Although your logo may be only one piece of your branding strategy, it is a large one. So, pay close attention to your structure and design. Here are some tips on how to make your logo a successful part of your branding.

1.  Develop your branding strategy before your logo.

• Who are you trying to reach?
• What message do you want to convey?
• What are your goals and values?

This will give you a clear idea for the structure of your design.

2.  Convey growth and professionalism no matter the size of your company.

• You want potential customers to be attracted to your logo.
• Show everybody you are a successful company and plan to go places!

3.  Differentiate yourself from your competitors.

• Be creative! Try to think outside the box on this step.
• Look to other industries, not just your own, for inspiration.

Have multiple options and present them to your employees, friends, and family. Which logo are they drawn to and why?

4.  Test, Test, Test!

• Market-test your logo. This blog goes into more depth on this issue, if you’d like to know more. Testing your new identity prior to the official launch is especially important if you are designing your logo in-house.

This will save you time and money in the long run. Who wants to re-design their logo after a year? Test before it goes live!

Overall, if you follow your branding strategy, be creative, and test your design you are more likely to have a successful logo that will fit in with your goals and attract many people! Good Luck!

Every year, new design trends appear and others fade away. This means that what is new, cool and hip today might be completely dated a year or so down the road. It’s just the chance taken. However we all know it’s almost impossible not to be influenced in some way by what we see around us. Though this blog was written and compiled at the beginning of the year, the trends Jacob Cass points are still extremely relevant and he seems to really hit the nail on the head for this year’s branding trends.

Obviously everyone wants their design to be unique. Trends, by nature, work against that. However, we must still be aware of the trends forming around us; whether we are hoping to avoid the trends or if we want use them as inspiration to create something truly new and create a trend all our own.

In May of this year, Borrell Associates released a report, “Direct Mail Falls, E-mail Soars,” that caused a bit of a ruckus on the Internet. You can download the executive summary for free, or you could buy the full report (the company’s site boasts that the full report comes with a webinar) for a whopping $995. In their executive summary, Borrell Associates reports:

We’re [Borrell Associates] predicting a 39 percent decline for this Goliath [direct mail] over the next five years, from $49.7 billion in annual ad spending in 2008 to $29.8 billion by the end of 2013. If that occurs, direct mail will fall from the No. 1 placeholder for ad revenue to No. 4, behind the Internet, broadcast TV and newspapers.

The market research company predicts that e-mail will fill the gap, with its cost-effective allure. The following are two of the top-rated discussions on the topic.

Death of Direct Mail: An Alternate Perspective
The Digital Nirvana, 5/28/2009

Direct Mail Doomed, Long Live Email
Media Post News, 5/20/2009

Bottom line? Any direct mail — snail mail or e-mail — needs to be targeted and relevant to the receiver. Work with your marketing and design agencies to ensure your message is the RIGHT message, otherwise it’ll end up in the recycle bin.

Think you’re ready to go to print? Be sure. Without good file preparation, valuable time can be lost and results are less predictable. When prepping a file for print there are a series of steps to take to make sure that your end product is clean and consistent.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that if they have a PDF, they’re ready to go. To the average person, a PDF is a PDF is a PDF. However, from a printing perspective, this is simply not the case. You can read this article for a breakdown of the different PDF file types but what we’re the most concerned with here at PMG are Press-Ready PDFs. Press bound PDFs must first come from a sound file from a competent layout program like Adobe Indesign. A sound file means all images are high-resolution (and ensuring that none are in RGB mode), fonts are high quality and can be embedded, the document has appropriate bleeds, etc. A PDF must then be generated with a tool such as Adobe Distiller.

If you have a PDF already and you would like to evaluate the print quality of that file, the easiest way to do that is with Acrobat Professional. This article will walk you through that process.

However, the easiest way to be safe is to ask us here at PMG. We are always available to answer any of your questions, be they prepress or otherwise. We also truly enjoy teaching anyone willing to listen about the printing process. It is our passion, it’s what we do - and we want to share the love.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

While this might be a good argument for Juliet, Shakespeare’s famous line from “Romeo and Juliet” is not going to help you solve the battle between investing in your brand and investing in other operations of your new business. If a rose was called a “turnip,” it may smell just as sweet, but it’d be overshadowed by its more prettily named competitors, such as the “calla lily” and the “orchid.” “Sweetheart, I bought you a dozen, long-stemmed turnips for Valentine’s Day” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

We didn’t think so, either.

But don’t take our word for it. Check out what the New York Times had to say about it in their March 17 article, the Importance of Branding Your New Business. When you’re done reading, contact us. We’d be glad to sit down with you to figure out how to brand your new company. And because we’re not just artsy designer folks, but printers, too, we understand that your brand has to be flexible enough to live in a variety of formats, from business cards to billboards.

“If you design with PMG, we manage the details so you don’t have to,” says Heather Youngblood, creative director. “Before we begin, we make sure to ask all the right questions such as, what are you going to produce, and how are you going to use the design. It allows us to give you the best, most accurate and flexible design available.”

Youngblood says PMG takes all the possible uses into account and then troubleshoots any potential roadblocks to ensure a smooth, cost-effective execution. This way, she says, when clients think they’ve gotten themselves into a corner, PMG has already thought about it, planned for it and figured out a way to avoid it before you see a design.

“We keep the fun in it,” says Youngblood. With PMG you’re going to love the design process and the end-result - your brand.”

…And in the realm of personal branding, the Seattle Times wants you to remember to be interesting.

by Taraneh Foster, guest contributor

By the time I met Mitch Craghead, who owns PMG, I was about to go postal. The company I was working for at the time had outsourced its marketing communications needs for its more than 50-year history, and to cut costs, it often let its sales team manage and implement graphic design projects. As a result, our corporate brand had run amok. Some literature had been printed on coated stock in CMYK at one printer, other literature had been printed in Pantone at another printer on uncoated stock, and some literature had been run off the Xerox machine in the mail room. I don’t even want to talk about design.

I knew I needed help, but more than that, I knew I needed expert help. My graphic design skills are all self-taught, and I was having the hardest time figuring out why the Pantone Warm Gray 2 on one data sheet did not match the Warm Gray 2 on another. Nor, did I really care at that point. I just wanted them all to match!

So I found myself in the PMG conference room one afternoon with a stack of our company’s literature. I spread out every single page, and Mitch helped me understand where all the color changes had come from. For the Warm Gray 2, it turned out that Pantone had updated its books, and the new Warm Gray 2 was a different shade than its predecessor. The other color variations had less to do with Pantone, and more to do with inattention.

It turns out that when you convert a Pantone color into CMYK or RGB, the color changes a bit. PMG has great digital printers that can usually make the CMYK look more like the Pantone spot color, but it’s not something printers can guarantee. The colors also change depending on the type of paper you use, and whether or not it’s coated (glossy).

This is where it really came in handy to have our materials printed at PMG, rather than a quick copy shop or an online copy company. When you need your Warm Gray 2 to be the same color, no matter the paper or the project, it helps to have expert, experienced printers who can catch any issues and fix them before you have 5,000 copies of a brochure you can’t use.

Trust me, your CEO is not going to be happy when you need that reprint!

In Portland, Ore., Lorrie Vogel is something of a celebrity. She is the general manager of Nike Considered, a sustainable product line at Nike that "considers" everything that goes into its products — the chemistry involved, the waste output, etc. — and, in doing so, has created a stronger brand relationship with customers and has saved the company approximately six million due to changes like reducing the amount of waste created to manufacture one of Nike’s shoes.

But you don’t have to be at Nike to incorporate sustainability into your business. After all, with resources dwindling, as Vogel says, it’s going to be a bad day for a business when it has to fight with its customers to get access to water. Not only will the company not get the water, but it will also lose brand value and credibility. The best thing to do? Anticipate these things and develop programs that allow the company to use less water in its manufacturing processes. The main points of Vogel’s presentations are for all businesses:

1. Find out your real footprint — from concept to the end of your product’s lifecycle (when the customer throws your product out)
2. Become a leader in your industry (retail, food service, semi-conductors, etc.)
3. Becoming sustainable is just good business, but make sure you’re still delivering what your customers want. For Nike, it was "sustainability, but not at the expense of performance and aesthetics."
4. Sustainability is not a program with an end date.

Why should a marketing communications professional be considered about his or her company’s comprehensive footprint? Because he or she does not want his or her brand to be associated with greenwashing. The University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication partnered with EnviroMedia Social Marketing to create the Greenwashing Index, which seeks to educate consumers about greenwashing by allowing them to upload and vote on how authentic or inauthentic a company’s messaging is in relation to reality.

In printing, the environmental impact is real. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that printing one ton of virgin, uncoated paper, which accounts for 90 percent of the United States’ printing and writing paper, requires three tons of wood, 19,075 gallons of water and generates 2,278 pounds of solid waste. The EDF’s 2005 article, six steps to cleaner, greener printing, is a must-read for marketing communications professionals who want to be sustainable, but who can’t have all of their literature in an electronic-only format. The design magazine, Dynamic Graphics, also published their tips, printing green: 12 things you need to know, for marketing communications and design professionals.

Monadnock Paper Mills also releases an annual Field Guide for graphic designers, printers and marketing communications professionals on how to best utilize sustainable practices, including how to incorporate this commitment in literature. The guide is comprehensive, and includes recommendations on paper (yes, this is a "duh" moment), production, inks, printing, finishing and even packaging. It also includes a handy checklist, so that you can use the rest of the guide as a reference, because really, who has time to read a whole field guide?

Here at PMG, we not only offer design services, but sustainable printing options, too. With the PressTek 52DI printing press, PMG is able to provides its clients with waterless offset technology, allowing them to lessen their environmental impact, achieve a higher level of print quality and save money in the process.

For more information about Nike Considered, check out one of Vogel’s PowerPoint presentations (low-res, PDF format), or read the GreenerDesign feature about Vogel.

Up next week: waterless offset technology and the benefits of using the PressTek 52DI printing press for your print needs.