Connect Your Marketing with Your Audience.
Marketing success requires making a connection with your audience. Connecting with your audience means first understanding what’s important to them. Hero principal, Jeff Mason, shares his thoughts on the importance of your audience’s interests and needs when crafting your marketing message.
Clients, Your Designer Needs Your Input.
Hiring a design agency, like Hero Design Studio, and participating in the creative process can be challenging for many business people. In this video Hero principal, Jeff Mason, shares his thoughts the project brief—an important way clients can contribute their expertise and get the best from the design team.
Sanjay Patel Interview from Grain Edit
Catching up on my RSS feeds this morning I came across this interview with Sanjay Patel about his just released book Ramayana: Divine Loophole.
from Grain Edit…
As one of the core legends of Hindu mythology, Ramayana recounts a tale of Rama, a god-turned-prince, and his quest to rescue his wife Sita after she was kidnapped by a demon king. Sanjay is able to breath new life into this 2500-year-old epic tale with over 150 pages of lush, detailed illustrations.
The quality of Sanjay’s work is amazing and the interview provides surprising insights into the personal motivations of a professional illustrator. We’re definitely going to add this book to our studio collection. There is also a limited edition silk screened poster that is signed and still available.
Read the full interview here>>
Find the book here>>
And the poster here>>
Our new freelancing friends often ask us about how much their hourly rates should be. It’s a common dilemma and one that inevitably ends with the phrase “it depends”. Sure there are average rates in the market, a range that collectively we feel the market will bear. But that’s a very localized thing. So much so that across the Denver metro area you’ll find significant differences north to south, east to west.
What everyone should be focused on is find a balance point between the market average and their skills—one that leans toward value for the client. It’s that value quotient that keeps you at the top of the list when clients have new projects. How do you figure out your pricing for new clients? What about repeat clients? What about work that comes to you through other freelancers?
Today Seth Godin takes and interesting view on issues around these questions in his post Open Buying and Open Selling.
There are many choices we make each day that appear to be benign. In truth, though, many have negative impacts on our global environment. Take for instance, your choice of typeface. When printing a regular office document do you consider the ink consumption of the your chosen typeface? And have you considered the impact of choosing a blatant ink-hog font like an Ultra-Bold Extended will have on the environment our childrens’ children inherit? I haven’t. And I bet you haven’t either. Why would you? The impact happens at such a small scale that it is invisible to us.
Someone has thought about this though—Matt Robinson. And he created a startlingly simple way of amplifying our everyday font choices so that we can clearly see the impact they make.
Take a look at Matt’s project Measuring Type on his site www.matthewrobinson.co.uk
The idea of “design for all” continues to work its way into our lives. Especially our business lives. Magazines like Fast Company and Good are bringing smart design to the forefront of business thinking. In fact, I’m not sure that either are actually business titles anymore. They both seem like some new version of CommArts that connects the dots between creative ideas and business results. In our head long rush towards measurable ROI, maybe this is what designers will be taking into the bathroom instead of the Print’s regional design annual. Read the rest of this entry »
Hand Done, Type-tastic Thursday
This week I’ve been really into Nate Williams’ Letter Playground website. Users upload funky hand done or non traditional letter forms. The website is a celebration of type as illustration and there is a lot of funky goodness and inspiration to be found while poking around. Letter Playground has nifty features allowing users to upload their own found or drawn letters, the ability to “favorite” letters, sort by letter and to comment on other’s letters. Some of my favorites include this robot-tastic set by the user Banu:
and also this angry looking stegosaurs ‘D’ by Heath:
How Clients Can Get Better Design.
If you’ve ever hired a plumber, the experience probably went something like this: you called, he showed up, you showed him the leaky sink, had a brief discussion and then left him alone to do the job. Some time later, he came to you, said the job was done, handed you a bill and left. No muss, no fuss — and little required from you except a phone call at the beginning and a check at the end.
It’s not uncommon for clients to think they can approach professional graphic designers as they would a plumber. Meaning, they view the relationship as a purchase of a turn-key solution that, once in place, will take care of itself.
We call this the “Buy-a-Logo-Get-a-Logo” mindset. It’s the shortest path to design that provides little, if any, real value. Read the rest of this entry »
Connect with Hero's RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to receive daily updates on how you can use inbound marketing to boost your business.
