Preparing Your Manuscript for Typesetting, Part 1

A manuscript you submit to a publisher or literary agent will follow certain guidelines — plain fonts, black text on white paper, no fancy formatting, generous margins and double-spaced lines. Individual publishers have their own preferred submission format, which you’ll find quite easily on their website. Any of these apply when you submit to an […]

Your Book is Great. But Will It Look Great?

For a typical author, it’s all about the content. That’s as it should be. Creating a book of any kind, whether it’s a novel, a how-to, or a travel book, takes a tremendous amount of creativity, thought and hard work. The last thing an author wants to think about, usually, is the mechanics of production […]

Type Says More About You Than You Might Think

I’ve mentioned before that it’s important to choose your typefaces (not “fonts,” which are particular styles, like bold or italic,  of a given typeface) carefully and not simply accept the defaults offered by Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. This goes for your business letters and for your advertising, packaging and signage.

Too many cooks spoil the (marketing) message

Some of my recent projects have run into what I call the “too many cooks” problem. Different parts of the client’s branding or collateral were done by different people at different times. The result is that none of the parts — website, identity items like logo and business cards, marketing emails, brochures — look like […]

The Value of Humor in Marketing

We’ve all seen great ads that stuck in our minds because they had a touch (or a bagful) of humor in them. Who can forget the kid in the Darth Vader costume who “starts” his dad’s Passat using The Force?

Great Positioning? — Just Do It!

Nike’s ad agency in Turkey came out with one of the most original and playful example of correct positioning I’ve seen lately. You know Nike — athletics, “Just Do It” and that iconic swoosh — even if you’ve never owned a pair of their athletic shoes. In this video, the agency combines a strong message […]

What Do You Mean by “Best”?

A client commented to me the other day, “I think I get some of your best work from you,” right after he’d commented that my “best” work was at the back of my portfolio. I was a bit taken aback; a design professional tends not to think in those terms. It got me thinking. What […]

Anatomy of a Brand Identity

I’ve mentioned Ultra Essence before. They were the subject of an earlier post because they provided a great example of how a correctly designed advertising display increases sales. The company has a new skin-care product for men, “Ultra Handy Man” or simply “Handy Man,” that gives me the chance to write about a simple case […]