As a designer, whether or not you publish a design blog as part of your online marketing day-to-day is a decision that only you can make. A design blog has some very real advantages in promoting your budding practice, but some downfalls in the upkeep department. A design blog can help you get some decent search engine placement pretty quickly, an advantage over a graphics rich site, which as a designer, you’re likely to have. While those lovely portfolio pieces may look nice on your logo gallery, they won’t accomplish much in the SEO department. Google, Yahoo and other search engines like ‘real’ content (text) and a blog is one method to develop lots and lots of text, manna for search engine spiders. Accordingly, maintaining a design blog can be a rewarding activity, both creatively and in terms in fairly rapid marketing (the point of this exercise).

On the flip-side, a blog can be a royal pain in the ass to upkeep if your heart isn’t in it. Keeping a blog can be enormously time-consuming - either writing complete posts, writing parts of posts for later publication (I started this article back in February) or researching news feeds, graphic design forums and other blogs for information.

On average (espcially recently) I’d say I spend about 3-4 hours a day on The Factor, including weekends, and at times it takes real effort to write even the simplest post. Sometimes I just get bored with my own blather. Often, I’m bereft of ideas and there isn’t any design news to write about or ‘pad’. If the weather’s good, my shiny red Yamaha is a lot more appealing than writing another article about the latest logo design news, or yet another rant, about yet another logo contest. Overall, maintaining a blog (at least one that’s going to help you market your design services) represents a sizable time investment and to be effective, requires consistent tending.

If you’re not ready to dedicate a least 3 - 6 hours a week in developing, writing and promoting your blog, it probably isn’t for you. A really nice blog will take longer. And that’s every week, often easier said than done. There have been times - too busy at the shop, summer, family responsibilities - when I haven’t posted on The Logo Factory studio blog for weeks on end. That’s never a good thing - defeats the entire purpose of having a design blog in the first place. When your last published date is weeks, or months ago, you’ll quickly lose any regular readers you’ve managed to attract, and a dated blog is certain to be viewed as a sign that your design business isn’t active, or even out of business (ironically, the opposite is probably true - you may be too busy with client work to actually get around to writing anything).

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Friend of The Factor, David Airey, is holding a blog logo design contest over at his new blog Logo Design Love. No, not the usual logo design contest nonsense - David has assembled a rather impressive list of judges who will take a gander at blog logos, from 10 categories, and judge the best through a series of heats. LDL is a nifty resource for all matters related to logos, with a ton of articles examples and links. Did notice one thing though - in David’s feature how much for that logo in the window, he opines thusly -

If a logo designer provides a fixed price before researching the project, the reason is due to one of three things:
1. They’re shooting themselves in the foot by under-valuing their expertise
2. They’ll create a poor design by scrimping on the research stage
3. The figure is huge because the designer doesn’t need the business

As we work with flat rate pricing at The Factory, not sure which of the these we’re guilty of. I’d argue (naturally enough) none, but no matter. Flat rate pricing, in fact publishing ANY pricing, on a design website has always been a point of contention within the design community. And one that I’ve swam upstream against for as long as I remember. The bottom line for flat-rate design is this - if you’re going to market services via the web you’ll need to have some form of quick-to-find rates in place. On the intertoobz, folks are in a rush to find out the nuts-and-bolts of any product and service, and generally speaking the second FAQ about design services is “how much?” (the first is ‘can you do this’?, more often than not answered by your portfolio). By refusing to list pricing of any sort, you’ll lose a hefty percentage of visitors who can’t be bothered filling out the contact form (regardless of how user-friendly), sending an e-mail or picking up the phone. The interwebs run 24/7, across many time zones, so you run the risk of missing out on overnight, weekend and holiday inquiries, especially when it’s a simple mouse click to find the answer somewhere else. For those that do take the time to communicate with you, personalized correspondence is manageable and every project can be tweaked and formulated IF your site is only receiving a few hits a day. Even then, a vast majority of website traffic consists of tire-kickers (folks who are not interested in design services but are ‘curious’), design students and yes, even your competition, eager to find out what the ‘other guys’ are up to. However, once your site begins to develop traction, and your hits begin to rise, the time taken up answering the ‘how much’ question would quickly overwhelm the finite resources of a one-person shop, or even that of a small studio. Get a decent amount of traffic and dealing with the ‘how much’ question on a personal level is simply not feasible. At least, that was my experience back in the day when we took TLF online back in’96. We had no choice but to develop a series of flat-rate packages in order to ‘cut and paste’ replies into e-mail inquiries. Even that became time prohibitive, so we had to develop an online pricing menu complete with automated project submission forms. In regards to the actual logo design pricing itself, we’ve been able to average the amount of time spent on various types of projects into a series of packages, each with varying degrees of turnaround time, file support and number of revisions we can commit to. When it comes to illustrative logos, we need to restrict these projects to professional packages, in order to cover the extra steps required to develop concept sketches, etc. Naturally, I can only speak for what goes on at The Logo Factory HQ, and while this kind of pricing isn’t for every design shop, it is certainly possible to bill out flat-rate-design without ’scrimping on the research stage’.

When it comes to designing company stationery, many designers and clients view their envelope as a ‘throwaway’ - the process involving slapping on the company logo, a return address, and we’re all set. In order to maximize the ‘ah-ha’ factor of any corporate identity work-up, shouldn’t we look at ALL the various stationery components - business card, letterhead and envelope - as important? After all, isn’t an envelope the first thing many will see before viewing the enclosed letterhead and/or business card? Having said that, there are some caveats to envelope design and it’s probably a good idea to understand what is, and what isn’t possible when it comes to designing an envelope, and how some designs, while visually nifty and all, may cost a small fortune to reproduce.

Firstly, printing of an envelope, generally speaking, is quite different that that for a letterhead or business card. More often than not, printers will use envelopes that are already constructed (with flaps and pockets already in place) and this represents some unique challenges on the press. An envelope is not flat, so it tends to move around a little when being printed - air can get captured inside the envelope - something which has to be factored into the design and the tolerances for registration are not as exacting as for other printed pieces. Also, it’s very difficult to use bleed printing or artwork on a pre-constructed envelope (unless the envelope is printed BEFORE construction - which is fantastic, but can lead to very expensive production charges). Because of press slippage, it’s also best to avoid four colour process printing to avoid registration problems. It’s more effective (and more economical) to utilize either a spot colour or one colour version of your logo and business information. Now, that’s not to say you CAN’T feature full colour bleed artwork on your envelope design, or that you shouldn’t - you can. It’s just going to be more expensive to print your envelopes if you choose to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

Entry deadline for the 2007 Create Awards is this Friday (June 29) and any submissions need to be postmarked or uploaded before that date. If you don’t know, the Create Awards are held by Create Magazine and feature best of industry prizes of $2,500. $30,000 grand prize package of sponsor products is also on the line. Entries cost $20 a pop (if you submit 5 or more) and there’s over 300 categories spanning all the creative industries. More info and entry forms at the 2007 Create Awards site.

About time. The US Copyright Office has just announced a planned online copyright registration service. Soon to enter beta testing, the system will allow artists, designers and writers to forgo the sometimes daunting task of registering copyright, while saving a few bucks in the process.

In the future, the Copyright Office will offer the option to file a copyright registration online through this website. A limited number of participants will begin beta testing the new system this summer. Once testing is complete, the system will be available to members of the public. Advantages will include:

• Lower filing fee of $35 for a basic claim (for online filings only).
• Fastest processing time
• Earlier effective date of registration
• Online status tracking
• Payment online by credit card or Copyright Office deposit account

Alternatively, the Office will also continue to offer the option to complete an application online, print it out, and mail it to the Copyright Office.

Beginning this summer of 2007, enhanced versions of our forms will be available. These forms will be programmed with special, scannable barcodes that contain the information you type into the form.

With new scanning software, the Office will be able to process these forms faster and more efficiently. Check back at this website for availability of the new versions.

Note that the current $45 fee for a paper application will be retained.

Online service is at the heart of improvements coming to the Copyright Office as part of a major reengineering effort. In addition, streamlined internal processing using better-integrated information technology systems will result in faster service overall and better tracking of work in progress.

These improvements will extend to many Copyright Office services including registration, the recordation of documents, and the provision of information and copies of Copyright Office records.

If all goes well looks like the new service, apparently named ECO (Electronic Copyright Office), will hit the toobz sometime this fall.

Generally spend the Sunday a.m. reading design news with a cup of java and puppies curled at my feet. While doing so this weekend, I stumbled upon this - Design: Too Important to Leave to Designers? Reading the provocative title, a couple thoughts came instantly to mind - ‘Dentistry: Too Important to Leave to Dentists‘ or ‘Accounting: Too Important to Leave to Accountants‘ and how they’d be equally dopey. In any case, had a hunch that the person penning the piece might have an axe to grind with designers in general, so perhaps a little more investigation was in order…

Apparently, this was an extrapolation of a recent article in Business Week entitled Are Designers the enemy of Design? In all fairness, the Business Week article was a transcript of a speech made by Bruce Nussbaum to students at Parson’s New School of Design. The speech was designed to be provocative (despite the title, it wasn’t a hating on designers screed) and was meant to challenge the next generation of designers to think - using the most tired descriptor imaginable - ‘outside the box’ - and an interesting read that touches on all the hot-button issues facing all the the multi-disciplined design communities of today. But back to the Design: Too Important to Leave to Designers, a discussion piece penned by Rob Marsh on his farily decent Brand Story blog. Marsh has a series if impressive credentials including, it should be noted, acting as the current VP of Customer Experiences at Logoworks. At the very least, his opinion deserves a looksee…

Great talents who understand that non-functional design is called art, not design. Exceptional artists who love to help clients create things they can’t do on their own (at a price that makes sense). Designers who are more interested in the needs of their clients (including sometimes making the logo bigger), than their own needs for aesthetics

Fair enough. Most professionals agree that design isn’t art (though the debate continues to rage on) - graphic designers are helping sell tampons, pet food, hamburgers and other life staples - and there’s only room for so much capital ‘A’ art to be crow barred into a package, or in this context, a logo. That’s the sacrifice that artists make when they decide to become commercial designers, as opposed to the ‘fine artist’ species. It was a bridge I had to cross many years ago when I had to decide between a roof over the kid’s heads, or a life in a drafty loft, surrounded by half-finished canvases, albeit with my self-proclaimed integrity intact. And while “exceptional artists” certainly do “help clients create things that can’t do on their own” (that’s pretty much the designer part) I might be tempted to argue that aesthetics are sometimes pivotal to the ‘clients needs’. Take a look at your average strip-mall. Probably 90% of the designs and logos featured on the overhang light-boxes don’t have any aesthetics at all - how many of these bad designs are a result of some well-intentioned designer throwing in the towel to a client’s misguided direction, aesthetics and resulting effectiveness be damned? Probably a decent chunk. Read the rest of this entry »