Co-founder of Mule Design, Mike Monteiro, wants to help you do your job better. From contracts to selling design, from working with clients to working with each other, this brief book is packed with knowledge you can’t afford not to know. This is a must-read for business owners. Not just design businesses either. We highly recommend it!
Wes Anderson’s latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, is in theaters now and I can’t wait to see it. It’s a tale about a pair of 12-year olds that fall in love and flee their New England town, which causes a local search party to fan out and find them. A bit of nostalgia, a bit of adventure and a touch of romance. Wes Anderson might just be the most brilliant film director of our time.
To top it off, all of us typography-obsessed creatives are equally looking forward to seeing the beautiful titles and credits created by the ever so talented Jessica Hische.
Jessica stated in an interview:
Overall the process was a total dream and Wes is incredibly involved in every aspect of production. When we were in the thick of it, he was sending me doodles through email about how the lowercase r should look, etc. He has a really good eye for typography and is definitely as much of a perfectionist as you’d hope him to be.
Also be sure to check out the movie’s interactive website, it’s adorable and highly interactive!
Many professional services companies create marketing materials to provide their clients with relevant information for their business needs. CBIZ Inc. is one of the best in their industry at doing just that and e design has had the privilege of creating the CBIZ MHM Business Tax Planning Guide for the past four years. This Tax Guide serves as a tool to help businesses with growth, investments, estate tax planning and more.
As with all the materials that e design creates for CBIZ (which is a lot!), this Guide follows a vision of branding but is always unique in it’s own right. We created other graphics to tell the story of the Tax Guide which includes an email signature graphic, an email blast announcement and a button for the CBIZ home page.
Several years ago, e design created a Corporate Standards Guide for CBIZ which included the usual branding information: a corporate palette of colors, fonts, logo usage rules, etc. Although the Standards Guide is a vital tool, it also gives us the flexibility to think outside the box and deliver the best design and ideas as possible with each piece of collateral that we produce. This is why we’ve been able to give the Business Planning Tax Guide and so many other communication pieces a unique look while staying true to the CBIZ messaging and mission.
Branding isn’t about copying corporate rules verbatim; it’s about pulling pieces together as a whole to tell a story. Consistency is key when branding many pieces for a single business, but no business should have standards so strict that every piece of communication looks identical. Sounds a little boring, eh? Not to mention the world we live in expects change, excitement and keeping up with the latest trends.
If you’re interested in creating exciting corporate branding materials (no, that’s not an oxymoron in our opinion), don’t hesitate to get in touch. We get our kicks in corporate design! You can tell by looking at our other branding projects we’ve completed over the years. And don’t forget to grab a copy of the CBIZ MHM Business Tax Planning Guide!
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As a designer I take a LOT of photographs. I’ve downloaded and tried a lot of photos apps over the past few years. Although there are a ton of great ones out there (Hipstamatic, Diptic, ShakeItPhoto to name a few), I became obsessed with Instagram and have Facebook and tweeted my love for the app several times.
Instagram shot of Screenstagram screen saver on my MacBook Pro
Instagram gallery show at Designbox
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Last week I tweeted about how I’m often asked to “design” in Microsoft Word. I put design in quotes because as you probably know, Word doesn’t have the greatest reputation for being a strong design program. My good friend Victoria (@veemoe) saw my tweet and created this quick piece of “art” (again, “art” in quotes).
With that, #WordArtWars was born on twitter.
I realize there are many people that are forced to use Word daily in their businesses and I feel your pain. I also realize that Word is an essential tool and mostly universal so it’s often the go-to program when creating business documents.
Hopefully, after seeing the ridiculous things that you can create with this program, it will lessen the pain and give you a few laughs.
Below are submissions I’ve been sent by twitter friends–or created myself–over the past few weeks. Feel free to submit your own “art” (be sure to “at” me @erinedesign) and enjoy!
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Hellooooooo. I’m ecstatic to have the new e design website launched and have this much-needed space to talk about why design makes me so happy and how I believe it’s an essential part of our lives. I hope you enjoy my insights, random inspiration and trends. Hence the name of this blog. Happy creativity!
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Growth, we all have learned, is no longer automatic. The past has less to teach us than we need to know. Consumers are jaded, markets fragmented and disposable dollars scarce. Risk is everywhere, and pressure produces rigidity, making it difficult to try new things. More than ever, time is our enemy.
This, as every visionary knows, is a rare moment of opportunity: one that rewards creativity and compensates companies that have learned to cultivate the brilliance of individuals and instill an effective process for innovation in their corporate cultures.
Despite commonly held beliefs, real invention is rarely the terminus of a carefully developed brief. It begins before the assignment is written, and is inevitably the difference between efforts that lead to meaningful new ideas and those that produce derivative results. It is an ability to identify inchoate opportunities and see openings where others can’t. Invention never should be saved for problem solving. It should be engaged first to recognize the most rewarding problems to solve. It is not for the faint of heart or narrow-minded.
Happily, we have a plan.
It’s called design.
Design is a profession based on conception: on helping to define an opportunity, then develop a solution that will fulfill it. Subsequently, design includes the identification and management of the team that will bring it to life, whether it is a product, communication, event or place.
This information has been reprinted with permission from AIGA. AIGA encourages anyone interested to download the booklet “What Every Business Needs” and use it to increase the level of respect and understanding for design.
The booklet includes a 12 step process by which businesses can create value and market demand through innovation. It is done in partnership with designers.
If you would like to discus how e design can help your company, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@erinedesign.com.
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8Faces is a new magazine for devotees of typography. That’s us!
The more I post (and you read) these blog entries, the more you will realize how obsessed I am with type. This magazine feeds that obsession and I’ve studied both issues they’ve released from cover to cover. Several times.
This is only the second issues of this beautiful magazine and I did a happy dance when it arrived. It’s printed on heavy stock with a foil-blocked cover, a small run of 2500 limited editions, and is a true collector’s item.
The magazine has one core question at its heart — if you could only use eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose? — and poses this (and many others) to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of course type design itself.
8 Faces is available internationally but each issues sells out quick. Stay up to date with the latest info at 8faces.com. I’ll keep you posted when I hear rumblings of another issue coming.
This makes me way more happy than it probably should. Hooray for type!
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