Firstly I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year, I think 2010 is going to be a good year for DDA and design in general and to mark the turn of the new year I thought we would look at some designs that we won’t forget.  Creating a design that will stick in people’s mind is more important than ever.  So what designs caught your eye this year?

Here are a few of my favorites which I came across on one of my favorite sites Web Design Ledger.

My first favorite is this one, it is the Anti Breakage Shampoo : Rapunzel.  I like how they have used a well known character to promote shampoo.

Not being a huge fan of heights, I am not sure that I would do very well with this and would have to take the stairs.

I also love the ones that can make you smile,

I have only chosen a few that I really liked, please visit the site to see more advertisements not to be forgotten.

Enjoy design in 2010.

]]> http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2010/graphic-design/happy-new-year/feed/ 0 http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2009/graphic-design/christmas-at-dda/ http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2009/graphic-design/christmas-at-dda/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:45:58 +0000 LucyP http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/?p=938

Here at Digital Design Advice we are really excited about Christmas and have added snow to our design.  What do you think?  Fingers crossed for snow on Thursday if the weather people are right ;o).  So instead of the usual design post I thought we would take a look at Christmas gift ideas – we  have just picked our secret santas.

So here is a quick look at possible gift ideas:-

USB stick

How about a Lego USB stick, which you can make by following the instructions.

Or how about the teddy USB drive

I like this idea too, the human sleeping bag.  I am not sure it would go down very well with the receiver but the person does look snuggly warm.

These are only quick ideas and I am obviously keeping my secret santa gift top secret until we exchanged them.

Merry Christmas everyone

We covered the UK Google Doodle competition last year, it’s always a really interesting and fun idea for Google and it gives loads of kids out there chance to showcase their skills and have their logos featured on the Google Homepage!

This years theme is “My Hero”.  It centers on finding out who children really look up to and  asks them to create a Google Doodle representing one of the heroes from their family, friends, community or even world famous figures.

The final winner will be chosen by Dennis Hwang, the original Google Doodler and the winner even gets a trip for California!

Please take a look at each of the age groups and vote for a finalist, here are my choices!

5-7 Year Old Category: SuperGran by Ellen Blair (Aged 5)

This is my favorite from this category purely because the artist thinks her Gran is her number one hero. Everyone loves their Gran and the feature of flowers and sweets (which we all associate with Granny) is fantastic. Well done Ellen!

7-11 Year Old Category: Tomoriko Nishicado by Pip Watkins (Aged 11)

This may actually be my favorite design overall. Not only is the fact that Pip chose Nishicado amazing, an eleven year old with respect for classic video game innovation! but the design itself is fantastic.

The “damaged” Google logo is an original and entertaining idea and the little touch of having “Google” as the high score is also loads of fun. If your reading this Pip DDA loves you!

11-14 Year Old Category: The Dashing Prince by Sophie Devlin (Aged 13)

This is my favorite from the 11-14 year old category. Sophie (great name btw!) has done a really good job at invoking all of our fond memories of Princesses in towers and brave Knights on horseback with her tribute to The Dashing Prince, every girls favourite fictional hero!

Sophie’s drawing is fantastic and I love the drawbridge “e” and the dragon,well done for this entry!

14-16 Year Old Category: Isambard Kingdom Brunel by Matthew Collier (Aged 15)

Matthew has done a fantastic job of creating a Google Doodle tribute to one of the worlds most influential industrialists. Very strong artwork with a nice balance between utilising the logo and drawing pictures around it. I especially like the use of the “L” as a bridge support.

Great work Matthew and good luck!

Computer Artwork Category: David Attenborough by Sophie Redford (Aged 15)

I think there is no doubt in anyone’s mind here at DDA as to how amazing this entry is, for a 15 year old Sophie (another one whoo!) has done a truly fantastic job.

A really worthy choice for a “hero” and amazing artistic ability make this, without a doubt, the most “attractive” entry into the competition.

Lets hope Sophie wins her category for all the effort she has clearly put in here!

That’s all for now, some really great entries this year. Good luck to everyone, not just those featured here, I will update when I see the winner announced!

Having been around since the early 1980s it has proven it self to capture and engage peoples attention and be an inventive way to promote your brand. Guerrilla marketing can be used by large organisations or small start up companies.

One of the earliest campaigns was from Adidas having struggled with promoting the brand after changes in management they needed to pull something big out of the bag and their answer was to give pairs of Adidas trainers away to rappers in New York and if you are a child of the 80s you will remember Run DMC bringing out a single called “My Adidas”.  If you don’t remember the song then see the bottom of the post.

Todays guerrilla marketing has changed from the early days and is now more inventive and sometimes challenging.

Here are some of my favorites:-

The important thing to remember about guerrilla marketing as a technique is it becomes ineffective once it has been used, marketers need to keep ahead and find new ways to grab the attention  otherwise what was a surprise marketing campaign that everyone was talking once will soon something that people have forgotten and are bored with.

Whether you like this marketing technique or not you have to agree that it does make you stop and stair – it works!

Just in case you don’t remember – you’ve got to love the 80s.

Hello,

When you start your initial design concept there are areas of the design that you don’t always consider initially, as the site is designed around what concepts the client needs to get across on the homepage.  Most websites follow the same page structure throughout having the nav and content positioned in the same place to maintain a consistent design throughout the site.  There are one or two exceptions to this consistent design where you are able to think outside the box and one of those is a 404 page.

404 or page not found is an error message that is returned when their is not a page to return with that url because of a mistyped url, broken link or moved or deleted content.

Below are some great examples of 404 pages with great designs to help enhance the rest of the users experience.  So rather than be disappointed they couldn’t access the page they were looking for they are impressed by the design and creativity.

Bluedaniel

jhuskisson.com

Heinz

Also with your design it is a good idea to utilise Google’s Enhanced Url, this enables the user to type in what they believe the page to be called to see if they can find the page.  You can also customise the 404 widget to work with your current design.

I think all in all 404 pages should be creative as someone has visited your site and not found the page they were looking for so to help keep them on your site having a great design and Googles enhanced url will help.

Welcome back to DDA, we have an excellent post today with a few friendly tips about logo design. Logo design is, without a doubt, one fo the most important areas of design from a business point of view and if you’re good at it it can be both profitable and fun.

There are certain rules however to developing a good logo, especially if you want to provide value for a business.
Including Text

Most compnaies want their name inside a logo but ideally you want to keep the imagary seperate from the text. This is because text goes against a bunch of the other points in this list and it also fails to be multilingual and can overcomplicate things.

There is nothing wrong with producing a variation of the logo with text alongside but be sure not to intertwine the two components so much that they cannot be separated.

Of course there are always exceptions, the Coca Cola logo is just text at the end of the day. Use your judgement as a designer and keep the following tips in mind.

Scalable

A big thing that designers forget is that logo’s must be scalable both ways. That means it should look good at 1 inch square or five meters. Make sure your logo does not loose value when shrunk or enlarged and remember that logos will be in a variety of placed so it should look consistant.

Aspect ratio also plays a big part here, do not make a logo that’s really tall or really long as it it won’t scale well on documents and won’t work well on external websites or products. Try to aim for square or just off square with the icon and let text make it wider if you need to.

Colour

Choosing the right colour is important for a logo, it almost sets a theme for the whole company and can often be carried into office design and packaging. Make sure you consider this when making a logo, if you intergrate too many colours you will make it difficult to place with anything else.

Additionally make sure your logo looks good greyscale. There are several reasons for this, the primary being the paper communication may well be in black and white and you don’t want your logo loosing value just because its printed out.

Representation

A massive misconception of many designers is that logos have to represent what a company does, i.e a gardening logo with a flower in it or a plumbers logo with a burst pipe. Sure these look great but good logos don’t need it, look at all these logos and tell me if they actually say what a company does?

None of them do, they are memorable and eye catching but they represent the brand not the product.

Coming back to what we mentioned in the colour section it’s important to remember logos set the tone for the theme of a company, try to represent this, not your product or service.

You also need to be aware what you might be mis-representing. Read this blog post and make sure you don’t make the same mistakes and make sure you’re not accidental breaching copyright or similar rules, definitely don’t steal or “borrow” anything, eventually you will be caught oput, especially if your successful.

Be Sure

Got your logo design done? Make sure they like it then make sure they have the full works, print design, letterheads, car stickers everything. Not just because you can make money but it will make their brand more valuable.

Getting your logo out there is the point of having a logo, if they don’t utilise it then there was no point in doing the logo in the first place. If they don’t agree show them your trainers or iPod, everything is branded, Nike shows often feature the logo 3-4 times per shoe.

The logo also needs to be static, not redesigned after a few months. Show them how valuable it is to keep a logo theme and give exmaples of the big companies that have.

Target Audience

The client liking their logo is important but press to them it’s their potentialy customers who should like it best. When you do a design always keep customers, not the client, at the forefront of design reasoning. If they really disagree? Well that’s too bad but at least try to get them to understand.

OK That’s all I have for you, hope these tips help with your logo design, let us know if you have anymore

But so many companies aren’t using it to their full advantage. Whilst searching for people to stalk… I mean follow… I was amazed by the amount of businesses not capitalising on their twitter presence.

Lucy pointed out that CSS Galleries are one of the worst culprits after finding the following list of Twitter profiles for galleries. It takes a good designer minutes to make a striking background, creating a much more professional look to the profile.

Take a look at DDA’s Twitter profile, I did this in a couple of minutes, just by branding it to match the DDA website and including contact details and a short profile about who we are and what we do – this gives it a much more personalised feeling.

Why not download DDA’s Twitter Template and give it a go yourself. Now there’s no excuse not to have a personalised Twitter page

Download PSD File

I have always been a huge fan of encouraging design and just generally being creative from a young age, afterall this is where the future of design lies.

With the finalists of Doodle 4 Google in Ireland picked for each age group from juniors to 6th year students now is the time to vote.   Contestants enter from different schools within Ireland and then the competition (I think moves to English entries)

You can vote for your favorite on Doodle 4 Google online with the voting ending on Monday 16th February 2009.

Here are some that caught my eye:-

Age 5th/6th year

Evan O’Sullivan Glynn, aged 16


Nathan Cafolla aged 16

1st, 2nd and 3rd year

Sarah Peters aged 14

Nora Casey aged 12

Juniors and Infants

Louise Gilmore aged 8

Visit the Doodle 4 Google site to place votes for each age group.

I have found some great brochure designs for you and if you have come across any that you have seen leave me a comment with a link.  I really appreciate interactive and interesting brochure design.

The brochure below is a great use of illustrative photography showcasing Boundless’ core services.  It is also nice to see the designers have integrated into their design a functionality of a pocket folder for any additional information.

The vibrancy of this design is a good representation of what the brochure is covering.  Creating a buzz through your brochure design not only enhances your design but promotes your company in the right light.

Brochure design doesn’t have to follow the usual format as these designers have done with this design, creating not only a fantastic design but also in a fun way interactive way to really communicate their message.

How is 2009 going for you all so far, I really can’t believe we are a month in already! Jeez.

I really hope you are all doing OK out there during this crazy “credit crunch” time, today we are going to look at my top five tips for being a successful graphic designer.

These tips are designed to help you to prove both your ability and worth as a designer. If you already have a portfolio it’s worth going over these tips at the side of what you have, if you are yet to develop one then keep them in mind for when you plan the project.

1) Variety

I see a lot of great graphic designers who are really good at one style have a portfolio full of that one style and nothing else. There is nothing wrong with playing to your strengths, in fact it should almost be a point in its own, but you should always consider that a potential client may not be looking for that particular style or format.

I recommend, if you don’t have a massive range of styles and products, you actually give yourself the job of creating them. Make a magazine cover, some album art, a flyer and posters, even something as seemingly trivial as a few desktop wallpapers can really spice up your portfolio and make you look a lot more versitile.

Make sure you vary your style and colour schemes too, sometimes it’s easy to think “I hate blue” and never include it as the main colour in work but your clients may not see the same view and by excluding it from the portfolio you could be going against them before you even start.

2) Work Online & Offline

This si the digital age and your online portfolio needs to be a big deal but this doesn’t mean you should have nothing to show people in the flesh. Networking is extremely important but networking without showing people your work is pointless.

You need to make an impact on people whether your online or offline so be sure to provide something of interest in both. Not taking a portfolio folder with you? Here’s a few idea’s;

• Range of different styles business cards
• Business cards with logo designs on
• iPhone ready portfolio sub-site
• Customised clothing

3) Understand Marketing

As a designer you main set of clients will be approaching you from some sort of marketing perspective. Spend time learning to understand what they want/mean/are saying about a project and more importantly why.

If you can more accurately understand the goals of your clients then its much more likely you will produce initial and finalised work that they are not only happy with but will achieve their goals and have them coming back for more.

This is not an easy task but read related websites and talk to any contacts you have as often as possible about marketing and stay on top of the latest trends.

4) Professionalism

There are a number of things, especially on an online portfolio, that can make you look more professional than you actually are. These little tweaks can make a big difference to how you recruit clients and what types of clients you attract.

Here’s a short checklist to run through;

• Spelling and grammar
• Privacy Policy page
• Terms and Conditions page
• Have a basic contract ready
• Full contact details and where applicable, company registration numbers
• Display awards, accreditation and qualifications somewhere on the site

Professionalism carries through to you as a personal as well, treat clients with respect and be sure to be understanding in the face of problems.

An additional note, while professionalism is important don’t let it stifle creativity, you can still be yourself, have fun, use bright colours and have teddy bears in the office just don’t throw the teddy bear in the clients face and call him names when he is late paying a bill.

5) You are a Brand

A lot of people don’t get this but you, as a designer, are a brand in yourself, even if you work for a company.

The purpose of any brand is to become well known and recognisable and to do this you have to be in the public eye. On the net this is very easy to do but time consuming. Here are a few ideas for building yourself as a brand, they can each be explored in depth but feel free to ask any questions about specific strategies.

• Run a personal blog, talk about your work, the industry, whatever you want, just be you.
• Take part in social networks, join Twitter and post regular updates, join Facebook and Myspace and publisise these things from your blog.
• Make yourself a presence on industry related forums and blogs and speak to “the big” players in your particular speciality, can you make friends and contacts out of these people?
• Use online portfolio sites to increase the number of places your work is displayed

Hopefully this will be really helpful to you and improve your portfolio and attitude in the field, aas always good luck with any work you do and feel free to suggest additional ideas!