Using social media is one of the easiest forms of marketing available today, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to name a few are relatively easy to set up and reach potential new customers.

Facebook

Facebook started off in the early days as simple social tool, users would post photos, write posts and generally chit chatter socially in groups. It didn’t take a scientist to realise that Facebook has a huge potential in marketing business, pages were launched and business profiles built for businesses.

Twitter

Twitter was also predominately used as a social tool, friends and family tweeting posts, news and gossip with ease. It can be used as a powerful marketing tool, not necessarily to sell products but more as a brand awareness tool. Twitter is a great way to keep customers up to date on what you are doing as a business. You can tweet offers or send latest news about what is happening in the trade.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another powerful social media tool when used correctly, Twitter and Facebook was invented for social purposes unlike LinkedIn which was designed for businesses. LinkedIn is the ideal tool for businesses to reach potential customers or simply raise your brand.

Play it safe

Using social media is great for business but use carefully assume your clients are seeing everything you are posting, make sure to keep your personal and business social media separate the last thing you want is a client seeing what a great weekend you had letting your hair down in the local pub. Post only business news and be professional always when using links or external websites.

These social media tools are extremely powerful ways to communicate with clients or prospects. To make use of these networks it does take time and effort but the rewards will follow once the leads come in and doors open for your business.

Article by Rob Steele for the Roller banners team

Ok I hear you shout it’s not rocket science, you fire up adobe and start the design what can be more simple, and you have the graphics and text what more would you need? Sounds simple designing an outdoor banner and really for experienced designers it is but it can go wrong if the simple rules below are not applied.

ALL CAPS headlines

All caps appear to be larger and easier to read but in truth and with research upper and lower case text is more digestible. Try to avoid using all caps on any headlines especially in the outdoor banner media. ALL CAPs will never be accepted in the graphic design communities not now or in the future.

Over fancy fonts

Stick to simple and clean corporate fonts in large format banners, fancy fonts never work with large print they distract the message and cause confusion with the readers. Remember you are trying to grab attention not distractions.

Use negative white space as part of your design

White space can be used as part of the design, not necessarily negatively. White space allows the design to breathe creating room and space. Sometimes called negative space but is just as important in some ways as the actual design elements itself.

One rule of thumb to remember is to allow 30-40% for white space, this will give the design plenty of space.

Author – Rob Steele for the roller banners team Cambridgeshire

So the big boss wants a new promotional item for your conference. It might be a simple flyer or postcard or small handout.

Whatever the promotional item is the principles are all the same. These tips below will help you create the artwork professionally and the boss won’t need to ask for the second time why you are having to re-supply the artwork.

• Planning - Before starting the design and layout you would need to decide whether you will be using special pantone colours or straight cmyk, using special spot uv finishes.
• Budget - Get the budget approximately agreed and quantities and paper stock required, ask your printer to provide a quotation on the quanties supplied. Printers can also advise on how to cut costs down if required or if something just won’t work.
• Choose the design program - Indesign is my preferred choice of design software because it works seamlessly with Photoshop and Illustrator. Try to avoid using Microsoft packages such as word, PowerPoint and Excel, these types of software are not professional design packages and cause printers plenty of headaches when setting up the files.
• Artwork dimensions – Your printer can help you with setting up the documents, the basic are the following to note. Add minimum 3mm bleed, this allows for an image or graphic to bleed outside of the document as bleed. Bleed helps the printer cut the trim marks, allowing a few mm to cut through. Your final hires pdf files should include 3mm bleed and crops marks.
• Colours - Use CMYK colour mode, avoid RGB this is primarily used for screen based graphics such as website design.
• Vector artwork - Vector artwork is the best form of artwork you could possibly use, try to stick to vector artwork (Illustrator eps) as much as possible when using logos or simple graphics. Vectors are 100% scalable, they can be blown up to any percentage where as a jpg or tiff cannot be scaled up due to pixels blurring.

Article wrote by Rob Steele for – Roller banners team Cambridgeshire

Large format printing design is very different to the usual print design, obviously the size of the documents you will be working with but also the variety of products in large format.

The product range includes Roller banners, mount boards, twist banners, tension roller banners and retail backlit graphics. Although they do differ greatly the principles in creating them is very similar.

If you wish to create attention and grab prospects interest a large format banner is the way to achieve this. The design requires high impact graphics and a good strong strap line or message to be successful.

So how can you make yours stand out from the crowd?

Avoid long paragraphs of text, it is hard to digest long realms of text.

The most important content needs to be large and at the top of the design.

Create your artwork in actual size to avoid loss of quality with pixel blur.

May seem obvious, check all copy especially headlines to avoid silly spellings.

The sizes of large format

Generic sizes of large format are;

Size     mm                  Inches

A2       420 x 594        16.55 x 23.41

A1       594 x 841        23.41 x 33.11

A0       841 x 1189      33.11 x 46.81

Bespoke sizes are for banner stands that require a unusual size to those above, create any design artwork in high resolution, (min 300dpi) using colour mode cmyk. You can work with the document in RGB but remember to convert once the file goes to final printing stages.

Meta tags are those little tags in the head section of your websites html coding, these tags are very often under estimated when it comes to search engine optimisation. Web gurus do have different opinions when it comes to Meta tags and search ranking, some agree they help, others don’t optimise for these and leave them altogether.

Although they don’t have evidence that they help your page ranks what they do is create an advertisement in how your website is listed in searches.

Meta descriptions are the small snippets of text which Google throws out when searching so yes these tags are extremely overlooked. Good meta description tags can be the decider between the searcher clicker your link or not.

So how can I view my website pages meta tags?

Quite simple view source, right click view source, at the top of the page you will notice you have a <title> tag above this is the pages meta tags, meta keywords tag (displays all your main keywords related to your site. Meta description is the pages description and more importantly the tag that Google uses for its search results.

Below are the four main meta tags related to search marketing
Title Tag – Web browsers view this as the main title of your page.

Meta Keywords Attribute – Keywords between this tag, depicts relevant ones to your page

Meta Description Attribute – A description of the page.

Meta Robots Attribute – An instruction is placed within this tag to tell Robots or Bots what to do with the page.

How can meta tags help with my seo

All the above tags have different roles in search marketing, the title tag is the most important tag, and this tag should include your main keywords you wish your site to rank for.

The meta-keywords tag has been pretty much avoided by Google, but don’t dismiss it entirely yahoo still uses this tag in its searches.

Meta description is next important below your title tag, Google uses this as brief synapses of your website and can help increase click through organically.

Meta Robots tag tells the robots what to do when they crawl your website,
Index/no index tells the robots whether to show your website in searches or not.

Follow/unfollow tells the search engines whether to follow your links or not.

So to draw a conclusion don’t pass these tags by, they may just be the trump card in your pack if you are targeting competitive keywords.

Article wrote by freelance graphic designer Rob Steele for roller bannerprinting.

Booklets are a great way to target and reach your customer base, ensuring your customer has all the information they need about your business, products, services and above all contact details. If your business hasn’t tried or tested booklet marketing you may well be missing a good marketing technique to reach possible customers. Booklets establish your business as reputable to deal with, it creates confidence and trust in the market.

Good marketing tool and creates trust

A booklet marketed well can provide great rewards if done correctly, it is one of the best ways to engage your customer base in relevant ways.

Business booklets can be used to provide very useful information which the customer references, this creates trust and puts you high in the expert of the field. Once you have created trust, your customers will feel secure buying from your business. Leave booklets with your customers, on shelves or receptions to advertise your services and products.

A good example is a search marketing company would mail out a brochure explaining how search engines look at your business in the search results and how you can change that by search engine optimisation techniques. The customer would reference this information and may even keep close on a desk to look back at when they require relevant information. This would create confidence in your expertise, trust and gets your brand in front of the customer without the hard sell.

Connecting with customers is first when marketing, booklets connect you with your customers and provide them with information they need. They create brand loyalty because your booklet connects with them and helps solve their problems.

Brand loyalty is extremely powerful is top of your list when marketing your business. Showcase the best selling features and products give the customer what they want to hear, they will feel connected and identify you as the brand to go to for their needs. Customers will identify themselves of buyers of your brand which is a benefit of brand loyalty.

Motivate sales

Booklets are not sell…  sell…  sell, they should be information related to your products and services. That all said there isn’t a problem in adding a percentage coupon at the back of the booklet to entice a spend on your services or products. Once the connection has been made and brand loyalty built up offer discounts and rewards to hold the customer and increase further loyalty.

Booklets make a fantastically strong marketing technique proven to work over the years, it builds customer loyalty, brand awareness and above all else brings customers back for repeat business for many years to come.

Article wrote by freelance graphic designer Rob Steele for roller bannersprinting.

Digital Printing – when was it invented?
Printing started life as a means to get copy and text from one place to another, usually on a medium of paper or canvas using tools.

(Illustration – early hand printing press)

Stamps and presses were used to copy by hand, this took a long time to produce material and was a highly skilled profession. Printing moved forward using mechanical printing presses as a means to print onto media. Demand for printed material or documents increased dramatically and it wasn’t long before the mechanical printing press was invented to feed this high demand.
Such high demands for print and indeed speed brought about the invention of what we know today is digital printing. Printing has always evolved to cope with the high demands of society.

Xylography and woodblock printing methods
Woodblock is a relief printing technique, blocks of wood are carved typically using a knife or chisel. The parts which are printed remain level with the media surface, non level parts are not printed.

The carved wood block is inked up and pressed against the required media.
Another name for this printing technique is Xylography or block printing. Wood block was originally inherited from the Chinese, the first methods were known to be on fabrics or textiles.

Three colours maximum producing floral patterns onto a fabric material. There are surviving prints dating back to the ninth century, the Chinese version of The Diamond Sūtra (left Illustration – shows excerpt from a book).

The 1300’s saw block printing popularity rise in Europe and was widely used as a method used for printing onto cloth. By the 15th century woodcut printing was replace by copper engraving, this was used heavily for illustrating books, copper printing was highly detailed and Illustrations produced with this method were quite astonishing compared to block printing methods.

These techniques are still used in modern times for Illustrators who want to produce a single print in woodcut (single-leaf woodcut).

Gutenberg Printing Press
A mechanical tool which is used to apply ink to paper or cloth using a plate. This plate printing method is mainly used for paper and changed the way we print, historically a technology that changed history to what we know Lithographic printing today.
German Johannes Gutenberg first assembled the first mechanical printing press in 1440. Originally he was a goldsmith and some thought he got the knowledge of using movable metal type from his experience in goldsmith and moulding coins.

Movable typesetting
Movable type is the process of using wood, metal or ceramic type as moving parts to copy text. This method gave more flexibility in terms of printing copy or text.

This evolved to typesetting which were type held in a job case, a drawer about 36 inches wide and about 2 inches in height. The draw contained various compartments to hold all kinds of type letters and symbols.
Pacific Coast Print foundries of USA perfected this process and this became the California job case. There weren’t any significant changes until the invention of electronic typesetting machines which took us to where we are today, fast, reliable and extremely efficient printing.

Digital printing
Digital printing is now the quickest and most reliable printing method today. Starting life as
Photocopying (1960), laser printer (1969), dot matrix 1970, inkjet printer 1976. Computers linked to a digital printing machine could produce high resolution images and high speed and progressed into large format printing for exhibitions and roller banners.
The 1990’s saw this method boom very quickly with advanced Apple Macintosh computer system’s coming into play to produce the high end graphics to what we know today as digital printing.

Article wrote by freelance graphic designer Rob Steele for roller banner printing.

The digital world changes extremely quickly, working as a graphic designer it’s very easy to get caught up in learning new techniques when the main focus is pushing your creativity limits. College is easy when it comes to getting inspiration or new ideas; you are not under the pressure of a working day and a boss breathing down your collar to finish a project.

Inspiration is tough to find if you feel pressurised into finishing a project piece.

Below are some good tips to help with inspiration, how to find it and prevent that stagnant design feeling and become a much improved designer.

Buy design books
Once a month search for a good design, typography or art book, a good book collection creates an on shelf inspiration library.

Subscribe to a design monthly magazine
Computer arts, digital art or design week are a few to look at, these monthly magazines are a great source of new inspiration for any designer beginner or advanced. They are not cheap, worth the bucks for keeping up to date with latest news, trends and help.

Read graphic design blogs

Excellent source for inspiration, subscribe and get the latest news feeds so you keep up to date with the blog. Join in and comment about the posts, you could meet new design people to get further inspiration from or learn more from the larger community.

Start a blog

Building up your own blog will not only help others, it will educate yourself whilst writing the articles. Create tutorials for graphic design, logo or typography related posts about the latest design trends and typefaces. Gather a following; you will be surprised just how many people would visit a design related blog for tips and advice. Post your work for comments and feedback this will help you become more analytical of my own work.

Create self promotional pieces or fake projects

If you get some free time let your imagination run wild, create a logo, website and stationery for a false business. Keeps your mind fresh and allows you to design without client restraints, sometimes clients change your design so far that it becomes their work and not your own.

Re-design old work

Start by choosing an old project and produce a totally new design, this keeps you learning and pushing the creativity boundaries. You will see how much better you can make the design being critical of changes you have made to the old design and why it has improved.

Keep a sketch book to hand

Hugely under estimated by modern graphic designers the sketch book lets you design freely without the software constraints. A sketch book enables you to design quickly and rough before moving to the final artwork using your chosen software.

Article by freelance graphic designer Rob Steele for - roller-banner stands

Top tips for choosing paper
Printers nowadays offer a huge range of papers to print onto, thick board to lightweight flyer paper. Paper is normally the last thing to think about before getting your marketing material printed, but this should be one of the most important factors when producing your material.
A bad choice of paper will reflect badly on your branding, paper is chosen based on your target audience for the brand material. Below are some useful tips.

Identify your audience
The audience will have a determining factor on your paper choice. For example a marketing agency, financial institutions or even estate agents for example would choose good quality. The audience would expect the quality of the paper to reflect the companies’ services or products they offer.
A charity wouldn’t mail out expensive paper, it would be recycled or thin shown to reflect cost savings and not funds spent on expensive print papers. The first step to choosing correctly is establishing your audience.

Quality
As explained above quality of paper reflects the services or products the business is offering to the audience. Paper is measured in gsm (weight. The larger the number the heavier the paper thus better quality. Flyers, letterheads are normally printed onto 80gms – 120gsm. Business cards 280gsm – 400gms board. Don’t cut corners and use lighter paper simply because it is cheaper to mail out, use the correct quality for your target audience.

Ask for advice
Printers are very experienced in paper quality and weights, ask them to provide samples, send the artwork over to them to produce a proof on your chosen paper weights. Some printers offer this service free to businesses especially if they are under the impression they are printing the project.

Choose the right paper for the right product
Adapt the paper choice with the product, a postcard wouldn’t be printed on to 100gms flyer paper it would look and feel like a flyer. Business cards printed onto light board would feel very cheap and poor quality, below are some useful tips on choosing the correct weight to product.

POSTCARDS: 250-300gms – heavy board to keep the card affect, not to heavy to keep mailing costs low.
BUSINESS CARDS: 250-400gsm – thick board, rigid and strong to look like a card without being too thick.
LEAFLETS: Wider range for this sector due to the difference in chosen audience, 100-200gsm are standard weights for leaflets.
BROCHURES: Inner pages 100-160gsm, covers 200-280gsm, brochures inner pages are generally thinner, the covers heavier to reflect a book. Ask your printer about finishes, saddle stitching is a standard finish to bind the pages together with a staple.
LETTEHEADS: 100-160gsm – Because letterheads are your main communication material choose the paper to reflect the quality.
POSTERS: – 160gsm-200gsm – heavy enough so they don’t tear, thin enough to hang on a wall easily.

Uncoated or coated material
Coated paper is standard for flyers, posters and brochures whereas uncoated for stationery such as letterheads, business cards and compliment slips. Coated paper has a light sheen to the surface, uncoated is matt and looks really affective as high quality print such as business cards.

Article by Rob Steele  for roller banners

Colour modes in Graphic design are pretty complex and needs to be correct to insure your artwork is using the correct colour mode for its media. Web graphics use RGB, print CMYK & finally PMS Pantone matching system.

Using basic principles below you can achieve better results within your design work.

RGB
RGB colour mode is primarily used working on graphics to be displayed on television or computer monitors (i.e. websites or video) Red, Green and Blue are the primary colours when working with Light. So how can you tell it uses RGB, look very closely at your screen to see a small pattern including Red, Green and Blue dots (RGB colours). When RGB colours are blended together equally and it creates white none of the colours present black is created. This colour is known specifically as ADDICTIVE COLOUR.

The secondary colours are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. A simple theory is imagining sitting in a dark room with no light at all the wall in front of you will appear black. Now with three friends sitting directly behind you were to shine three lights Red, Green and blue, the three colours would appear and any overlap creates the white light.

Red and Green create Yellow light, Green and blue create Cyan and blue and Red create magenta light. But interestingly when the three colours combine together equally they then create White. This is called RGB colour mode and is why it is used on video and website design graphics.

CMYK
This colour mode is used for print purposed or media, you may have heard it called the four colour process. Main colours are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. It is used when applying ink to paper or canvas. You must double check with the printer before sending artwork as some large format printers can use other colour modes for printing depending on their set-up.

If you have a graphic ready but it is in RGB mode you can convert it to CMYK, but be aware that this can make the colours very muddy (Subtractive colour), it is always best to start out using the colour mode you are going to use rather than converting the graphics. This is why a printers proof is important to get a feel of how the piece will print, too many clients sign off design from screens and when they receive the print ask questions about why the colour looks different. So be sure to try and get artwork signed off from a printed version rather than screen.

The difference between RGB and CMYK is how it uses light, CMYK does not give off light of its own, and it simply reflects light from additional sources. In CMYK white is created by absence of colour and the black is created by combining the three main colours.
Cyan and Magenta create Blue, Magenta and yellow create Red, Yellow and Cyan create Green. Black is created by combining all colours equally; White is when no ink is present thus blank canvas or paper. If a client asks why the colour differs from on screen simply tell them screen is made of RGB colours and print is CMYK as we described so they will look different because they use light differently. If your project is critical and colours need to be matched this would require a pms (Pantone matching system) as detailed below.

Pantone matching system – PMS
Pantone Inc developed the matching system way back in 1963 to overcome the above problems with RGB and CMYK when a job requires exact colour matching. They are specials or spot colours used and are matched to the pantone booklet either coated, matt or non coated stocks. You can create your artwork and specify this spot colour whilst asking your client to sign off the colour from Pantone colour book. Pantone colours ensure consistency and are accurate with the printer mixing the colours as directed from Pantone. The only downside to this special colour is the cost, much more expensive but worth it if your job requires accuracy in colours.