Happy New Year
December 30, 2011 Leave a comment
Please click here to view our online card.
From all of us at Affinity Express, we wish you a very happy 2012.
New Year Ads
December 27, 2011 Leave a comment
What comes to mind when you think of New Year’s Eve? Based on the ads we create at this time of the year for our clients, it is fireworks, balloons and decorations, and champagne. Unlike Christmas, there isn’t a wide variety of iconic images from which to choose, which means it can be challenging to stand out in a crowd of New Year’s promotions.
Nevertheless, I think this ad for Jaguar is successful. It gets your attention with bright fireworks that lead the eye to look down at the cars. Wouldn’t it be nice to ring in the new year with a new luxury car? Well, it’s nice to dream . . .
Happy Holidays
December 24, 2011 Leave a comment
It’s a holiday tradition at Affinity Express to recreate a well-known piece of art using embroidery digitizing. This year, the pressure was heightened since last year’s design just won us two awards: the Stitches Golden Needle awards for Design of the Year, Technical, Corporate and Design of the Year, Artistic, Corporate.
The subject we chose this year was a Renoir painting. And regardless of whether we win an award, I think we can be proud of this year’s design as well! What do you think?
Christmas Ads
December 20, 2011 Leave a comment
We’ve written previously about holiday-themed ads and how to best tie into the season to encourage customers to buy products and services. As we approach the winter holidays, let’s take a look at some fresh winter ads.
This is another example of adding an image to a standard ad to brighten it up and evoke the season. It’s easy and, quite often effective with minimal work required. Basically, it is an ad for businesses to do just that: pop in an image and some copy and run it in the newspaper.
10 Tips on Designing Brochures
December 16, 2011 Leave a comment
With Mel Fernandez
Even with the prevalence of digital marketing, brochures are common marketing materials, used in both printed and electronic form. We use them to present our company and its products and services in an interesting way that grabs readers’ attention and makes them want to buy from us or work with us. To be effective, a brochure must have solid branding, strong visuals, clear and concise messaging, and effective page layout and design.
When we recently re-wrote and re-designed an Affinity Express trade show brochure (for print) and some posters to display in our booth, we took the time to document the process. Mel and I have worked together on dozens of brochures and come at it from two perspectives: strategy and content for me and design and branding for Mel.
Together, we came up with the following tips that will help you create effective brochures.
Using Cartoons for Marketing
December 13, 2011 Leave a comment
Cartoon created by Affinity Express for a client
I have been reading the book Visual Marketing by David Langton and Anita Campbell, and came across the example of cartoons to market CaseCentral. CaseCentral markets eDiscovery software to law firms and corporations, and these “Case in Point” cartoons are meant to draw attention, entertain as well as demonstrate the company’s knowledge of the field.
That is a smart use of visual marketing, and it reminded me of the Indian consumer goods company, Amul. Amul Butter cartoons appear on billboards and newspapers all over India. Each cartoon references some current event—an election, a new movie, a sleazy scandal—and the tagline is at once a pun on and a comment on the event that it references. They have been doing this for decades and these cartoons are immensely popular: you can browse through some here.
If you haven’t guessed already, I am in awe of the Amul campaign. They combine contemporary relevance, story-telling and art to create a powerful message that evokes the brand and ties in the product, and they have done this consistently for over three decades. If that isn’t brilliant, I don’t know what is.
7 Reasons Why I Hate Your Website
December 9, 2011 6 Comments
There are many, many reasons why someone might hate your website. If it works for you—gets you a great number of leads every month or your e-commerce sales have gone up since the redesign—you can shut this page now and go back to work. But if you wonder what it is about your website that’s just not bringing in the leads, read on: your website might be committing one of these mistakes.
It Annoys Users
Forcing me to wait through a two-minute Flash “intro” before I can even get to your site will really annoy me. Almost as bad is making me click on an “enter site” button. I AM on your site, so why do I have to ENTER it?
Other things that annoy your users:
- Music that plays as soon as I enter your site so I have to frantically mute my computer while coworkers raise their heads and look around
- Cluttered design with little white space and too many different elements
- Bright clashing colors or light text on dark background to give me a headache
- Lots of Flash, so that getting to your “management team” page feels like a complicated and difficult game
- Your website takes so long to load I can make myself a fresh cup of tea while I’m waiting
Read more of this post
Seasonal Ads for Winter
December 6, 2011 Leave a comment
Every season brings on a slew of new products that need to be promoted. Smart marketers and business-owners also find ways of packaging existing products for different times of year to inspire customers to buy. As winter sets in, let’s take a look at some of the ads our team has designed for our clients while the temperatures drop and the snow starts in North America.
The easiest way to work make an ad seasonal is when there is a natural fit with the products, such as these ads for winter boots and slippers that will keep you dry and warm.
Like this:
How to Work with Designers
December 2, 2011 Leave a comment
Over at the Search Engine People blog, I offer more advice on working with designers.
Working with someone in a remote office is always difficult, but when I started out, I found it harder to get design done efficiently because I didn’t know much about design and I hadn’t realized how I could be a better client.
So here’s some of what I’ve learned the hard way!
Once in a while you work with a designer who can take your “I want something pretty, but corporate, and use our brand colors but do something different and fluid” and turn it into a fabulous design. (Thanks, Mel!) But lets face it, that’s really rare. So here are some tips for marketers and business-owners on working with web or graphic designers (whether they are employees, freelancers or a business services provider).
Give detailed instructions.
This is the most obvious but also most important tip. Especially when you start out working with a new designer or provider, make sure you write down every little thing you can think of. Here are some common aspects I often forget to specify:
- The size of the design (in pixels or inches or whatever works for you)
- The purpose: Is it for print or web? Will it be used in your blog and have to fit into the blog column? Is it a direct mail piece that has to fit into a certain size of envelope?
- Do you have preferences on how the design should be laid out? How many columns? How much space should the image take up?
- When do you need it?
And make clear what you can’t do: e.g., change the colors in your logo, use serif fonts, or whatever your guidelines are. Which brings us to…
