Ask any business expert what really matters during times of economic instability and they will say that continuing to market your business is critical. Yet, in business, matters of creativity and design are often seen as something nice to have if you can afford it, but easily cut during uncertain financial times. Historically, when money is low, the arts and artists feel it first.

Existing businesses are struggling more, and people are losing jobs and going out on their own in droves, making competition fiercer than ever. How can they stand out and be seen - if not by marketing and advertising? And if you are going to spend the time, money, and energy, why bother if not with good design? Online or off, good design gives credibility, visibility, and consistency. It can even make economic sense, if approached strategically.

Do It Yourself Branding: We all have heard the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. When a business is seeking higher visibility, often the projected image makes them memorable. As you are competing with other companies selling the same service or product, there are many things which can set your business apart - but FIRST you have to get the customer's attention. On first impression, the only differentiation between you and your competition may be your branding and image. And that is achieved with graphic design.

Good design leads to communications consistency. Studies indicate that a prospect must hear of or see your business numerous times before it will spring to mind unbidden. Having a consistent and memorable message and image can help accelerate recognition and therefore speed up the branding process.

Imagine this: you are at a seminar listening to a dynamic speaker and you ask him to send you more information about his company. When the package arrives, you are surprised to discover the information is barely readable, the colors clash enough to make your eyes ache, and there is a good chance the charts were done by a five year old. You will probably overlook all this, because you met this gentleman, and you already know he really knows his stuff. But if you received this marketing collateral before meeting and hearing him, it is likely you would question the consultant's credibility and professionalism.

When you visit a business on the web, navigation and content on a web site are extremely important, for it is the visual design which lends credibility and indicates the professionalism and quality of the business. Consumer Web Watch reportedly found that "Design Look" (46.1 percent) and "Information Design/Structure" (28.5 percent) were the top factors people used to determine credibility of the business they were visiting online.

Having a quality product or service is terrific, but it is not enough if no one can see you, or if no one knows you are there. What better time to let the world know that your business exists, than when your competition is hunkered down and not marketing? Perhaps they are marketing, but doing it themselves, on the cheap and poorly designed - this, too, presents an opportunity differentiate your business. Professional design can improve your business image and communications, and it is good for economics. A good image offers increased, positive exposure and differentiation from the competition. Improved communications assures your message reaches your audience, and is received. Economically, good design increases sales through increased acceptance and awareness of your products and services.

How can you afford not to be sure your business is well designed?

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Eileen Parzek is an award winning graphic and web designer providing digital and print graphic design and web design services. Always found at the intersection of information, creativity and technology, her business, Business Design Studio (www.businessdesignstudio.com) helps small businesses make a big impression.

When it comes to buying art supplies, we’re luckier than the Old Masters because we can buy everything ready-made, ready to use and we have far more choice. What hasn’t changed is the importance of being particular about the art materials you use, opting for quality rather than quantity. Tubes of paint you know are full of pigment, not just a little stretched with filler. Paper that doesn’t yellow or have spotty sizing. A brush whose hairs stay firmly in place and shape. By using top-quality art materials, you make the most of your artistic skill and creativity.

Even if you are already using top-notch materials, it’s worth periodically checking to see what’s new. It's not every day that you will discover a product such as Winsor & Newton’s Artists' Acrylic which introduced a totally reformulated acrylic, but innovations and improvements happen all the time.  For instance, Winsor & Newton now has three versions of traditional lead-based white for oil painters. 

The right brush for the painting

Hog-hair, sable-hair, squirrel-hair, synthetic fibers, mixed fibers... filbert, flat, round, mop, fan, rigger... long handle or short. There are so many variations to something as fundamental to painting as a brush. Everyone has their favorite, the one that’s just right for your painting style. But familiarity puts you into a comfort zone; you know what you can do with the brush and if you’re not careful, the brush dictates how you’re painting.
Try a different shape of brush and see what it does to your mark-making in the paint.

Try a different type of hair and see how it works with the paint. A rigger brush for delicate lines longer than you’d think possible, or a mop for wonderfully watery washes. And if your memories of synthetic-hair brushes date from when they first came onto the market, give them another go as you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

If you look after a top-quality brush well, it may even outlast you, whereas a poorly made brush will frustrate you by leaving hairs in the paint and soon end up unused in a jar on the shelf. What you’re after is a brush that will hold the paint within the hairs and let the paper gently pull it from the brush rather than it all slide off the instant you touch the surface. As well as a brush that is balanced in your hand, not top- or bottom-heavy. The ferrule won’t rust or loosen. The varnish doesn’t flake off the handle. Hairs don’t fall out or instantly splay in all directions.   

When you look at the Rolls Royce of sable brushes, such as a Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush, you’ll notice it has an exceptionally fine point. That’s because it’s made from different length hairs, carefully arranged to have longer ones around the fatter belly of the brush and tapering to a point. Put a little pressure on the brush to paint a thicker line, lift up and the hairs spring back to the point, enabling you to paint fine detail without swapping to another brush.

If you do have to replace a quality brush, the new one will respond like the old. With poorly made brushes that wear out rapidly, you have to keep buying a new one and learn its idiosyncrasies all over again. You’re spending time mastering a tool – again – rather than developing a painting.
Next time you looking at brushes, don’t think of it as simply “this brush costs X and that one Y” but analyze what you’re getting for the price. The quality and selection of the hairs, the construction, how many miles you’re going to get out of it, what it might add to your painting technique and style.

Student paints and artist’s quality paints

There are many different types of oil paint and at the bottom end of the market, those of a poorer quality have so little pigment that they can be difficult to paint with. Above this you get cheap student paint, and above this you get the student or hobbyist lines produced by the reputable brands. These student paints can even be better than what some manufacturer’s sell as affordable artist’s quality.

Buying a reputable brand means you can know the colours aren’t going to fade or produce peculiar colour mixes, that there’s a decent amount of pigment in the tube and it’s been properly formulated.  

Winsor & Newton’s affordable brands -- Galeria (acrylics), Cotman (water colours), and Winton (oils) -- all offer an array of colours that will have anyone painting contently. But WINSOR & NEWTON’s artist’s ranges give access to far more; to the full range of pigments, traditional and modern, the full extent of the strength and subtlety of colour available to artists today. Learn with student paints, and then step it up a notch and move up to artist’s quality paint.   

For an in-depth look at how to judge what you’re getting in a tube of paint, read The quality of your oil colour by Emma Pearce, former technical expert for Winsor & Newton. It’s about oil paints, but the key information applies across all mediums.

Quality in the foundation

The best paints in the world aren’t any good if what you apply it to isn’t going to last or yellows. With canvas, some of the problems encountered are easy to spot. Stretchers that aren’t put together square or so thin they’ve warped. Canvas not stretched tightly enough or pulled skew so the grain is distorted. Canvas with a coarse weave that will overwhelm fine detail. Unsightly folds at corners. 

Other issues are less easy to spot, such as uneven priming. I’ve even encountered a canvas where acrylic paint simply wouldn’t stick in one spot. I had to sand it down and prime it again.

If you’re using oil paint, look for canvas that is double or triple primed or buy unprimed canvas and apply several layers of gesso yourself. Several layers of gesso helps stiffen the fibers in a canvas, reducing movement and flexibility, thus protecting the paint. Gesso also protects the canvas from the oil in the paint. Acrylics are more flexible, so it’s less of a concern unless you’re using thick layers of paint or texture paste.

Paper needs to be acid free or it will deteriorate and yellow over time. Few of us are going to check a paper declaring itself to be acid free is indeed so, relying on the integrity of the manufacturer. Similarly, you can't see the sizing in a paper, but once you put brush to paper you experience it. A quality paper will have the same level of internal and surface sizing, so you can rely on it responding consistently. Poorly sized paper can lead to paint spreading unexpectedly. One small spot on a sheet of paper is all it takes to ruin a watercolour painting.

Once you've found a paper you enjoy using, why might you change it? There's the new-on-the-market aspect, the greener-credentials papers, and the stuck-in-a-rut factor. If you only ever use what you know, what might you be missing out on, what paintings might you not create by changing the materials you’re using?

A heavier weight paper isn’t simply a thicker version of a thinner one with the sole benefit that you don't have to stretch it before painting on it. Try it and you'll feel it responds differently, it’s more resilient. With graphite, for instance, a thicker paper will more readily take additional layers. You can leave the paper for a bit to 'relax', then apply more on top. If you’re lifting colour off to fix a mistake in a watercolour, there’s less risk of disturbing the surface of the paper.  


Don’t forget mediums

If you’ve never used anything but oil and turps for oil paints or water for acrylics and watercolours, then you’ve been missing out. How about adding a bit of texture medium to watercolour? Or a sparkle to colours with iridescent medium? Deliberately making the pigment dry uneven with granulation medium? Slow the drying time?

With oil paint, there are mediums for speeding up the drying time, for making it easier to blend without brush marks, for adding body (impasto). With acrylic paint the range is even larger, including mediums to facilitate glazing, make the paint more matt or gloss, or slow the drying time, as well as all sorts of texture mediums for extra body and surface textures such as glass beads.

Getting an easel

Few things feel more like a commitment to creating art in the long term than getting an easel. If you’ve been in an art class with battered tripod easels that wobble however you stand them, struggled to adjust wing nuts or tighten them so your painting doesn’t slide down as you’re working, then you probably won’t need persuading to buy a sturdy, h-frame one with a ratchet so it’s easy to adjust. If it seems an expense you can’t really justify, divide the cost over the years you’ll use it, probably the rest of your life...

Check the largest size canvas it’ll take and whether your ceiling is high enough for the easel at its maximum extension if you like painting standing up. Check the mechanism for adjusting is easy to use and, if it’s on castors, that these are easy to lock. If an easel wobbles or is a pain to adjust, you won’t use it and may as well chop it up for firewood. If an easel is sturdy enough to withstand vigorous brushwork and simple to adjust, the joy of using it will be reflected in your art. Once you get over the horror the first time you get paint on your lovely new easel, that is.

I recommend taking a look at Winsor & Newton’s Shannon and Welland studio easels.
 

Don’t get stuck in an artistic rut

It’s easy to find excuses for sticking with what you know, for not trying art materials other than what you’re now using or using better quality paint. Take the initiative and discover for yourself how much more you can achieve with top-of-the-range art materials and experiment with new products. You won’t be the first to discover that it is true you can use less good quality paint to achieve more than you can with loads of inferior paint.

Marion Boddy-Evans is an artist and writer who now lives on the Isle of Skye. She paints mostly with acrylics, but regularly gives herself a creative boost by using other mediums too. Marion also writes About.com:Painting.

http://www.winsornewton.com/resource-centre/product-articles/choosing-quality-art-materials

Most Common

Offset lithography is the most common high volume commercial printing technology. In offset printing, the desired print image is burned onto a plate and is then transferred (or offset) from the plate to a rubber blanket, and then to the printing surface. The lithographic process is based on the repulsion of oil and water. The image to be printed gets ink from ink rollers, while the non printing area attracts a film of water, keeping the non printing areas ink-free.
Mechanical Steps Eliminated in Digital Printing

Digital printing eliminates many of the mechanical steps required for conventional printing, including making films and color proofs, manually stripping the pieces together and making plates.
So ... Which is Better

Well, it seems that depends.

Advantages of Digital

• Shorter turnaround.
•  Every print is the same. More accurate counts, less waste and fewer variations, due to not having to balance ink and water during press run.
•  Cheaper low volume printing. While the unit cost of each piece may be higher than with offset printing, when setup costs are included digital printing provides lower per unit costs for very small print runs.
• Variable Data Printing is a form of customizable digital printing. Using information from a database or external file, text and graphics can be changed on each piece without stopping or slowing down the press. For example, personalized letters can be printed with a different name and address on each letter. Variable data printing is used primarily for direct marketing, customer relationship development and advertising.

Advantages of Offset

• High image quality
•  Works on a wide range of printing surfaces including paper, wood, cloth, metal, leather, rough paper and plastic.
  The unit cost goes down as the quantity goes up.
• Quality and cost-effectiveness in high volume jobs. While today's digital presses are close to the cost/benefit ratio of offset for high quality work, they are not yet able to compete with the volume an offset press can produce.
• Many modern offset presses use computer-to-plate systems as opposed to the older computer-to-film work flows, further increasing quality.

Still Not Sure Which is Right?

Use this checklist to help decide:

• Quantity. Offset printing has a front-end cost load. Short runs may have a high unit cost. But as quantities increase, the unit cost goes down with offset printing. Very short runs can be much more cost effective with digital printing; while larger quantities are likely to have a lower unit cost with offset printing.

• Printing medium. Do you need or want a special paper, finish or unusual printing surface, or unique size? The options are increasing continually for digital, but offset printing still offers the most flexibility.

• Color. Digital presses use four-color process printing. If you need only black ink or one or two ink colors, offset printing may offer a more cost-effective solution. If you need four-color printing, digital may offer advantages in lower up-front costs.

• More on color. If you're planning to print using the Pantone® Matching System, offset printing will give you the best match, since it uses actual Pantone® ink. Digital printing simulates the color using a four-color matching process, so some digital printers may offer less accurate color matching on projects.

• Turnaround. If you need it fast, digital usually offers quicker delivery.

• Proofing. Digital offers accurate proofs since you see an actual sample of the printed piece. Accurate color proofing for offset printing can be expensive.

• Customization. Without question, digital printing offers the most affordable way to customize marketing materials, direct mail pieces, letters, etc.

Summary

Use the above checklist to help you decide and talk to your printer before submitting your job for advice on preparing files properly for the option you choose.

The Internet is a powerful tool for business. It displays your products to the world 24/7 without huge costs to the organization. I have met many business owners who will put a web site on the Internet and not do any follow-up with that site. Web traffic is like any other traffic to your business. It needs to be tended, fostered, advertised, and promoted in various ways.

One of the fastest ways to drive web traffic is through social media networking and direct mail.  But how does a business do this properly?  The first evaluation should be based on what you are trying to accomplish.  If you have a national or international product that involves shipping and delivery to various locations, you would use a form of "direct mail" or directed traffic via Ad-words on Google or advertising through social media and promoting your product through distributors web sites or other types of targeted advertising.  Most local businesses, however, rely on a very small demographic area for their "bread and butter" business.  A restaurant, a club, a retail store, or other highly localized business that relies on "foot traffic" would be better served by using both ground-based and Internet advertising.

Many companies do not have the resources to do a full web presence (which can cost upwards of $10,000) to develop, nor do they really need a "fully-functioning" web site with shopping carts, databsases, etc.  What they really need is a nice informational site that can be promoted through social media (which is free, although you do have to tend it) like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. and through ground-based advertising which is targeted to specific areas of the city or town in which the business resides.

For businesses in Ogden and Salt Lake, Ogden Blue offers unique direct mail services that can help boost awareness for your business.  There are several options available, and some are very low-cost for the amount of people reached.  Direct Mail pieces should have a clean design that is used to point people to your web site where people can more fully get acquainted with your services and offerings.  In spite of what you might think, there are some very low-cost, new options where expensive mailing lists and first-class or even standard postage is not required.

This year, the Postal Service introduced a new product called Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM).  This delivery service is available at half the price of Standard Mail, and your mail can be tailored along delivery routes to hit the main target area or demographic that you wish to reach.  Look at the rates below:

With these rates, Direct Mail becomes a low-cost way to directly target and mail to a specific demographic area.  

Ogden Blue just did a mailer to 3,500 people about our services.  This mail piece directed people to our web site where we are running a contest.  Total cost of postage was $507.  For our customers who are printing and mailing, that same reach would have been around $900 total cost (Ogden Blue charges an additional $.02 per piece to deliver the mailer to the individual Post Offices).  That is a lot of people exposed to your product directly in your targeted area for very little comparable cost.

The nice thing about direct mail is that you are not competing with other offerings, as you would be in other print media.  Your piece is seen directly by the person without distracting messages surrounding it.  When this is coupled with a direct or targeted message telling customers to visit your web site, it can be a powerful tool in raising the awareness that your business exists and the types of offerings you have.  

 Think about how this could impact the number of people who know about your business in an area.  Typically, restaurants, retail, and other local services only pull customers from a 5 - 10 mile radius.  If this matches the description of your business then Direct Mail might be an option for you, especially if you are newly starting up your services and need a jump start on getting customers through the door.

WHy the new web site?

For anyone who saw the old web site, I think you will understand why we really wanted to update this site!  When I came to the company two and a half years ago, there were a lot of pressing issues that needed to be taken care of, and the web site just seemed to drop by the wayside.  We really concentrated on becoming a top-notch printing firm during that period of time, and we have done an outstanding job on offering unique services, stellar customer service, and a fast, easy printing experience.  The web site is more about customer service to me.  Is there a way that we can help you get stuff done faster, easier, with less hassle?  I hope that is what the new web site will be all about.

This site now gives us the ability to change the information here ourselves.  We get to blog and converse with you through it.  It links to our social media, so we can let you know about all the great services and specials you can find at Ogden Blue.  In other words, it helps us continue the conversation with you, and helps us deliver a higher level of service than we could before. 

New Features

We have a lot of new features and a new look.  Our new look, which some of you have seen, reflects a bit better the new Ogden Blue.  We have had blueprinting services for a long time, but a lot of people didn't know that we also do color printing which is reflected in the new logos.  We have some amazing digital presses that give incredible quality... right here in Ogden so you can keep your business local.  Our six color bars reflect the six ways that we can serve you, and each one represents an area in which we can help you express yourself as you want in print, art, and design.

So... we have added a File Upload area, where you can send your print files to us.  You can also contact us directly or learn about the different kinds of services we offer.  We have an Art Knowledge base coming soon, where you can learn a little about the different types of products and how they are used.  You can join a newsletter that can help you track when art classes are, what specials we are offering, and hear about great new products that we are bringing on-line or into the store.  There will be specials that you can only view on-line, and we will have contests that will run.  For instance, right now, you can win an iPad by just printing with us or by joining our newsletter forum!

 We are happy that you decided to check out our new web site, and I hope you find it enjoyable, informative, and easy-to-use.  I also hope it saves you time, helps you learn, and helps you save.