Here’s what had been proposed:

The major problem with this design is that it looks smooth and clinical, like Band Aids or surgical gloves, not like something for a construction worker or a trucker to use on the job. There’s just nothing masculine about it. The hands in this illustration aren’t working hands. (Next time you see a bricklayer with perfectly manicured nails like these, let me know. I’d like to meet him. Or her.)

It’s also dull. It wouldn’t attract attention or interest. A brand identity must be memorable, and this just isn’t.

Advertising grooves in a brand or a campaign “look” by repeating the same visual message over and over again in different contexts to build recognition, whether on the product itself or in advertisements. But the message must be interesting to start with, otherwise the campaign will be grooving in boredom instead of recognition.

The first thing we need is a logo. (In this case, the “wordmark” — the correct term for the name of the product or company set in a special way that identifies them. The familiar Coca-Cola script is a wordmark)

The lettering for this product name must be at home in the world of industry, construction, trucking, do-it-yourself and similar activities that are hard on the skin. We need industrial strength lettering.

What could be more industrial than those stenciled labels you’d see on a big wooden crate? There’s a font for that, too. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Stencil,” and it works well for the words “Handy Man.” By setting the word “HANDY” at an angle to match the diagonal stroke of the M in “MAN” we get some tension and  a sense of action. We give “MAN” a subtle emphasis without being crass by making it larger, which also allows it to balance the width of “HANDY.” The letters are overlapped slightly to keep the whole compact, and a white border adds a little dimension at the same time as it keeps the letter forms clearly visible.

With that done, the next task is to put it in context. Although the immediate job is to create the label for a 4 ounce tube of the product, there will be other items such as jars, point-of-purchase display packaging, sell sheets, counter displays, web ads, TV ads and possibly banners. It isn’t enough, then, simply to whip out a quick label design.

Putting a new product on the market demands a brand image repeated across different media, all carrying the same message. The usual approach is to map out a campaign, plan one or a series of photographs that will appear in the advertising, then hire a photographer.

There was no budget for photography in this case, but we lucked out with a stock image by photographer Lisa F. Young of fotolia.com that fit the requirements exactly: big enough to crop for different contexts, and with exactly the right message.

A photograph of a similar product tube, a little Photoshop magic, and suddenly we have a “tube” of the as-yet-nonexistent product in the electrician’s tool pouch. We have a brand image.

Producing the label requires adding the surveyed catch-phrases or buttons for the buying public, ingredients on the back, etc..

For the company’s  overall brand word, “Ultra,” the script lettering used on their other products would look out of place. Rather than repeat the stencil type, which would be hard to read at small sizes, we use Clarendon, very readable at small sizes and different enough from Stencil that it won’t clash.

The conceit of having the tube label pictured on the tube label itself is not obtrusive, but it’s there. It encourages a double take without being gimmicky.

Finally, here is an example of a counter display that continues the branding using a differently cropped version of the image and the same typeface and type color as the product name. Darkening the background image lets us “punch a hole” in it to focus attention on the hand. It adds depth by making the large image of the tube appear to be closer to the viewer. Overlapping the bottom panel with the tube cap enhances the three-dimensional effect.

This was a very specific conversation, but it brought to mind the more general question everyone faces at least once a year: “Should I upgrade to the latest version of [insert name of software program]?” For casual use, it doesn’t much matter. If the version of “x” you are using does everything you need, upgrading is more a matter of whether you simply like having the “latest and greatest” or the new version does some things the older one doesn’t.

For professional tools, like the ones I make my living with, the considerations are different and entirely pragmatic. My conversation with Thorsten made me think about this in some detail. There’s nothing like explaining an idea to someone else for clarifying your own thoughts. It seemed worthwhile to pass them along; if they were helpful for Thorsten, then they will probably be helpful for others.

A friend recently opined, “but you’re an upgrade hog” (I’m not sure “hog” was his first choice, or a word that starts with the same sound), referring to the fact that I typically upgrade to the latest versions of the Adobe Creative Suite software soon after it comes out. He doesn’t, needless to say. I think he has the idea that I’m in the “latest and greatest” camp, but that is a serious misperception.

A pro in any field buys a tool for one reason only: to get the best possible product with the least expense in the least amount of time. If you’re a writer, Microsoft Word or Scrivener or Final Draft is probably your tool of choice. For graphic designers, and many in the video and film industries, the Adobe Creative Suite or some parts of it are essential (Photoshop is, quite literally, everywhere). The movie, architectural and engineering fields have specialized software tools that are often fabulously expensive ($90,000 or so for a single license in some cases). Software manufacturers constantly work to improve their products. Each time the new version of a tool comes out, a professional user has to make the decision to upgrade. It’s an expensive decision. Or is it?

Remember why these tools exist — to get the best possible product with the least expense in the least amount of time. That gives you the clue to my own upgrade decisions. If I can get more work done in the same amount of time, or if I can get a product (or a quality of product) that would be difficult or impossible otherwise, upgrading is a solid investment that can pay for itself in a short amount of time. The various teams at Adobe, bless them, have made both production speed and production quality the defining characteristics of their development efforts, so it doesn’t take me long to move to the new version once it hits the market. I also participate in the pre-release testing of several of the Creative Suite programs, which gives me a seat at the table when it comes to deciding what would be the most productive new features.

There is always a learning curve with something new, so that has to factor into the equation, but if I can see the end result is worth the effort, I take that as part of the cost of becoming more productive. Photographers like Thorsten had to make the expensive leap from film to digital, years ago, as the movie industry has been doing more recently. Why did they go to all that trouble and expense? — To get a better product less expensively in less time.

By contrast, Microsoft made a major change to their Office suite in 2007 that, when I tried it, proved highly counter-productive. I could work at great speed with Word, Excel and Outlook in the 2003 edition, but found their new design awkward and slow by comparison. So, you guessed it, I skipped Office 2007 and Office 2010 as not worth the effort or expense. Office 2013 brings something new to the table, and I’m experimenting with that right now. No decision as yet.

There is one more factor in my own field that is worth mentioning: graphic designers are faced with fast-changing technologies (e-books, digital billboards, rapidly-changing web technologies, to name a few). New technologies demand new tools, or major improvements to existing ones, but in the end you either keep up or get left behind. Eventually, if you want to stay in business, you have to catch up. My experience has been that keeping up takes far less effort, and is a lot less expensive, than catching up. Q.E.D., as the old geometry books used to say.

Here’s what the cover looked like:

In the last post I talked about pictures that are too small to be useful in print, and this is a great example. The blurry, blobby look of it in this image is actually better than how it looked on paper at 5 inches wide by 8 inches tall.

A brief tour of what else is wrong: The typeface, Lucida Calligraphy, would look great on a certificate but looks quite out of place on this busy background. Some text is centered, some isn’t. It disappears into the background. The blue and yellow bands are an attempt to solve that problem, but between the blue bands the text is almost unreadable. The bullet points (on a book cover!) use an asterisk instead of a real bullet character. Because most of the words are the same size, or nearly so, it’s impossible to tell what is meant to be the title of the book.

“Your book?” I asked. “Might I make a suggestion? I’m a designer, perhaps I can help.”

As we talked, I got a look at the inside of the book. The table of contents looked like this:

That heavy black type might work for a thesis, or a government report, but it’s wrong for a book about how to have beautiful hair. In fact, it’s a font called Verdana, designed for websites rather than print. It also makes the calligraphy-style headline look completely out of place.

Then there are those orphaned single words where a line was slightly too long for the width of the page.

The book text is in the same type style, with tiny margins and tightly-packed lines so that the pages look black and intimidating. The whole impression is about as unfeminine as you could get, and entirely wrong for this book. Jeanne, the author, knew that, but she didn’t know how to solve it until that chance conversation with a friendly designer gave her the solution. Not long afterward, she asked me if I’d take on the project of redesigning the book.

Book design is a bit of a paradox. Good typography invites the reader to the page, but then it gets out of the way. The reader should never be aware of the design, or the font; only the content. A book must look good, but above all must be easy to read. The last thing you want is for the type or the layout to get in the way of what the author has to say and the reader wants to understand. The cover should be noticeable, attractive and appropriate, so that someone will want to at least pick up the book and browse the contents. When they do, that content should invite reading.

After that, it’s up to the author to have something interesting to say and to say it well. In this case, that part wasn’t going to be a problem, because the book is well researched and the style is engaging and informative.

 The book needed a larger format, so that the margins could be enlarged to give the text room to breathe. A combination of an elegant script font, Adobe’s Bickham Script, and a classic text face, Garamond, make for pages that are clean and easy to read. The same typefaces on the cover, with an image that really says what the book is about (and is large enough to look good), make the finished product great to look at and easy to read.

When it went on sale on Amazon, it was the fulfillment of a dream for the author, and it is selling well, in part because it looks like what it is: a well-done book with good, reliable information about women’s hair health.

Designer: “We can’t use that image in your [brochure/flier/magazine cover] because it’s too small.”

Client: “But I got it from our website. It looks fine there, and it’s almost three inches square!”

Designer: “Well, do you have the original photograph? I can work from that.”

Client: “We gave it to the guy who did our website two years ago. I don’t think we have it anymore. Can’t you just make this one bigger in Photoshop?”

The short answer, “No,” isn’t helpful, and the long answer isn’t so easy unless you’re a photography geek. So, to help reduce the International Grump Index a bit, I thought I’d try to show what the problem is and why it really isn’t possible to copy an image from a website (even if you own the copyright) and drop it into a piece intended for print.

It starts with “pixels,” an abbreviation of “PIcture ELement” (the “x” got in there because it was out catching a bit of fresh air that day, and got talked into it by some IBM engineers). A pixel is a square dot of a particular color.

Any digital image, whether it’s from your camera or on the web, is a mosaic of pixels. Everything you see on a computer screen, television, tablet or smartphone is composed of these individual dots of color.

Here is a small block of pixels from a photograph, enlarged to 3200 percent. Doesn’t look like much, does it? It probably doesn’t immediately make you think, “camera-shy pussycat,” for example. Until we zoom out, making the pixels smaller, it just looks like a quirky job of kitchen tiling.

We have to get far enough away (or “zoom out”) so that the individual tiles are barely distinguishable before the whole thing starts to make sense as an image.

Lesson 1, then, is “Pixels have to be small.” That means there have to be a lot of them. The shy kitty portrait on the left has 84,348, in fact, taking up what is probably about 3 inches square on your screen if you are reading this on a computer.

There are anywhere between 90 and 150 pixels to the inch on an average computer monitor, so the picture will look larger or smaller depending on your screen. But everything on your monitor, including text, is displayed at that 100 or so pixels per inch. That means everything on the screen is a little fuzzy.

“No!” you say, “My screen is pin sharp! It better be, considering how much it cost!” Well, let’s take a closer look. Here are two words from the title of this post:

Just because you don’t see the pixels doesn’t mean they’re not there. Let’s zoom in a bit, so we can see the fine detail. Now it’s obvious:

Nothing on a computer screen is dead sharp. You don’t notice this because it’s all that way, text and pictures. Those disposable “focus-free” cameras are like that: everything in a photo looks okay because nothing is dead sharp. Just don’t try to make an 8×10 enlargement.

That brings us to what happens when you put a picture on a printed page. On a printing press, text and images are also made up of dots, but text has more than two thousand of them to an inch. Individual letters appear very crisp, with razor-sharp outlines. If you put a picture with about 90 dots per inch next to some text at 2,800 dots per inch, the sharp text makes the picture look like mush. For a picture to look good in print, it has to start with at least 250 pixels per inch, preferably more, at the size it will appear on the page.

Our kitty picture won’t be three inches square on paper; it’ll be about one inch square. To get a good looking 3×3 print image of kitty, we’ll need to start with, not 84,000 pixels, but about 800,000. I don’t have any paper handy to show the effect, but here is an approximation that will give you the idea. First, an image with the correct resolution:

And now, the effect of trying to force too small an image to be the size we need:

So far, so good. I hope I’ve convinced you that a picture that looks good on screen isn’t necessarily going to look good at large sizes in print.

But there’s one more thing you need to know about images from the web, one that can make a picture look awful even when it is theoretically large enough: compression. I’ll cover that in the next post.

(Special thanks to our cat Mio, who graciously agreed to let me to use these images.)

Here’s how things looked before. This is one of two different banners that were in use. Note the cartoon cow in the top right.

The banner as it was

“The cow,” they said, “has to go!” I agreed. That wasn’t the only thing that “had to go.” The whole sign, with its mismatched fonts and gaudy colors, has a street-market vibe that isn’t in keeping with the product or its buyers. It also has no relationship to the product itself, apart from the name “Ultra Balm.”

A consistent look is essential in branding and marketing a product, no matter which market you’re in. The new banner would have to match the labels on the jars and tubes, so picking colors and fonts from the product label was the starting point for the redesign.

But… the company also didn’t want to look too “high end.” If you look too elegant, your typical state fair shopper will pass you by because they’ll assume your product must be beyond their budget. At the same time, too cheap and cheerful a look reduces credibility. Looks are everything. The answer had to lie somewhere between the two extremes: friendly enough to be approachable; good-looking enough to give a professional image. Understanding the context and the audience makes the difference between a success design and a poor investment.

The starting point was the same font family and a color or two from the actual product label. The company also has a celebrity customer in just the right “over 30″ age range to match their key demographic, who was happy to have her image on the banner as an endorsement. A friendly face is the perfect attention-grabber for the left end of the new banner (we read from left to right, so a dominant image on the right would lead the viewer’s eye right off the artwork) and a great starting point for the overall message.

The company was kind enough to send a photograph showing the banner in place, along with a note that they were very happy because they had experienced an immediate 30% increase in sales. That made me very happy, because I knew that we’d hit the mark just right.

After the design makeover

I’ve known for a long time that almost all of our business comes from happy clients who keep coming back, or from the friends, colleagues or associates they have recommended. I like it that way. It keeps things friendly, and I don’t have to take a lot of time off from designing wicked-cool stuff to do a lot of “selling.” We’ve seen double-digit growth every year since we started (in the teeth of the recession — take that, Wall Street!) so I’ve seen no reason to change things. What I hadn’t quite grasped was how much this is not peculiar to my line of work (or my almost non-existent personal marketing).

For successful small businesses generally, including retail stores and restaurants, business comes in exactly the way mine does: a full 99% of their sales fall into two categories: repeat business (90%) and referrals (9%). New business, then, comes 90% from referrals.

Courtesy of www.engagementmarketing.com

It’s the people who keep coming back, and the people they refer or bring with them, who make up almost all the sales of any small business. A measly 10% of new business comes from other sources, but that 10% gets almost all the budget and attention when it comes to marketing.

The killer follow-on was that most businesses put very little attention or effort into their existing customers, even though they are responsible for almost all of the sales. Makes you think, doesn’t it? (At least, I hope it does.) This is the starting point for her new book, Engagement Marketing, and its companion website (which is excellent, by the way).

Any honest marketer will tell you that word of mouth is, hands down, the finest marketing there is. Addy and Cleo awards don’t mean a thing if people aren’t recommending their friends to your products or service. Social media marketing works because it is word-of-mouth in a slightly new form. Internet marketing and email marketing follow the same laws. (And, while I’m on this subject, these are not complicated. I’ve seen small and medium-sized businesses pour money and time into online ads, elaborate “social media” plans and “Search Engine Optimization strategies” that don’t work or actually reduce sales, all because they miss this crucial point.)

Great products and fantastic, over-the-top service build loyal customers who know they can trust you and who keep coming back. Almost all your new business comes in from the people who trust them; people who were thrilled and passed the word. All the search engine optimization and advertising in the world won’t compensate if those two factors are missing; in fact, they’ll probably backfire. Social media, in particular, can backfire.

What I liked about Gail’s presentation was that she really gets it when it comes to small-to-medium business, and has the creative imagination to come up with simple, usable answers to the question, “So what do I do about it?”

The news was not good, but it is interesting.

1. About 60% of business owners consider promotion an expense rather than an investment. For many, therefore, it is painful to spend money on promotion so they prefer to “wait for customers to walk in.”
2. Sales people in retail stores and receptionists in offices are not actively engaging potential customers in a friendly, interested way. In most cases they are bored, uninterested and not paying attention.
3. Some are stuck with outdated methods of advertising (when did you last look something up in the Yellow Pages?) that they know aren’t bringing in business, but don’t want to change because “promotion is expensive.”
4. Some do not promote at all and – no surprise here – their businesses are struggling to survive.
5. Some blame “the economy” and hope maybe something will happen to reverse the scene.

In all these cases we observed empty stores, quiet waiting rooms and an general atmosphere somewhere between disinterest and despair.

It’s not all gloom and doom, however. Many business owners understand that promotion is an investment, so they promote, promote and promote some more. These places, naturally enough, are the ones with customers. Even here, there is room for improvement. Not one of the businesses surveyed keep track of which ad, which promotion is bringing in new business, so their results are uneven.

We conclude that businesses could be immediately more successful if they gave attention to these few points:

1. Promotion is an investment. It is supposed to bring in a return better than the cost of the promotion. Not to promote is very expensive.
2. Keep track of your advertising. Note which items or methods drive in more business (do more!) and which don’t (drop!).
3. In businesses that rely on walk-in traffic, such as retail or professional offices, ensure that your staff are trained to be attentive, interested and friendly to potential customers. Bored, inattentive staff drive business away.

Live Concert Shot

Press Photo

The performance shot is great, but it has a problem: he’s on the left of the photograph. If we put the ad copy on the right, he’ll be looking out of the page and the copy will be behind his back. If he’s on the left of the ad, the reader’s eye will stop at his picture before it’s reached the text, another reason to rearrange things. The image is a standard 2:3 format photograph, but the full ad is 10  inches by 12 (5:6 ratio), so we will have to either crop it or extend it.
The other publicity shot the artist has provided is in horizontal (landscape) format. It is much too small to fill the page and visually not very exciting. It will work for editorial purposes, like an article in the local paper, or on a CD cover, but for a big ad promoting a high-energy, rockin’ show it won’t. The moody lighting and odd pose might work as a contrast to the action shot.
Although it wasn’t part of the information we were given, a little research on Google showed that this press shot was being used to promote Joe’s latest album, so it should be included in the ad.

The first job was to create a background the size of the full ad, with Joe on the right so he has some space in front of him where an audience could be. By carefully picking a color from the photograph in Photoshop, and extending the rays of light from the stage lights, we end up with a nice open space for the ad copy that also looks like it is part of the original picture.

The completed background for the ad

I wanted the artist’s name to be big, bold and at the top, leaving all that open space to add copy, the show details, and the publicity shot.

Notice that we’ve “lost” most of the right half of the photograph. Enough is left to provide some stage atmosphere, but now the artist himself provides a nicely shaped border for the copy space. By carefully placing the copy so its right edge parallels that shape, the whole piece comes together nicely.

The completed ad is below. (And in case you’re wondering, it was a great show and a packed house.)

The completed ad

P.S. If you’re interested in the technical details, ask a question on graphicdesign.stackexchange.com, where I tend to hang out, and I’ll be happy to answer.