The right designer or design agency can take your idea and breathe critical visual life into it—producing effective, attention-grabbing marketing materials that do their job: to sell your product or service.

The problem is that countless individuals call themselves graphic designers with no more than a Photoshop license on their home computer.

So, how do you know if you’ve found the “right” graphic designer or graphic design team?

The right designer for your project will have exceptional skill, plenty of experience, and a track record for successful project delivery. To make sure your vendor meets these requirements, here’s an outline of questions you should ask before beginning an engagement:

Experience

1. How long have you been doing graphic design?
2. Do you have any formal training?
3. Can I see a portfolio of your work?
4. Do you have customer testimonials on your website or in print?
5. Can I speak with a few clients about their experience working with you?

Watch out for minimal experience, a lack of work samples, and difficulty producing clients that will speak to prospects on the designer’s behalf. The best indicators of a quality service provider are a successful business and plenty of satisfied clients.

Business Process

1. Are you a freelancer or affiliated with an agency?
2. What are your hours of operation?
3. During the course of the project, when and how can I reach you with questions or comments?
4. What turnaround time can I expect for each phase of the project?
5. How many drafts can I see before the final?

Look for indications that the designer has a solid project management process in place. An experienced graphic designer understands the value of a project plan that includes well-defined deliverables and a realistic timeline. Additionally, you want to make sure your designer is accessible and committed to meeting deadlines.

Deliverable

1. What software programs or other tools do you use?
2. In what formats will I receive my designs?
3. If I need another file format or size later on, will you be able to create it for me?
4. Will you be archiving copies of my design? If so, how long do you store them?

It’s important to consider file storage. If a designer doesn’t archive your project for you, make sure you back up the files in your own storage system in case of emergency.

Billing & Payment

1. What are your rates?
2. Are your rates hourly, or project-based?
3. Will I incur added charges if my project takes longer than expected?
4. Do you require a deposit? If so, how much and is it refundable?
5. How and when will I receive my invoice?
6. When will my payment be due?
7. What methods of payment do you accept?
8. Can I pay online, or by credit card?
9. What if I am not satisfied with the final result? Do you issue refunds?

Be wary of designers with no guarantee related to your satisfaction. You want someone who is flexible enough to work with you to produce something you love at a price you can afford.

Comprehension & Communication

1. Do you understand my company, product, or service?
2. Will you be easy for me to work with?

These are the most important questions to think about and answer for yourself. Your design team’s job is to take your abstract ideas and turn them into concrete visual material. Therefore, they should take the time to understand you and your business, and communication should easily flow between you.

Color & Code provides highly-skilled graphic designers with practical experience in a wide range of business verticals. Our entire team is held to the highest standards of quality and service—and our track record for customer satisfaction proves it. We encourage our clients to ask a lot of questions before engaging our services because it builds a trusting, productive relationship.

Whether you are considering Color & Code or another vendor to fill your graphic design needs, we encourage you to ask these questions and closely compare vendor answers before making a selection. As a guide, please download our free Vendor Evaluation Form to help you in your decision making.

Within a month of launch she realized that a more flexible, self-hosted solution would be necessary to make some aesthetic changes to the look and feel of the site. We guided her through the process of selecting a hosting provider and a package, and then transferred her site with its current “theme” and all of its existing content, and added new plugins to provide similar functionality as her old site. The process was seamless to her subscribers, and we established a redirect to ensure that no traffic would be lost between her old blog and her shiny new carblightliving.com domain name.

After the transition was complete, we designed the logo and developed a color scheme to ensure that the Carb Light Living™ website would be memorable and attractive to its visitors. We then created a set of matching business cards for Joann and her husband, Gary.

Next, we worked with Joann on a facebook marketing strategy, including the visual design of her page, and a Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaign which has generated her thousands of highly-engaged fans in just a few months.

We have also designed two custom tabs, one featuring Joann’s Amazon web store (aStore) integrated into her facebook page, another featuring a fan-only coupon code, which requires fans to “like” her page before receiving the discount.

We are now working with Joann on an eBook layout for her upcoming recipe collection, and provide continual maintenance and support of all of her online and offline marketing collateral.

Joann has said this about working with us:

When people ask me, “What contributed most to the success of your company?” I tell them that, other than my own personal drive, it was getting with the right web designer from Day One.

Joann Mercer
http://carblightliving.com

Read the rest of what Joann has to say about working with Color & Code in our testimonials section. If you’re ready to kickstart your own company’s branding and marketing initiatives, give us a call today at (707) 932-5570 for a free consultation and custom quote!

If you haven’t heard already, facebook announced last week that the Timeline layout – which has been an optional update to a facebook user’s personal profile for some time now – will be pushed to all facebook business pages (fan pages) at the end of this month. When we previewed some of our client pages using the new layout, we were a bit put off. There are MAJOR changes to the layout that affect the appearance of many elements on the page that I’m sure your designer had lovingly crafted in months prior to this “update.”

Most notably, the profile picture which used to appear in a nice, vertical layout is now cropped down to a square, leaving little space for anything other than your company or brand’s logo.

Second, any custom apps, such as a custom landing tab or fan gate, will probably have unsightly, default icons instead of the carefully-crafted 16-pixel favicons previously used.

Finally, there is the new “cover photo” which, while providing an opportunity to showcase a much larger featured photo, according to facebook cannot contain any promotional language such as pricing or even language that encourages users to “like” your page, as previous fan gate designs often did. Therefore, even though the cover photo image area is similar in size to previous fan gates and custom tabs, it is against facebook guidelines to use it that way.

As a result of these changes, many of our clients need to update their pages. Without making any changes, here is what one of our client’s pages looked like:

After some basic updates, it’s looking much better:

*Ahhh* a sigh of relief can be heard from both the client and the designer.

Here are the guidelines we suggest for users who are attempting to do this on their own, without the calm and reassuring guidance of a professional marketing team:

• Use a square profile picture. Images should be exactly 180 pixels wide x 180 pixels tall for best results. After you have uploaded the profile picture, be sure to also edit your thumbnail image for optimal display (in your posts and replies to comments and on other people’s pages, for example).
• Change your custom tab’s app icons if they are not meaningful to your fans. These should be 111 pixels wide x 74 pixels high. To edit, click the downward arrow near your app thumbnails, then hover over your app and click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner. Click “Edit Settings” then in the popup window next to “Custom Tab Image” click “Change.” In the window that opens click the text that says “Change” again, then upload your image.
• Be sure to use the “About” section that facebook provides, as it is now more prominent. If you include your website URL here, it will display as a clickable link – one benefit over previous facebook fan pages.
• Create a unique cover photo. You can either hire a designer to create a custom design (ahem – call us for a quote), or upload a photo that you already own. Be sure that it speaks to your brand and is of a high quality – most digital cameras will take large enough pictures. It must be at least 399 pixels wide but you will probably want to use something at least 851 pixels wide to avoid stretching. Blurry pictures do not leave the best impression!

Good luck to everyone attempting to update their facebook timelines. Hope you make it in time for the March 31st update (pun intended)! If you get stuck or need some advice, we’re only one call, comment, or post away

Making Progress

In the time since our first meeting, he’s really hit the ground running with plenty of content throughout his pages, reflecting his expertise in the subject area and landing him on the first page of Google for some of his target keywords. He also has several books available on Amazon related to his website, which he now links to through blog posts and widgets in his site’s sidebar. Even without a physical product to sell, Dr. Sadovsky has created this knowledge product — a popular and proven strategy to generate revenue from a Web site.

Looking Forward

I admire Dr. Sadovsky’s personable nature, which comes through in both verbal and written communication. I look forward to hearing about his successes in the online marketing world, which I’m sure will mirror his real-world accomplishments. Although his primary goal for our one-on-one training sessions was to learn the in’s and out’s of WordPress administration, we hope he comes back soon for an eBook cover design or maybe a web site brand and identity package (in which we’d feature some of his beautiful photography of wild horses).

“Free” Blogging Software Solutions

There are a number of blogging services available which will allow you to create a free blog in minutes, with WordPress.com being perhaps the most popular. Setting up a blog on a free blogging website involves creating an account with user name and password and following the service’s guidelines for layout and other settings.

Pros:

• Low Up-front Cost: free for the most basic options
• Potential Traffic: possibility of extra traffic from the blog’s own network, e.g. feature in the “blogs of the day” section
• Easy to Setup: simple set-up process
• Low Maintenance: the blogging company takes care of the software updates for you

Cons:

• Low Originality: limited to free themes / templates available in the company’s own marketplace, so your site won’t necessarily be unique
• Little Flexibility: for WordPress.com, no third-party plugins are allowed; this greatly impacts the flexibility of the software
• Limited Ability to Brand: your blog often resides on a sub-domain name such as myblog.wordpress.com, not your own .com address (this is a paid upgrade for WordPress.com users)
• No Monetization: third-party host is entitled to advertising revenue from ads placed on your blog
• No Room to Grow: “free” solutions often impose limits on storage space, unless you pay for an upgrade

Self-hosted Solution (Hosted by Color & Code)

This option allows the most customization but also requires more time and effort. Setting up a self-hosted website requires purchasing your own domain name, locating a web hosting service provider, and downloading and installing a content management system on your chosen host. However, with the experienced team at Color & Code at your disposal, we can eliminate many of these negative effects and provide you with a flexible, branded, and cost-effective solution.

Pros:

• Total Customization: a wider range of customization options including unlimited theme customization and plugins available in third-party marketplaces, as well as the ability for your designer or developer to edit the CSS / HTML / PHP code directly, ensuring that your site looks and functions exactly how you want it
• Complete Flexibility: ability to install helpful add-ons for Search Engine Optimization assistance, e-mail marketing, website analytics, sidebar widgets, social media feed syndication and much more – we will recommend the best ones to you!
• Your Own Branding: having your own domain name without “.wordpress.com” will add to your brand’s credibility and professionalism; you may also opt to remove footer text belonging to the Content Management System itself; in addition, if you decide to sell your site for profit, having a self-hosted website with an independent domain name will increase your site’s market value
• Monetization Freedom: you are the receiver of all advertising revenue if you decide to feature ads on you blog
• Room to Grow: more flexibility and space to upload images, video and graphics you need
• Support: your web hosting service will provide technical support 24/7, and Color & Code is also available according to our service-level agreement to troubleshoot any issues you may have and respond to emergencies

Cons:

• Seemingly Higher Up-front Cost: annual expense for domain name registration and website hosting; talk to us about pricing and comparison with many “free” blogging services’ upgrades
• Potential Traffic: no additional traffic from the CMS’ internal network, for which we can help you compensate by the Search Engine Optimization benefits of a self-hosted solution
• Difficult to Setup: sometimes it is difficult to download and install the Content Management System on your chosen host, including creating a new database and FTP of files (many web hosts advertise a one-click application install for systems like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, but these are often outdated versions of the software, come with pre-installed bloatware e.g. plugins that are unnecessary, and are difficult to troubleshoot in case of an error); Color & Code will manage this process for you from start to finish!
• Higher Maintenance: generally, a self-hosted solution requires regular maintenance and backup, but with Color & Code’s Annual Management Package, we manage it for you

If you already have a website running on a “free” Content Management System and decide to take advantage of the extended functionality and possibilities of a self-hosted solution hosted by Color & Code, we can help you transfer your blog or website seamlessly with no loss of traffic, search engine rankings or subscribers.

In fact, we have provided this very service to several clients in the past few months. Check out the Color & Code testimonials page to see how happy our clients are with our services, and get in touch with us to learn more details about our Annual Management Package.

However, while the tools are very user friendly, it’s easy to go off track without a good campaign strategy. If this is your first time running an online ad campaign, you may run into several common problems. For example, you may not be targeting your audience effectively, which will result in failure to generate revenue. You may not be targeting a wide enough audience through a limited marketing strategy, thus missing out on important customer segments. You may not be using appropriate metrics to measure success, resulting in suboptimal use of the marketing budget.

Engaging a professional marketing services company, such as Color & Code, will help to avoid these problems and create an effective advertising campaign within a limited timeframe or budget. Since online marketing combines creative and technical aspects, we are well positioned to design a one-of-a-kind campaign from a “colorful” perspective while addressing technical and strategic issues. We’ll start by getting to know your business and help you clarify your marketing objectives. Then we’ll plan a detailed advertising campaign to address your specific needs, whether it’s branding, identifying sales prospects or actually generating sales. We can help you make your campaign as relevant to your target audience as you need by using keywords. We’ll also determine your success metrics in advance, ensuring the real-time ability to track whether the campaign is meeting its objectives (using Google analytic tools) and adjust your strategy as necessary. By partnering with our customers at every point in the campaign, we are able to offer highly customized solutions to meet your unique needs and objectives.

Get started by giving us a call us today at (707) 932-5570 and be sure to ask about our AdWords vouchers!

• Hundreds of visitors to the site within the first month of launch
• Thousands of page views on the site with multiple pages viewed per visit, a sign of visitor engagement
• 133 Facebook fans as of this writing
• Ms. Miller’s first sale originating from e-commerce

In addition, Ms. Miller has repeatedly received positive feedback from her website and fan page visitors.

Everyone who I’ve talked to about my site has been really impressed with the look, logo, etc.
- Elizabeth Miller

Our work with Ms. Miller included migration to a self-hosted WordPress site with search-engine-friendly redirection, creation of a heavily-modified child theme design using the Twenty Eleven base theme and unique graphic design elements, logo design according to Ms. Miller’s specifications, color scheme and font selection, style sheet modifications for optimal margins and padding throughout the site including comment form styles (a common complaint among users of the Twenty Eleven theme), as well as suggestions for site structure and organization.

Last but not least, we created a Facebook fan page including graphic elements, advertising strategy and implementation through Facebook Ads and Google AdWords, and conducted administrator training.

Thanks to Ms. Miller’s own hard work and dedication beyond the hours of her full-time work week, she has also been featured in a number of guest blog posts and has received links back from other websites in her niche around the web. Stop by her website at http://matchpointtravel.org and her fan page at http://www.facebook.com/matchpointtravel to see what she’s been up to lately.

We look forward to watching Ms. Miller and her new business prosper in the months to come!

As a business owner working on a print project, terms like “bleed,” “safe zone,” and “trim area,” sound a bit foreign. Reading the following article will help explain some of the industry jargon so that you can communicate more effectively with your creative team and commercial printer. The article was written by a printing company and provides a nice illustration, and a light writing style which we can always appreciate.

The author mentions that it’s important not to overlook these concepts when working with a designer on a print project, and we agree. It could make your final product look unprofessional and cost you lots of money in printing the lot over again (which, unless you have a great relationship with your printer who takes pity on your soul, will probably be about what you paid for the initial run – also a good reason to get a “proof” which is another topic for another day).

So, read on and educate yourselves, then demand this level of attention to detail from anyone you work with!

“Cut Area, Bleeds, and Safe Zone Demystified” from Heritage Printing and Quick Copy, Inc.

I’m going to explain how you can easily change the header image of your sub-pages based on a feature that I have custom-coded into your WordPress theme template. I’ll first take you through the image creation and uploading steps, and then I’ll show you how to make the one change within WordPress itself so that it’ll show on your site.

Let’s start with the image. Take any photo or artwork in your favorite image editing program, and crop it to a size of 510px wide by 210px high. Once you’ve created the image at the right size and you’ve done your processing, color correction, or anything like that, then you’ll want to save it as a .jpg with a specific file name based on the page where you want it to appear.

So, let’s say you have a page called “Annuals.” Well, that’s easy, we’ll save it as annuals.jpg

What about “Fresh Cut Flowers?” Save it as fresh-cut-flowers.jpg (replace all of the spaces with a “-”). This is actually the same name as your “page slug” in WordPress.

See here…

So, that’s pretty straightforward, and now that you’ve saved the image to your local computer, you have to upload it to your web server. Well, how do you do that?

Depending on your web host, there may be different options available, but in this case, you can login to your cPanel directly from your web browser. Another option would be to use a desktop FTP program like FileZilla (its a free download) which I prefer. For this tutorial though, I’ll show you how to use the charliesnurserynj.com cPanel since it doesn’t require you to install any additional software. That means you can do this from any computer that has a web browser!

So, let’s login. Now, scroll down and find the icon for “File Manager.” If it asks you which directory you want to go to, you can select the default “Web Root” and click “OK.”

Then, double-click the folder icon for the “wp-content” folder, then “themes,” then “lightword-garden,” “images,” “rotating-header.” The images have been saved into this folder to separate them from your uploads and other content which appears within your blog posts and around the site. I’m going to take a minute to explain to you what each one is:

• banner-spring.jpg
• banner-winter.jpg

…are the main or “default” header banners which we have used for the two seasons so far. I kept the winter one in there so you can use it again next year if you’d like, and we can add a banner-summer.jpg and a banner-fall.jpg later.

• header-banner-base.gif
• header-banner-base.png

…are the images that give you the nice Polariod-like quality with a drop shadow behind your header graphic.

The other 11 files are placeholder images I have created for each of your existing sub-pages, which you can overwrite with your new images when you are ready.

Now that we know what’s on there, let’s take the image we saved previously, and upload it using the “Upload” icon at the top of the page. Find you file(s) using the “Browse” button, and in the dialog that comes up “Are you sure you wish to overwrite this file?” select “Yes.” If you want to stop being asked each time, select the checkbox next to “Overwrite existing files:” and it will automatically overwrite them. When you are done uploading your new images, you can close your cPanel window(s).

Then what you want to do, is go to your WordPress site and login to the admin panel. Go to the page that you were working on, and on the right-hand side in the “Page Attributes” box you will see a dropdown called “Template.” You want to select “Custom Header” and then click the blue “Update” button. If you ever want to switch it back, just use “Default Template” instead. The only difference is that one uses your default homepage image for the header, and the other finds your custom image.

The yellow notification area tells you “Page updated.” Click the “View page” link to see your new custom header in action!

If you have any problems, double-check your image file name(s), and try refreshing the web page. The worst thing that can happen is you will see a blank area with a little red X in the upper-left corner of the header area, in which case just switch back to Default Template and reach out to me, and I’ll investigate.

That’s basically all there is to it. Two steps. One is upload the image to your web server, two is make sure your page is set to use the Custom Header template. Once you’ve done that one time, and you want to change the image again, it really becomes a one-step process: simply upload and it will show.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and if you have any questions, send me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to answer. Talk to you soon.

Stay green,

Amy

Selecting the Right Color(s) for Your Brand Identity

First of all, you want to make sure that any color you select to represent your brand is the right color for your industry, your specific product or service, and the message that you want to deliver about that product or service. Different colors have long been known to play a psychological role, influencing buyer behavior and more. Think about the way the color turquoise makes you feel, as opposed to cinnamon.

Perhaps turquoise evokes images of a tropical paradise, which may be warm, serene, or peaceful.

On the other hand, cinnamon may evoke images of being warm inside your home in the winter, or cozying up with some hot cross buns next to a fireplace.

Of course, your own responses may be different from those listed above, but you can see how these two simple colors produce such varied emotional responses.

Creating a Cohesive Color Scheme

It’s important to not only select colors that work well, but that work well together by developing a harmonious color scheme to use across all of your brand materials. This may include a dominant color, accent colors, and neutral colors. We’ll use an example from our own brand, taking the dominant color which we have called “Mauve Valentine” with HEX #990066.

Now, we will go to the “color wheel,” which is a common representation of color theory. Take the dominant color for your brand, then use a bit of geometry on the wheel to find some supporting actors. By selecting colors opposite each other on the color wheel, you can find complimentary colors which are very high-contrast and really “pop.”

By selecting colors arranged in a triangle (such as the primary colors red, yellow, and blue), rectangle, or square around the color wheel, you can also find harmonious color combinations that work well together in a less jarring way.

Finally, you can select colors that appear next to each other to form an analogous color scheme which is sometimes more of a “safe” bet, but you must make sure to include enough contrast between elements to avoid having a dull image.

As you look over each example, pay attention to your emotional response to each combination. When pink is set off against green, how does that compare to the pink and blue combination? What about red and pink? Some of the designs are visually pleasing, some are just wacky and maybe better suited for a candy store, some are “cool” while some are “hot.” In addition to this selection of pure colors, you can add variations by lightening, darkening, or de-saturating any of these colors. This is where terms like tint/brightness, shade/value, and saturation/tone come in to play, respectively.

Why is this important in terms of branding?

Selecting the correct color combination for your logos and other brand materials will allow you to communicate with your audience without saying a word! Going back to the examples above, think about what each example makes you believe about the Color & Code brand. By selecting the right color combination as the foundation of your brand from the very beginning, you will influence your customers through visual communication.

Users will take one glance at your design and subconsciously respond, either positively or negatively. You will of course want to elicit positive responses so that customers keep coming back for more of your product or service.

The Integrity of Your Brand Identity

It is important to not only pay attention to these factors in the beginning, but to implement them across all of your materials – whether creating a logo design, Web site design, business cards, or letterhead. Doing this effectively can help to: establish your unique brand concretely in the customer’s mind; reinforce your message each time the customer interacts with your brand; provide a sense of reliability, security, or trust; showcase your business’ professionalism and attention to detail.

If you follow the above steps when initially building your brand or when undergoing a re-brand, you will benefit in the longer-term by providing the right message to your customers and helping them to remember it with subtle visual cues.

So, to recap:

1. Select the appropriate dominant colors to deliver the right message about your brand
2. Choose harmonious supporting colors based on modern color theory
3. Implement these colors across all online and print materials

At Color & Code, we are a bit obsessed with color (in a healthy way of course). We can work with you to establish the right colors for your brand, develop brand guidelines including specs for both print and online work, and help you maintain consistency across all of your customer touchpoints. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more or get a quote!