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As I’ve mentioned before, I do alot of networking here in Brighton, Michigan and I see a wide variety of people at these events. Have you ever been to a networking event and run into someone in torn jeans and a t-shirt? Were you more or less likely to take them seriously as a business person? Would you go to a job interview in yoga pants and a fleece jacket? For most of us in the business world, we know these are no nos when you are out marketing yourself or your company. You don’t always have to wear a suit, but you have to dress in a manner appropriate for the level of professionalism that is expected.
The same can be said for the look and professionalism of your marketing materials. Passing out a business card that was put together on your home computer, printed out on plain paper and sloppily cut out instantly says, “I’m not professional”. So does some clip art you threw together with a whole bunch of different fonts. You don’t always have to hire a professional graphic designer (although it can’t hurt, and let’s face it, as a graphic designer I would advise you to hire one), but you should at the very least educate yourself on some very basic graphic design principles to help make your materials look appropriately professional.
More in the next several posts on some of these basic principles…
The challenge of this project, how to express a varied mix of products for a company whose name didn’t portray this variety. I was approached by Michigan based Musical Instruments Supplies International to design a logo that would appeal to all of their potential clients. While the company’s name implied a fairly limited clientele, in reality, the company supplies imported wood for musical instruments, furniture and flooring… a fairly diverse market.
For the first round of logo designs, I provided one design that very overtly showed each of the target markets and then focused the other designs on what was a commonality among each product (exotic wood). Three logos were designed with a stylized version of a rubber tree and one with images of musical instruments, flooring and furniture.
For the second round, he wanted to focus on the logo that displayed all three uses. I changed the violin image to a guitar and then offered a variety of color options.
After considering the logo for a few days he decided to go back to the idea of the stylized tree. While he was originally not happy with the logo of a tree in a circle, this logo had grown on him. For the final logo we decided to merge logo #3 and #4 together and came up with a stylized rubber tree, confined within a circle with the words, “musical instruments, flooring and furniture” as well as only the initials MISI for a company name. Completed within 5 days from start of project to delivery of the final logo, this logo portrayed the commonality among his products, and didn’t limit him to only musical instruments.
I got the chance to design some very funky business cards when Betsy with Michigan based OpenDesign came to me to design unique business cards for her and her up and coming interior design business. Betsy’s tagline is “The Smiling Eclectic Designer”, and it suits her to a tea. Fun, energized and anything but stodgy, Betsy wanted cards that represented her… definitely different, and definitely not corporate.
She had developed a swirly graphic, sorta yin yang, sorta stylized woman, and had been using that as a logo of sorts. She also had a photograph of herself, somewhat out of focus and generally soft with flowers in the background. We decided on a two sided card, with the photo on one side and most of the business information on the other.
For the photo side, I added an earthy gradient to the photo to leave room for some text and also to allow the image to take up the entire area of the card. For the other side, I took her swirly graphic (a low res bitmap), redrew it as a vector file and then colored it in four earthy yet funky color versions. These four swirls were strategically placed in the background of the card so as not to compete too much with the text, but so that they also definitely stand out. I then added her company information and other tagline of “life is too short for white walls”. She was thrilled with the results, which capture her style and creativity with a card that is far from just another business card.
