Some of us like watching adverts. After sifting through a lot of the rubbish and the shouting, occasionally you’re met with an advertising gem. 

I’m not sure what the above advert is for, or what the product might be, but the it certainly has my attention. I’m now eagerly waiting for an extended version revealing all or a company to claim it as their own.

This snippet has me intrigued. It is also very well put together and funny. Two things that have endeared me to the advert straight away.

This approach can be applied to a business of any size. It is a clever way of creating a buzz about your brand or product whilst having fun at the same time.

Think of ways you can bring attention to yourself and create a positive reaction. Perhaps you can come up with an online or printed campaign that tease your audience and garners interest.

Sticker campaigns, subtle business cards, flyer drops, a Youtube video, posters, the possibilities are endless. Take your interests, your humour, the values of your business and combine them in to a campaign that excites you and your audience.

If you want to know more about viral advertising read our blog from earlier this year.

Or if you’d like more information on professionally designed campaigns that create real impact for your brand, then contact us.

Responsive web design or RWD is the aim of designing websites to provide the best possible viewing experience based on the device they are viewed from.

There are various ways in which this is achieved, none of which I am going to bore you with. However, what they should result in, is a much more user friendly experience for the person browsing.

RWD techniques have become efficient and clever, this has made responsive web design accessible to small business. Suddenly RWDs are appearing for small companies, where large corporations haven’t figured out how to implement their’s yet.

On a mobile device an RWD often appears like an app within the browser. They can be simple and easy to navigate and are focused on the user experience, not the imagery and traditional “design”. The tablet version of these sites is often halfway between the mobile version and the desktop version, again presenting a user friendly experience but with perhaps more imagery that you would associate with a traditional style website.

RWD is revolutionising the design approach to a website. “User Experience” is the fashionable phrase of the moment, but is also a movement away from focus on animation, front end wizardry and loading screens and a much stronger focus on how quickly the user can get to the information they need whilst still being presented with a professional and aesthetically pleasing website.

A good way to perform a basic audit on your user experience is to make a list of 5 things you want to find out about your business from your website. Then critically assess how easy it was to find those 5 points out.

Is your website mobile and tablet ready? Is your user experience intuitive and hassle free?

Contact Salop Creative for a FREE consultation and to arrange your website audit.

Why rebrand your business? 

There is a common misconception that “rebrand” means to change your business name. This is just the most noticeable version of a rebrand.

Rebranding your business could also be a change in your core values, a change in your visual identity or a change in the way you do things.

Successful businesses are always looking to change with the times, maximise their potential and ensure they are communicating their service to their potential customers.

A rebrand is an effective way to ensure your business remains true to its values (be it’s original values or new ones), is up to date in view of it’s target market and is evolving it’s identity to keep up with current trends (at the moment a lot of businesses are adjusting their identity to suit current internet trends and social media).

Often a change in business (perhaps your business started off B2B and has evolved in to B2C) means that a business must rebrand, sometimes a change in legislation, change in direction or even crisis management can all mean it is time for a rebrand.

How do you start a rebrand?

As a business manager you should always be looking to gauge the reaction of your target market, your suppliers and any other important stakeholders.

You should know what people think about your business, what services they think you offer and what their impression of your business is. You need to know where people position your business in comparison to your competitors.

Think about things you need to communicate and process effectively to tangibly see a benefit to your business. Are you already doing this? Can this be improved upon?

Your initial research should give you enough scope to decide if you need to make tweaks, change your visual identity or give your brand a full overhaul.

Think about the most effective ways to tell people what you do, show how well you do it and keep your staff motivated to express the values of your brand in their behaviour and service.

What next?

Consult an expert on your current brand positioning, your weaknesses and your strengths. Consider the next move for your brand and whether your rebrand will be a tweaking process, an overhaul or perhaps you are satisfied with the current state of your brand.

For a FREE consultation on your brand and the options available to you contact Salop Creative on 01743 493 077.

We’re excited to announce that we will be exhibiting at the Wavelength CIC event ‘So What’s Stopping You?‘ on Tuesday 23 April.

Wave-length CIC is running a one day event providing information on making self-employment a reality. People with disabilities are 2% more likely to become self-employed than those without a disability.

The sessions will cover, setting up, planning, preparation, obstacles, impact on benefits and tax.

We will be on hand to share our experience of starting out self employed as well as to offer constructive advice on how to control your brand identity, launch your first website and project the right image to your potential clients.

We’ll be difficult to miss, unveiling our new exhibition banner design and new flyers. Come and say hello, we’ll be running a competition on our stand all day and there’s bound to be loads of free sweets and goodies!

The event runs 10.30am – 3pm at The Glass Classroom, Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge. See you there.

Salop Creative are proud to announce we have joined the Federation of Small Businesses.

The huge benefits and support the FSB has to offer will be a great help to Salop Creative and that can only be good for the people we work with as it gives us more time to focus on our clients needs.

We have already attended some FSB events and look forward to attending many more.

Branding can be an alien concept to many people in business. Often the focus on sales and building the business, means that the visual representation of the business is put to one side.

And yet, a strong and appropriate brand identity should make building the business, the sales and customer relations processes easier.

In the following blog we touch on a few of the elements to be considered when addressing your brand identity requirements.

The business logo

Other than staff, your logo is the face of your business. It is the visual representation of your brand and how people remember and associate with your company.

Your logo will most probably (and should) feature on every piece of printed material, your web presence, uniforms and more that your business presents to the world. The colours, style and visual elements of your logo will influence the visual style of your entire business.

And yet many businesses fail to address their outdated or inappropriate visual identity in their attempts to engage with their target market.

Consider the modern requirements of your logo…

• Is it compatible (and does it work well with) social media platforms?
• Does it display properly and effectively in your email footer?
• Do you have a version to use as a favicon (the small icon that appears next to a web address in your address bar)?
• Can you blow it up to any size you may need?

Colour

Colour is a vitally important and often overlooked part of the brand identity. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe documented the psychological effects of colour as far back as 1810.

The foundations of Colour Theory were born. The symbolism of colour varies from place to place and culture to culture. In Western society green symbolises environmental awareness, but it also symbolises activity and action (go on a traffic light).

Therefore, as a business, choosing your corporate colours must be a careful and well thought out process.

Many businesses upon start up go with colours that the owner likes, or that they think are well suited. A little bit of research in to your target market and competition, and a quick look at Colour Theory can really make a big difference.

Quality Perception

Does your brand identity represent the quality of service, individuality and nature of your business?

If your logo is pixelated, badly reproduced or the colours inconsistent on different marketing materials, you are reflecting that as the general attitude of your business.

Consider if your visual identity is a faithful representation of the quality your business offers.

Considering the basic elements of your brand identity will give you insight in to how effectively you visually represent your business.

Salop Creative can perform a brand identity audit of your business and suggest ways to develop your appearance to engage with your market and outshine your competitors. For more information on faithfully representing your business contact Salop Creative. 

The formats that you possess your logo in are vitally important.

Do you know what file formats you have your logo in?

Depending on your familiarity with graphic file formats, the usual image files you would be aware of are JPGs and possibly TIFFs. To ensure your suppliers (designers, printers, web developers, vehicle livery etc) can use your logo effectively, the best possible version is required.

A scalable vector format logo is ideal. A logo in this format is infinitely scalable and will never lose quality. Whether it is sized for a sticker, or for projection on a building, it will always have the same crisp quality you would hope for.

If you have employed a professional designer to design your logo, you should have been provided your logo in vector format in any of the following file types: .EPS, .PDF, .AI or .SVG.

But what if you just have a .JPG version of your logo?

The alternative to vector format graphics, are rasterized format. Raster based graphics are set in their dimensions, if you try to change their size they will lose quality.

The images are made up of pixels on a set grid (like a photo) and so if you change the size of the image, you distort the intended size of the pixel.

Other versions of raster files you may regularly encounter: .TIFF, .PNG, .GIF, .BMP

Why is this a problem?

Unless you are provided your raster format logo in all the possible size eventualities you might encounter (this would take some huge file sizes), then if you only have raster versions of your logo it is likely that when you need to print a large brochure, or produce a poster or billboard that your logo won’t reproduce in the quality you would expect.

Poor quality reproduction of your logo will not create the right impression.

The solution

Your first port of call is to request the vector format versions of your logo from your original provider.

However, your provider might not exist anymore, may have designed the logo in raster format initially or may not be very forthcoming with the file.

Do not worry. Salop Creative can recreate your logo as a vector version and provide you all the formats you will ever need. We can also optimise the colours for web and for print and give you all the advice you need to protect your brand identity moving forward.

If you’ve encountered this issue, or would like further advice on getting your logo in the right format contact Salop Creative on 01743 493 077.

Stuck for a way to advertise your business/product/service/town/tourist attraction? Grab people’s attention with an alternative style postcard design. 

Postcards are a great way to to promote yourself. With junk mail now coming by the way of e-mail, traditional ‘snail-mail’ has become a powerful marketing tool once more.

The advantage of postcards is they are inexpensive to post on mass, they can be left on counters and in leaflet stands and people also take them as mementos of their trip, advertising you further afield.

Postcards are also very inexpensive to print. Normally full colour on the front and black and white on the back, you can print 1,000 in high quality lithographic print for as little as £135. Just 14p each!

A well designed postcard will attract people to your product/service/destination whilst using the information side to inform them and offer further incentive.

Talk to your designer and photographer. Think of alternative ways you could use the postcard format, how you can create a viral-marketing feel to a traditional form of advertising.

Above is a concept design we created for the historic market town of Church Stretton. Combining a mixture of our own photography, with traditional layout design and some contemporary photoshop techniques to create an alternative postcard design.

If your marketing material is looking tired, or you want to explore an alternative, mixed media approach to your print design, contact Salop Creative about our alternative postcard designs and other design services. 

A concept poster to encourage people to visit Church Stretton