Company History:
The first section of your brief should include a brief company history, some detail about the industry that you work in. Provide any information that you think maybe relevant. The more information the designer has about your company the more effective his work will be.

Market Overview:
What are the current trends in your marketplace? Give a list of your main competitors and detail any of their recent marketing activity that you maybe aware of.

Target Market:
Who is your target market? What customers are you looking to attract with your company’s product. Give detail about gender, age range, income, lifestyle and current awareness of your products.

Key Messages:
Have a think about what key messages your company is trying to convey to your customers. Do you want to be known as an expert within your industry? Do you want to be seen as an approachable, fun, company? Are the products you sell luxury items or necessities?

Design Requirements:
Outline what your design requirements are. In the case of a Logo design your requirements maybe the following: Logo / Identity required for the following company, “YourCompanyName’. It will be used across various marketing materials including business cards, newsletters and a website. The Logo should be designed to be easily transferable across all these mediums. Please keep colours in the logo to a minimum to reduce printing costs.

Previous Marketing Material:
If you have an old logo or any other marketing material that has been designed previously then provide a few examples of this work for the designer’s reference.

Timings and Budget:
Give the designer a delivery deadline for you final logo artwork and ask to be provided with a detailed work plan. Let the designer know your budget for this project so he can plan his time appropriately.

So now you have provided your designer with a professional brief, what should you expect in return for your money?

Delivery Schedule:
Firstly, as mentioned above ask your designer to provide a delivery schedule. This would normally include the date of briefing and any required consultation time, Design and Development of first concept work, a secondary development stage for any changes to initial designs and a final artwork deadline with a date for delivery of final files.

First Concepts:
A designer would normally provide 3 or 4 concepts for you to choose from to develop further. Hopefully at this stage you will have a route that your are reasonably happy with. Don’t be afraid at this stage to voice your opinion about whats working and whats not.

Secondary Concepts:
At this stage hopefully you will have narrowed you options down to a coupe of design routes and the designer will develop these routes further, based on your feedback.

Final Artwork:
Once a final design route is chosen the designer will artwork the final files making them print ready.

File Delivery:
Once you receive the final files make sure you have the following information:

Original artwork files
This maybe a Illustrator.eps file or a Photoshop.psd file depending on what program the designer has used to create your logo. Make sure you have this file so any future amends can be made by other designers you may use in the future. The Photoshop file should be a Layered file and not a flattened final image so adjustments can be made.

Colours
Ask the designer to provide a full colour breakdown of your logo. This should include a CMYK* reference for print and an RGB** reference for screen + any PANTONE®*** references

*CMYK explained:
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are called process colours and are the 4 main colours that the print industry uses to print most documents. Most colours in print are created by a mixture of small dots of CMYK that make up all the other colours. A mix of 100% Cyan and 100% Yellow dots, for example, will appear Green although there is no green ink in the print. Next time you pick up a printed label, grab a magnifying glass and have a look to see if you can see these dots.

**RGB explained:
RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. Every colour on your computer screen is made up of rays of Red, Green or Blue light that when mixed together create all the colours that appear on your screen. 100% of R, G and B will give you white and 0% of all 3 will give you black. Your own RGB reference for your logo is important to keep your logo looking consistent on screen, eg. your website or powerpoint presentations.

***PANTONE® explained:
Sometimes, if designers feel that they can’t achieve the correct colour using CMYK references they might choose a PANTONE colour. This is an industry standard list that refers to colour inks that Printers use. It is unlikely that your designer has used a PANTONE® colour. If they have, you should ask them their reasons. Limiting your Logo design to PANTONE® colours could possibly lead to higher printing costs as a print job might need CMYK + a PANTONE® colour.

Fonts
If any fonts where used with the design make sure these are detailed to you by the designer. It is always good to know what fonts are used within your logo design in case you decide to use this same font across your other marketing material. The fonts may be new fonts that will cost you money to have on your own computer. Make sure you know about this extra cost in advance. Alternatively they maybe free fonts that you can download from a website. You could detail in your brief that only free fonts are to be used with your design. Also find out if the fonts are compatible with your computer. A lot of designers use Apple Mac equipment and fonts have different formats for both PC’s and Macs. A safe bet for font types are TrueType fonts that are compatible with both systems.

File Formats
As well as your original artwork files detailed above ask the designer to provide you with your logo in various formats. Ask for a High Resolution and Low resolution Jpeg. The High-res Jpeg can be printed high quality and sent to various people who might want to include your logo in their promotional material. The Low-res Jpeg can be used for your Powerpoint Presentations or Word documents without making the file too big to email.

Ask for a PDF document of the file. PDF stands for Portable Document File and can be opened by anyone who downloads the free Adobe® Reader. In my experience Jpegs can sometimes be corrupted by email but PDFs always manage to get through without any issues.

Also get a Black and White version of all the formats stated above.

That’s it. If you have all the above information then there shouldn’t be many issues when producing your marketing materials and getting them printed in the future.

Craig Balbirnie http://www.myshopsigns.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Craig_Balbirnie

Presenting Santa Claus and the Christmas family. Originally requested by a user of the IStock forums, Santa and the rest of the family members were drawn separately, layered and colored before being placed together as a happy legion. As you can see I did not employ my standard outlining to this one in order to keep a very soft-edged look to it despite the blaring christmas colors. I think I lost a few years of my life on this one lol, but it’s worth it. The image carries a higher price-tag than the norm due to every image being a strong element on it’s own. Were you to purchase the EPS and pull it apart, you will see that there were no shortcuts used or tricks employed outside of create, cut, paste and group.

The files can be viewed in detail and bought at the following locations:

IstockPhoto.com – ID: 10943811
Dreamstime.com – ID: 11521567

Who is the River Queen?
The River Queen is a piece that I got inspired to create from my friend’s fiance who continuously schools us at Texas Hold’em. My intent was to make her race ambiguous but to keep her as relative to her inspiration as possible.

Medium and method of creativity
As usual I took a trip to the local Barnes and Nobles with the sketchbook in tow and sketched the happy lady with her hand raised. Once I had the image together, I took her home and scanned her then found a poker table online for inspiration. The table was drawn and scanned similar to the lady and the method I used to make them vector was to trace the lines first using the pen tool and connect the points to make shapes. The River Queen is 100% comprised of shapes no lines, in order to make the increase and decrease of her size clean without compromise. It is the same methodology I use for logos.

The River Queen can be downloaded at the following links:

- IstockPhoto – Stock vector | File #: 10354380
- Dreamstime – ID: 10637614

How does it work?
Blogs are great for both the author and reader for different reasons. For the author, he/she is glad that you have visited the site via the blog. The fact that you searched for something that resulted in you landing on the page may lead you to exploring a bit more and purchasing the goods from the site. For the user it is a blessing to find an answer to the question he/she searched for so they are grateful that the site has some information. I find myself asking the almighty Google questions daily and many people do the same thing. An example would be me reading a novel about a Carpenter who falls in love with an a Stewardess. Within the text a procedure is explained very briefly about how the Carpenter was able to fix her broken desk at home but my Web Designer’s mind cannot grasp the procedure so I do what I would normally do. I Google the question and read the results. Let’s say you run a site on Carpentry and recently blogged about the methodology in fixing an antique desk. Chances are your post will show up for my search.

Empty blogs will make your site look unprofessional and unfinished. Nothing is worse than clicking on a business’ blog and seeing the default “Hello Dolly” dummy text that comes with a newly installed WordPress Blog. So please keep in mind that not having a blog is better than an empty blog, even if you have heard that it is the thing to do. Write in your blog, pay your Administrative Assistant to do so or just cancel the thing altogether.

Hire an expert and let him do his job

This is simple management but many of us lose sight of it when we are passionate about a goal. Some people simply cannot trust someone even if they researched the person and know that they have the credentials to do the job. The last thing you want for a professional to be is aloof about your baby and you must realize that the more push that you apply to the function and creativity the less likely that professional will apply the extra magic needed to make your project shine. What will result from it is a good site but due to a soured relationship (due to your micro managing out of ignorance) it will not be a great site. Here are 4 things you should look for when selecting a source for having your site built and they can be the key to making or breaking your dream.

Extensive Portfolio Research
Scan the designer’s past works, make sure that he truly created the sites and that they are of a functional and professional manner. If you are looking for database programming, E-Commerce or a dynamic type of web design, you may have to split your resources into two and hire both a Graphic Designer  (make sure she has some web design abilities) and a Coder. The reason I stated that the Graphic Designer should have web abilities is because you need a smooth transition between design and code. To have a designer give you the most amazing layout only to find out that you are getting charged 3 times the amount due to more work from your coder is not ideal.  You are looking for someone who can make it look good within the confines of current Web Design. To avoid this step may land you with a hack that has done a few sites poorly, struggling to piece your site together through sloppy code, buggy methods and bad design. You will end up paying someone down the line to re-design in correctly and it will mean more money for you and your company.

Figure out a good resource for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Above all else if your site is being built to pull in audiences from the World Wide Web then you do not want to be non-existent on search engines. Make sure your Web Designer knows up front that you are going to want prominence on search engines and do some research on a good company that can make it happen for you after the design is complete. Some companies offer all-in-one but you must be careful of this since SEO is a great big beast all on its own. Just be careful with this because I get a ton of clients who brazenly announce that they want to be “first on Google” but aren’t willing to weather the time or pay the amount it takes to get even close to this. Do some research on SEO for yourself and get educated on it, you must realize that your business, the keywords you select and your 1,000 competitors all play a role in how far you rank.

Make sure your website has a point
There are many reasons to have a website, it can be a virtual business card, a virtual store, or a home base. What you don’t want is to have a meaningless website. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a pamphlet on a business or meeting a salesperson who gives you the introduction to the company only to visit the site and feel like you wasted your time. “Oh this is a nice website but there’s nothing here”, ever have one of these moments? Some business owners are told “you need a website”, but when you think of cause and effect, do you really need one? One can argue that it is fairly cheap to have a site so why not, the younger generation lives and breathes the internet so why leave them out? This makes perfect sense but make sure it has something that rewards the visitor. A form to join up, a registration, a contact us that is more than your name and number, a coupon to print out and bring into the store… SOMETHING, anything.

A Web Master for Maintenance
If you don’t feel like blogging about your company’s progress or setting up a comments section so that your customers can share information then you need to have some sort of periodical updates. You need to capitalize on return visitors and having a stagnant site will not tempt people to bookmark you. Get the maintenance rates from a good Web Master, get on a monthly or bi-monthly plan and keep your content fresh, relative and up to date.

These are only a few steps to getting a good site together but they arguably some of the more important steps. Remember to scan that portfolio well and make a collection of sites you find interesting to emulate. Provide the designer with these examples at the very beginning of the layout process and leave the coding up to the coders. If you are not a Web Master yourself or a Graphic Designer, just remember that it won’t benefit you to try and play one when it becomes time to have your website built. You will find that the entire process does not have to be a chore after all.

I am an artist by nature so I tend to draw a lot. One thing I have had to learn through trial and error is how to bring my drawings into Photoshop, color them and maintain ALL the lines that were made whilst drawing it. In the past I used to scan it in, place the layer to multiply and then color on a bottom layer but that had it’s share of problems. For one I had a hard time blending one color seamlessly into another, and I could not color my lines a nice sepia brown or gray due to multiply adopting whatever color was beneath it. So I am presenting this tutorial to help any of you out there who have had this issue. This is the definitive way of bringing in line art for coloring in Adobe Photoshop.

Scan and Prepare Line Art
I like to have my images large for Photoshop so I scan my artwork in at 300dpi. Once it is scanned in, I save it and then bring it into Photoshop to resave it. I normally re-save it as a PSD file, for this example I used the name “Brin_Colored.psd”. Once the file is opened and resaved as a PSD document, look at your layers panel and double-click the Background to make it a layer. This is very important for the next step.

Select Channels and on the bottom of the tab you should see an icon that looks like a ring of dots. This is the “Load channel as a selection” button, go ahead and press it and you will see some running ants appear around your line drawing. Once you have the ants, select your Layers tab and press delete to clear the white from the art itself. Now don’t be shocked because it will look washed out and seem as if you’ve lost some of the lines. No worries, above your layer on that tab you will see a series of icons, one looks like a square with a transparency. This is to “Lock transparent pixels”, click it and select a color from your swatches that will represent your pencil. I chose black.

With your color selected, press Ctrl + a (Command + a for MAC) to select all. Select Edit, then Fill, then make sure Foreground color is selected and click OK (Or you can just do ALT + Backspace). You will see your artwork is now back in all it’s glory sans annoying white background. Lock this layer if you feel you may mistakenly color on it later on. Now create a New Layer and drag it beneath this one and fill it with White (CTRL + Backspace  if you have white as your secondary color). Now we are ready to color our art.

An Example of Coloring
I would go into the intricacies of coloring but that is it’s own tutorial, for now I can lend you an example of how I choose to do it. In the past I would lump all colors up unto their own layer that layed beneath the line art but I hae found it is easier to manage art when every color has it’s own layer (especially for revisions later on down the road). So create a new layer between the white background and your line art and select some color and an appropriate brush size. Zoom in closely and color the area that you wish applying shadows and highlights as needed. Simple enough right? Just make a layer for every color and remember to save often.

Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial we will be utilizing layer masks, the lasso tool and layer styles. If any of these are new to you, this is a good method to practice the use of each in a meaningful way.

1. Create our paper
Open a new document at a bigger size than you want your paper to be and paint the background layer a mid-dark color (your preference). Try selecting a color from your Swatch menu and pressing alt+delete to completely fill the page of it.
Once you have the page colored, create a new layer, select the Rectangle Marquee Tool(M), change your foreground color to white (or whatever color you want the paper to be) and draw a rectangle to represent it. Fill the rectangle with white and deselect the rectangle.

2. Tearing the paper
Select the Lasso Tool(L) and hold down your alt-key. Start near the edge of the white square and draw a rough inner square using the lasso tool. This new square represents the paper after it has been torn so take your time in ensuring that it looks adequately jagged, which works well if you move slowly in drawing the square.

Once you have completed the square release your alt-key and mouse so that the ends can meet for your jagged square shape. On the bottom of your “Layers” toolbar is an icon that looks like a white circle within a gray square, this is the vector mask, click it with the white rectangle layer selected. You should see the rectangular converted into the jagged edged version that we outlined.

On the layers palette, click on the new layer mask you have created (it will be next to your paper layer with a chain-link in between) to make sure that you are working on the mask and not the actual image.

3. Making the paper realistic
Select the Smudge tool(R), change options to 50% Strength, and a tiny brush size. Drag your brush along the edges of the paper in an erratic way. Remember the more random you make the smudge, the more realistic it will be, judge by sight and smudge until you are happy with the edges.

Click on the layer that has our paper (not the mask, we are done with that) and then select a Layer Style from the bottom (should look like an fx symbol). Select Drop Shadow and adjust it as needed until it looks real.

4. Kick it up a notch
Select an image that you would like to be on your torn paper and paste it into a new layer right above your current paper layer. Hold down your alt-key and left click the line in between the two layers (indicated on my example by the red circle). This will mask the image within our paper’s confines.

Ctrl-click the layer mask of the paper (the black square with the white shape). This should place running ants on the outline of the jagged paper. Make sure you now select the layer with the image on it and select inverse (ctrl+i). On the top menu go to select – modify – feather. Select 2-6 depending on how wide you want the white tear to appear around the image and then press delete 2 times.

There you have it, a torn image generated from Adobe Photoshop.

In my experience with site design I would say that the menu is typically the thing you want noticed but last in succession. In terms of relevance you want people to notice the header first (top portion of site), then the content, then the menu so that they can explore further.  The common practices in website design are not necessarily correct but we do them because people are used to seeing them done that way thus the pattern continues. Initially website design was done by coders who were not trained in design or layout principles. This led to ugly websites with pages that were functional but not aesthetically pleasing (many still exist out there). That is why menus dominate the top  and left of web pages (I try my best to make mine subtle like www.gdyer.com).

To break from this seems like a huge deal to people because we are now trained to “look” for the menu at the top or the left. Imagine a nice magazine layout that demands us to flip the page or jump to another page via the bottom or right-hand side (where it rightfully belongs). For informational sites this would be an advantage since the viewer would have to scroll past relevant info to get to that navigation. Not everyone would agree with this but as a designer this would open up so many possibilities with layout without having to tackle the ugly horizontal bar at the top of websites or on the left.  Think about it.

What you have to realize is the difference between working for an individual and working for oneself is the ownership of the craft. Take for example an instance where a painting is being done for a family. While doing said painting you want to do it to the best of your abilities since you were hired based on what was shown as your quality work. During the painting, a family member may ask you to leave off his/her acne or make his/her nose a tad different. It is their painting so you oblige. This is different however if you were doing the painting as a portfolio piece and the family are paid models that are at your service.

The same can be said when designing a logo, business card, postcard, poster or even a website. The person paying you calls the shots and therefore you cannot be married to your work. There are times when I have had a logo or website replaced with something I consider less quality than what I had initially created. Upon surfing to a known site of old, I bump into a redesign that isn’t an upgrade but quite the latter but it is no longer any of my business. This is due to my being a professional and keeping my work as a simple date, and not a spouse (metaphorically speaking.) Now in cases where a client asks my professional opinion, I give it without issue because I know that I am doing a service. When a job is complete, it is complete, I would love repeat business but I am no longer attached to that creation.

As an Art Director in the past, I remember this was always the toughest area in dealing with new hires. The fresh “out of school” designer is normally so proud of their work that when a client asks for a change it is devastating to their ego. If you want to do well in the creative field, you must learn to detach without sacrificing quality, as hard as it may seem to do. You will do better for it, your clients will be happier for it (no-one likes a creative screaming bloody murder over an edit) and you will succeed in your given field.

These are the times to get aggressive with your business and build a foundation that will bring you to the forefront post-recession. With the world quickly moving away from print media and more towards the speed and ease of the internet, if you are one of these businesses without a website, you may want to think about getting one now. The quickest and most cost-effective method of doing so is through purchasing a pre-designed web template and having a web designer tweak it to your identity. This should be one of the first investments you make with your company due to the habits of young professionals of today. For example, when a person is told about a company, one of the first things they will ask is “do they have a website?” This is due to the ease of typing in the URL and researching the company for oneself.

For instance I may be feeling stressed out and need a massage. My direct friends do not visit the spa, nor do they know much about spas so I may ask a family member to recommend one for me. Once I am given the name, it is almost automatic for me to Google the name of the company or type in the URL if it was provided to me. When I see the site, I may be influenced to follow up on my desire for a massage and schedule an appointment.  Remember a website is a virtual business card plus much more, it is your identity on the web and it can make a huge impact on your business. Think about it in terms of ROI, the massage may cost me $200, and while I am there I may get a facial, manicure and other treatments all totalling roughly $450. I am but one customer to a business owner who purchased a template and had it redesigned for about $425. It took one sale to get his investment back for a website that will continue to serve clients as long as it is live.

Just remember the web is only getting better, it is the newly discovered land that is being settled by virtual pilgrims all over the world. The land is vast and endless but as the villages of these pilgrims increase, the chances of finding good space and visibility decreases. The traffic increases and more sophisticated modes of transport will be developed to get people around, but they will only become more expensive. Why not carve out a plot of land now while it is affordable? It is all relative and any marketing expert would agree, investing in a website is the way to go no matter the economy.