problems, FIRST: with design contests you often don’t know the source of the artwork. Was it plagiarized? Can it be trademarked? Do you have full copyright to the work? SECOND: Quality. As you can see from the state fair logo it’s not very good and the response was overwhelmingly bad. THIRD: There are many talented professional designers out there who would have been more than happy to work with the fair to create an affordable professional design for them.

This kind of work is like asking a bunch of lawyers to draft some documents for you. Instead of paying them you tell them you’ll look the documents over and pay the one person whom you like most. Do you think they would be okay with that? These contests have become increasingly popular and it only reinforces the old adage that you get what you pay for. Because more often than not they end badly with dissatisfied customers and upset designers who don’t get paid. I’ve seen it happen before and I’ve worked with companies that have attempted this.

There are plenty of high quality designers in Nebraska, talk to some of them, get their opinions on what you want. You’ll be glad you did.

What does branding mean to your company?

Some people confuse branding with getting a logo and business cards. They’ll get some cheap logo made with a swoosh and say. “There, I’m branded. Done.” In reality it’s much, much more than that.

Think of the Nike logo, by itself it’s just a curved graphic and does very little. The swoosh isn’t any more sporty, fast or effective than any other logo but it’s been built up over the decades to be associated with all those things. Now it strikes an emotional cord not because of the logo itself but because of the overall brand. A logo is not your brand, it’s simply an icon. An identity is not your brand is just a system used to lend a consistent visual voice for your organization. It doesn’t change who you are, it just augments how you are perceived by others.

Branding is not just marketing or advertising gimmick. It’s bigger than your logo or your marketing campaign. Branding is about asking: Who are you? Why is your business here? What makes you unique? Getting started with branding is about asking these questions. Building credible and memorable branding means being true to those answers and yourself. Real branding can’t be faked. There is so much commitment and passion that goes into starting a business or running an organization. Do you want to be seen as just another company or do you want to be seen as something more?

Effective branding is far more internal than external.

You need to be ready to ask yourself some hard questions, ask yourself: What is my business or organizations purpose? What is the point of what we are trying to do? What at-heart are you made of? THAT and that alone is what branding is all about. MEANING, not marketing. Marketing and advertising is about spreading your message externally, before you do that and you must brand yourself internally. Really define who you are, what your message is and who you want to talk to. That is the first step to any successful business. If you don’t know the answer to those questions then no one else will and your company will suffer for it.

In the end no one will know your business better than you will but don’t be afraid to get a creative professional’s help. They will assist you with taking those things that you love best about your business and being the owner and create imagery and visual elements that help reflect that. A professional can help you remove the unneeded elements and hone the unique characteristics into something that makes people want to learn more. It’s a process but it’s worth it.

Thanks for reading this installment, be sure to check out the next one where I’ll delve deeper into the things a business needs to consider when branding themselves effectively.

I’m not going to get into the benefits of blogging or it’s use as a marketing too. That’s an important topic but I want to cover some basic information on just getting started with blogging. There’s a TON of information out there and while I know I’m not covering it all I wanted to give a crash course.

There are a lot of blogging options available now a days. My friend sent me some links to various other blogs he had found that he liked. The first one was a nice WordPress site of another artist. WordPress is a very popular open source blogging content management system. It has a lot of advantages, it’s free, easy to use and has an active developer base with plenty of useful plugins. It’s also easy to customize and there are PLENTY of free and low cost themes to modify the look of it. You can basically go at it a couple of ways: You can install WordPress on your own server, which requires a bit of bit of web knowhow and very slight database setup(PowerBand Graphic’s site was built this way). There’s TONS of tutorials online thanks to its popularity. You can also host your WordPress site on WordPress’s servers. In that case your site URL would look something like www.yourname.wordpress.com. If you don’t want that you would need to tweak some DNS settings on your domain . Here’s some useful links:

www.wordpress.org (this is for downloading the software to install the blog yourself
www.wordpress.com (this is for using WordPress to host your blog for you)

WordPress isn’t the only blogging platform out there either. Blogger (or blogspot) is owned by Google and is a popular way to blog. This service is all hosted by Blogger though. It’s easy to use, free and easy to integrate advertising(if that’s something you want to do) but doesn’t have the same level of customization that WordPress has. Again, you would have a name like www.yourname.blogger.com unless you change some DNS settings.

Another popular blog is Tumblr. Tumblr is getting very popular because of it’s simplicity, style and customizability. It’s very “stream of consciousness” and not the most robust content management system though.

There’s many many more blogging options out there to say nothing of dedicated content management systems. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are free, others are not. Some require a decent amount of upkeep and managing others do not. I have worked and researched systems like Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, Expression Engine, Concrete5, CushyCMS and LightCMS. All good options but like anything worth researching to find out which one fits your specific needs.

NOW on to selling stuff. Here’s where you can get a little tricky. It depends on how you want to do this. Do you want the process to be automated-full-on-ecommerce with a shopping cart where people go through the process without contacting you? That’s where it can get complicated and the answer depends on how much you want to do the work yourself or hire someone. Most of these solutions require some form of fee or constant updating to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Magento is another free option, it’s a full on ecommerce platform that you can download and install similar to wordpress. This might be a bit overkill and time consuming for you though. Shopify is another option for selling things online. It’s a service with a monthly fee but what is nice is the company handles all of your hosting, security & support. Another possible option would be to create a blog and then also create a shop on Etsy Then my friend could just link his artwork in the store from his blog as he creates it. I’ve never used Etsy myself but I’ve heard it highly recommended by many artists and designers.

Phew! Lot’s of stuff to cover! It might also work to start small and test the waters. Maybe set up your blog and create a post for each item you’d like to sell with pictures and details. Then just have people contact you directly to purchase with a paypal or money order. There aren’t any hidden charges from Google that you should worry about when selling stuff from your blog. You may have to start charging sales tax depending on the state that you sell to (I believe if you use Etsy or Shopify they automate sales tax for you). I’d get an accountant you can trust if possible and get their opinion.

In the end I recommended a combination of WordPress + Etsy as the simplest combination for what my friend wanted to accomplish. Like I said there’s an incredible number of options out there. It depends on how much time you want to do this stuff yourself, your technical ability, budget and what you want your site to do. Do your research, there’s a perfect fit for everyone and you’ll be blogging in no time!

GET ADVICE FROM A PROFESSIONAL

PowerBand Graphics is happy to announce its first educational seminar aimed at helping new and established businesses brand themselves more powerfully. This is a great opportunity to get expert advice on issues that all businesses need to consider. John Holtgrew, owner and Creative Director of PowerBand Graphics will be speaking. The topics will cover:

PERSONAL BRANDING:

- What branding means and its importance.
- The competitive benefits of professional design.

WEB DESIGN IN BRANDING:

- Why web design and a professional look is important to branding
- Taking advantage of new technology and services.
- Basic search engine information, strategy and marketing.

CONTINUING YOUR BRANDING:

- Establishing new consumer relationships with social media.
- Creating consumer trust with consistent branding.
- Making your message meaningful and making it stand out.

AND MUCH MORE!

There will also be opportunity for Q&A the entire class! The seminar costs $25 and will be held Wednesday June 16th in the basement conference room of West Gate Bank (6003 Old Cheney Road in Lincoln Nebraska). Click here for directions. Please RSVP by June 14th!

The class starts at 11:30 and will go until 1:30. Lunch will be provided!

Even if you have a brand already you may be missing out on what it takes to make your business great! Take your business to the next level and get more information about how to brand yourself powerfully! Contact us to reserve your seat. We hope to see you there!