Interested in seeing how Star Wars posters have been adapted in a variety of different countries? Check these out:

HUNGARY

POLAND

JAPAN

The post Worldwide “Star Wars” Posters appeared first on samgrantdesign.

This cartoon follows this theme of the Marketing Strategy post a couple weeks ago. Jennifer Nelson shared a comment on that post that struck a particular chord with me: “If you can’t invest the time in developing and aligning on a good brief, why should your company invest (potentially) millions of dollars in A&P to execute it?”

In marketing planning, we focus carefully on ROI calculations based on previous campaign results. X media spend = Y volume lift. Yet creativity is the more overlooked part of the equation. The actual creative briefs are often given significantly less attention.

Denny Haley, retired BBDO chief creative officer, put it this way: “Creativity is a force multiplier, the better the work, the higher return on your investment.”

This idea of creativity as force multiplier is particularly important in today’s social media world. But you will rarely find it on a marketing planning spreadsheet. In practice, the process of creating a campaign is like the Mark Twain quote about laws and sausage: it’s better not to watch them being made.

Read the entire article at: Marketoonist:  TomFishburne.com

The post Low Budget Marketing Strategies appeared first on samgrantdesign.

Mercury Script is an action packed type family of three weights. Click on Swash, Contextual or Stylistic alternates in any Open type savvy application for plenty of extra grooviness and combine with Mercury Ornaments for superb results. Turn on Small Caps to activate a complete set of block capitals designed to go with the font.

Mercury Script is based loosely on hand lettering found in a vintage lingerie advertisement, only containing the words “light control”.

• Designer: Emil Karl Bertell
• Design date: October 2012
• Publisher: Fenotype
• Purchase from: MyFonts.com

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Creating a visual identity for any client requires a lot two very important factors. One is listening, the other is patience. Arriving at every solution requires cooperation from both the designer and the client. The level of trust from both sides is always an issue, but the solution will always answer the call. Here’s how we solved the Soto Consulting Group LLC.

The Soto Group is a new consulting firm that pushes for the professional and personal ethics in the areas of early childhood education, all forms of mediation in Florida and relationship sales and management. The logo need to reflect founder Ms. Soto’s “personal” vision of the company’s image, as well as its goals and objectives.

I like scribbling down words that are mentioned repeatedly in a briefing. The client always looks for those terms to become visual elements of their product.

The terms that popped up more than others were  ICONIC and CRANE. I started working on multiple iconic symbols first, just in case they wanted to keep the visuals simple and focused on the name.

However, the crane was to be the primary element  and not the secondary symbol. Ms. Soto discussed the meaning of the crane to me at great lengths. There were several spiritual messages associated with this majestic bird. It seems the Crane is considered a messenger of God, or a symbol of communion with God, or Light Beings. It represents entering higher states of consciousness. In China, it represents immortality, long life and happiness. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the Crane was sacred to Apollo and was a herald of spring. In Christianity, it represents goodness, loyalty, good order. The mysterious Ainu people of Japan perform a ritual crane dance as do the people of Korea. The crane is often seen in traditional Japanese art. Finding as much as reference as I could, I began to sketch out my crane concepts.

Once I got the crane I thought was working, I began to develop visual elements around it. However, the client though the crane was too elaborate and needed less detail. After more internet research, I started working with the essence of the crane and stripped out the nonessential stuff. Here’s what I ended up with:

The crane was approved, and the colors were modified by the client. here are a series of mockups I presented for final review and approval:

The post The SOTO Group Visual ID appeared first on samgrantdesign.

A hundred years after their invention, cars are pretty much the same. Faster, better looking, more comfortable — but still with four wheels, a steering column, engine, brakes. A fridge is a fridge is a fridge, whether it was made in 1953, 1983, or 2003. Some inventions perform a function and, aside from improvements in the technology, their heart never really changes.

Computers are different. For starters, there’s the form factor. Chances are you’re reading this on a laptop, an iPad, or even your Smartphone. A decade ago, you probably owned a bulky desktop tower and separate monitor. These days, if you have a desktop machine it’s probably a super-slim iMac. Only video editors and others requiring heavy processing power opt for the chunky Mac Pro.

Even if you are reading this on a notebook, you don’t need to be. Your iPhone has more than enough processing power. You use your shiny new Macbook Air for light browsing, some photoshop, email. Your five year old Macbook could do exactly the same thing, albeit three seconds slower. Your machine is already a hundred times more powerful than it needs to be.

The fact is, if you’re a light user, the next PC you buy might very well be your last.

Yes Final Cut, Photoshop, and Logic users need the processing power. But the 45 year old housewife who Facebooks, emails, and surfs the web simply doesn’t.

For most people, the PC era is effectively over. It’s Apple who are heralding the ”end of the PC era” — enabling you to perform most light tasks on a tablet or a smartphone, and delivering cloud computing services so you don’t even need physical storage, but in many ways it was Microsoft who launched the first fatal blow that could eventually see the PC consigned to history.

For a seamless user experience, look at the evolution of gaming.

In the 90s, hardcore gamers were dedicated to the PC. Consoles were for kids.

The launch of the Xbox in 2001 changed all that. The six year old Xbox 360 is still going strong — and plays most new games at a higher framerate and resolution than your spanking new Macbook Air. It is, in many ways, Microsoft’s greatest success. Gaming on a console such as the 360 is a much better experience than gaming on a PC. It’s practically seamless and offers instant entertainment. Consoles are optimised to play games and they deliver a simple, efficient, switch-on-and-play gaming experience that brought “video games” out of your fifteen year old’s bedroom and into the living rooms of grown men and women in their twenties and thirties (and even older) who wanted something more exciting and social than TV. In many ways, the iPad and the iPhone are doing exactly the same thing to the PC — making it look clunky and obsolete. If Apple spent the best part of the last decade taking the “beige box” and making it cool, they look set to spend the next decade showing you exactly why you don’t need it.

Computer makers expect to increase sales by just 4% this year. Compared to a whopping doubling of the global tablet market since last year. Tablet sales will overtake netbook sales next year. Already, Apple sell almost three times as many iPads as they sell Macs.

Most interestingly, penetration of tablet devices is reaching beyond the typical young, male demographic. 54% of tablet users are thirty five or older, and 19% are over the age of 55. (Source: Lukew.com)

The tablet (as well as the smartphone) era is making home computing easier and more accessible to a wider number of people, the way fifth and sixth generation consoles have made gaming much more mainstream. And, having let Microsoft steal a march on them here this time, it’s Apple who are leading the way.

Consoles simply work. So does the iPad. Even the latest rage of fully-fledged Macs are being designed to offer the kind of seamless experience provided by iOS, with ‘instant on’ hardware functionality and software improvements in OS X Lion such as auto resume and mission control.

Get Your Head INTO the Clouds

But Apple aren’t content to rest on their laurels. Yes, tablets and smartphones are changing the way we use computers. But cloud computing has the potential to change the way we do things even more. Apple’s $1 billion purchase of a new data center in North Carolina isn’t simply about storage, it’s about processing power as well. If, in the future, we’re all connected to the cloud, why carry expensive and fully featured processors in our pockets everywhere we go? Apple is banking on breaking the low-to-mid-range smartphone market by offering us a digital future where a data center can perform the heavy lifting, delivering data over the cloud.

Once again, video games are leading the way. We’re already seeing this emerging technology being used in services such as OnLive, who deliver streaming entertainment to televisions and computers at vastly reduced computational power, doing all the hard work themselves.

Terminal Illness?

The computer era began with massive mainframes and simple, “dumb” terminals that performed no other function other than to connect to the mainframe, send and receive data. Slowly the terminals became more powerful, standalone machines as the requirement for processing power vastly outstripped both bandwidth and connectivity. With cloud processing, we may well come full circle.

The PC era may not be over, but its golden days are long gone. Fewer and fewer tasks require fully fledged machines. We’re living in the era of the tablet and the smartphone now. And, with the advent of the cloud — and the remote processing capacity it brings — the way we interact with machines may soon change once again.

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I know this is from 2008, but I felt such a strong touch of Deja Vu, I thought I’d tell somebody about it. Have a great weekend everybody.

The post Kinetic Deja Vu appeared first on samgrantdesign.

Want to see the rest? Their in D’Joint!

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The Fontmaker is type foundry based in Varna, Bulgaria. What’s a Bolyar you ask? Fontmaker clues us in:

A Bolyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Bulgaria – second only to the ruling Tsar (king). This font is closely related to its name origin – at Fontmaker we believe we’ve created a royal, majestic and elegant typeface. We’ve developed a wide set of alternates, swashes, ligatures and ornaments so that this font will be able to face your needs from simple body type to a strong dominating headline or even logo.

Bolyar  and other Fontmaker fonts are available from MyFonts.com.

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If you are interested in making your handwriting as your font you have come to the right place. We are here to help you to make your dreams come true. Go HERE and start working on your Dreams!

The post Make Your Own Handwriting A Font appeared first on samgrantdesign.

The client brief is the initial step to the logo design process. Designing a good logo depends on the level of detailed information provided in your client questionnaire. These 10 questions will give you plenty of information and ideas you need when faced with your next logo design project. By asking a lot questions, it is very possible to find a great concept to work with and the proper type of logo to use. Remember, these are foundation questions. Add a question if it helps you design a better identity.

Start by asking:

1. What are your business objectives? What are your client’s reasons and intentions for the new logo design.

2. What is the company mission and vision? Knowing further details of it’s foundation can provide you with important information that can be lost without delving deeper into your client’s knowledge. Find out the purpose of the brand and it’s long-term goals. Your design may convey the brand’s message or core values.

3. How would you like to be perceived by others? Important in determining the style of your design. The brand image may be different from the one your client desires, a logo and proper branding can take them into the right direction.

4. Who is your primary target market? Base it on demographics (age, education, income, etc). Also important to find out their lifestyles, likes and dislikes.

5. What do you offer your target market that others do not? Base this question primarily on the competitive advantage they have over their competitors.

6. What do you want your logo to say about you? This question provides insight into the clients thoughts about what their brand stands for.

7. What keywords best describe your business? Provide them with multiple options and some writing space (in case they want to add their own). These are the keywords I currently use (dependable, traditional, established, edgy, strong, enthusiastic, unique, high-tech, integrity, fun, serious, upscale, original, etc.)

8. What are 2 logos that you like and dislike? Although you may have great concepts, sometimes a clients personal taste can get in the way of great design. The best thing to do is educate your client on what makes a good logo.

9. What colors do you like and dislike? Add their favorite color to the logo, but only if appropriate.

10. What is the time-frame? A short amount of time will require your undivided attention. The more time dedicated to this project, the less amount of time you can apply to other projects. This question will help you know how much to charge your client.

These are standard questions, so make sure to add your own to the list. In the meantime, check out these perps below and see if you can spot your last client.

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