Annual Master Photo Competition and Holiday Party

Chris Handley - 2014 APS Holiday Party & Master Competition Awards

Last night was the Atlanta Photographic Society's annual Holiday Party and Master Photo Competition Awards banquet

How Did You Design That?

The event marketing client from my previous blog post was CoreNet Global, a professional association for corporate real estate executives.

To create the materials for their Annual Summit Meeting, we went through a thorough process that began with several client meetings. Through the meetings and research I got very familiar with CoreNet’s unique challenges in marketing the summit.

I always immerse myself in a client’s business to fully understand their situation before brainstorming goals and defining approaches to achieving those goals. (There’s a lot more involved in the strategic planning stage and I’ll have to save those details for a future post.)

Once we have goals and our plan in place, I like to do my own research. I encourage the rest of the team to help brainstorm marketing messaging, which also helps me develop visual communications to present in the form of prototypes. I think faster with pencil and paper, and it’s not uncommon for me to rough out about 80 concepts for one event promotion campaign. This helps generate as many creative ideas as possible, without being too critical in the beginning.

Next I narrow my 80 concepts down to about 12 of the strongest concepts. I’ll tighten those 12 up, still working in pencil, and then whittle down to the three or four concepts that best address our marketing goals. The focus on our goals helps me avoid personal bias in my selection process.

Ultimately, I’ll tightly mockup three or four concepts on the computer to present to the client for discussion.

We discuss the options and decide which solution works best with our marketing objective. I’ll make any adjustments and begin designing the rest of the marketing materials based on the approved strategy. Once the event is over, we discuss any challenges that came up during the event promotion, measure results and discuss opportunities for the future.

In a nutshell, this is typically “how I designed that.”

Can you get me a draft tomorrow?

At a business luncheon recently, I presented a case study on event marketing materials I designed. I was pleasantly surprised to see my client was in the audience. During the Q&A at the end of my presentation, she shared an insight for the audience when she said, “Good designers make it look easy, which leads to one of the biggest misconceptions people have about graphic design. It’s actually very difficult.”

I never realized until I heard her comments what it must look like to clients when I present materials. They just see the finished visuals, but a lot of strategizing, design and production time goes into making them.

But it’s like that in any trade. From the outside, we usually assume it can’t take that long to build or create something. I know I’ve been guilty of this in restaurants when I’m hungry!

Website Design — Buyer Beware!

If you’re in the market for a new website or a re-design, please do the appropriate due diligence!

I’ve been running into more than a few people lately who have spent a lot of money with a developer or designer, but six months go by and they have very little to show for it.
If you’re in the market for a new website or a re-design, please do the appropriate due diligence!

I’ve been running into more than a few people lately who have spent a lot of money with a developer or "designer", but six months go by and they have very little to show for it.

Companies that don’t ask the hard questions before hiring someone to build their website make themselves vulnerable to well-meaning service providers who fully intend to get their clients launched – but get in over their heads.

I can get the project completed for them, but the lost time, revenue and opportunity could have been avoided.

Here are some things to ask before you hire any developer or designer:

• How long have you been in business as a designer/developer?
• Do you have a degree? What did you study?
• Do you have any testimonials?
• What’s your process for completing a project like this?
• Have you done a project before like the one I’m proposing? Did anything go wrong along the way? How did you resolve the problem?

Ask to see their website design portfolio and try to work with someone who has created something at least similar to what you need. For example, if you’re rebranding your company website, ask to see their brand development work.

When Less is More – Mortgage Consultant Streamlines Web Presence

People like working with people more than they like working with companies. Stephen Katz of the Katz Mortgage Team is well aware of this fact. A mortgage consultant since the early 1990s, he’s built his business entirely on relationships and referrals.

He knows it’s the right strategy but it gets complicated when you’re in the finance industry and financial institutions are buying each other out or simply going out of business. Due to all the financial turmoil of the last 20 years, Katz has worked with nine different mortgage companies.

So how do you maintain a consistent marketing identity in the face of all that change?

Katz has figured out that you can’t hitch your star to the financial institution: you have to sell yourself first and rely on your own company name, logo and website to provide a sense of stability and consistency.

But even with that knowledge, the demands of running a business over the years without an integrated marketing plan can result in a fragmented approach that undermines the stability and credibility needed to attract customers.

The Problems with the Piecemeal Marketing Approach

Before Katz started working with Snowball, he was dividing his marketing efforts between a number of social media platforms, four different websites, and a dozen online tools.

For 12 years, he had been adding online marketing collateral ad hoc and had multiple identities across a variety of marketing channels. As a result, client confusion was a common challenge.

And the old technology, with its limited functionality, was further constraining Katz Mortgage Team’s efforts to attract and measure online traffic. He was certain he was losing business to competitors who were further along the learning curve with their online marketing.

Weaving All the Pieces Together

Snowball worked with Katz to develop a brand identity system, starting with the design of a logo and a new website. Blog articles and tools from Katz’s previous websites are now unified under one look and housed in one site.

With new technology comes better data about visitors and a resulting improvement in the ability to measure what Katz’s clients and prospects are interested in and what keywords will improve the site’s ranking.

One Website as a Hub for All Katz’s Marketing Activity

The new site features a content management system that allows the Katz team to easily update content and blog posts and to experiment with online marketing initiatives. And with only one website to manage, marketing is less labor intensive, analytics are easier to assess, and the Katz team is able to compete more effectively for customers on the Internet.

The new brand guidelines are used across the company’s social media platforms to establish consistency in the look and feel of all their marketing efforts.

Finally, building a brand strategy can be costly and time-consuming. In the mortgage business, which is rife with compliance requirements, this is especially true. To address these challenges, Snowball created a phased plan to further develop the brand strategy over the coming year.

Micrifiber Lens Cloths

With more smart phones on the market than there are people in the world, Micrifiber Lens Cloths are an excellent promotional product for cleaning glass on smart phones, tablets, camera lens, monitors, and eye glasses. I have a lens cloth with me at all times. I actually keep one in every pare of pants pocket, so it gets washed frequently.

Lens cloth design can be tricky, because the artwork will be printing onto a flexible material. It's difficult to make exact cutting of the material and harder to register the front and back sides of your artwork. Printing onto paper typically requires a 1/8 inch bleed all around your artwork, whereas printing onto microfiber cloths requires about 1/2 inch. That's a lot of bleed and potential shifting that can happen. Take this in consideration when designing a lens cloth.

The design needs to be something simple without any critical information (like a phone number or URL) close to the edge of your design. Be aware that the registration can be off by a 1/4 inch in some instances.

Photographs work really well on microfiber lens cloths. Just be sure the image is 300 dots per inch at actual size. The digital printing looks really nice on these cloths.

Feel free to send me your questions.

3rd Place - Monochrome Photo Entry

Although most of my trip to Italy was filled with rain, my wife and I forced ourselves to dawn our rain gear and explore the many towns in and around Tuscany. I earned third place for this monochrome photo print entry from the Atlanta Photographic Society in August, 2010. The rain finally let up and left the streets of Siena with a wonderful reflection on the wet pavement and beautiful contrast of light and darks. Well worth the wait for a break in the constant rain fall.