Articles by: Go Media Inc.
Why Hire a Professional Web Design Company?
Enterprising business owners are rarely daunted by new tasks. Diving right in is second nature to many entrepreneurs. When it comes to web design, there’s no denying the ample DIY resources available to help companies cobble together an online presence. But hiring a professional Cleveland web design firm has several distinct advantages for your small business.
There’s little question these days why businesses need a website. The reality is many businesses can’t survive without a web presence. It allows people searching for your products/services to more easily find you. It becomes a point-of-contact. It’s a forum for answering frequently-asked questions. It creates leverage on social media platforms. And ultimately, it’s a customer convenience that most all have come to expect.
And let’s not forget: E-commerce sales have been through the roof in recent years, with the U.S. Census Bureau reporting $870 billion in 2021 e-commerce sales – accounting for nearly 14 percent of total sales. Not having a website at all puts companies at a clear disadvantage.
All that said, a poorly-designed website can have a host of adverse impacts to your business. Among these:
- Lack of credibility and trust. Opinions of your business are formed within milliseconds of landing on your website. Nearly 40 percent of users will leave a website if the content or layout is subpar. Websites that are not professionally-designed tend to have higher load speed times, which also frustrates customers and hampers SEO.
- Reduced SEO. Search engine optimization refers to how search engines rate your website – and therefore how well it shows up in search results. Your business absolutely needs an SEO strategy, and a professional website design firm can help you formulate and facilitate it.
- Poor user experience hampers marketing efforts. A lackluster design – particularly those that are not responsive and built with consideration for mobile users – supports the erroneous assumption that your company doesn’t pay attention to detail and customer experience.
So the fact that you can build your own website doesn’t mean you should. Even if all you need is a single-page reference source, hiring a professional web design team helps ensure you aren’t overlooking any critical blind spots.
The experienced pros at an established web design firm can help ensure that your page is not only visually-appealing, but SEO-optimized and functional for your target audience. A well-designed website helps promote trust and carves out authority in a given field. It provides clarity on exactly what you’re selling – and what customers can expect.
Primary Benefits of Hiring a Pro Web Design Firm
While DIY web design templates are often a lot cheaper (sometimes even free) they end up costing companies more in the long-run – whether that’s by disappointing/frustrating customers or simply missing out on prime opportunities.
Hiring a professional website design company will help ensure your website is:
- Unique. There are 2 billion websites in existence currently. If you opt for a DIY platform, your website is going to look like 50,000 others. Rubber-stamped website templates lack the customization companies need to stand out (in a positive way) and establish their own invaluable brand identity.
- Fast. If your website doesn’t load quickly, you can kiss 50 percent or more visitors goodbye at the jump. It’s going to be, “Immediately: No.” Professional web design can help ensure you have the sort of fast-loading website that users are going to expect.
- Optimized for users and search engines. A website designer is going to carefully examine your niche, market, and target audience. There is going to be careful analysis and groundwork for layout, color schemes, branding, and more. The website user interface experience (UIX) is going to be mapped out from start-to-finish, and functionalities like navigation, display, e-commerce, mobile optimization, etc. carefully tested and re-tested. When users find your site eye-pleasing and functional, they stay longer – and your SEO gets a boost.
- Polished. A professionally-designed website helps convey the message that you are making your customers the priority.
- Secure & Supported. When you work with a professional website design team, you automatically get the benefit of closed-source software that helps protect your site from hackers and bugs. If an issue does arise, you’ll have a team that can respond right away. We can also teach you how to best utilize all the functions we’ve built with tutorials and training.
All of this allows you to also stay focused on internal operations. After all: You’ve got enough to do in your day-to-day operations without piling on, “Learning how to build and optimize a website.”
If you have questions about our Cleveland web design services, we provide free initial consultations! Contact us by calling (239) 939-0000 or send us an email to [email protected]
Additional Resources:
Quarterly Retail E-commerce Sales, 4th Quarter 2021, Feb. 18, 2022, U.S. Census Bureau News, U.S. Department of Commerce
More Blog Entries:
How to Be a Better B2M Business, June 11, 2019, Go Media Cleveland Web Design Blog
Go Hosting Cloud Infrastructure Upgrade
For over a decade, Go Media has been proud to espouse the virtues of hosting with Amazon Web Services. Also known as AWS, this behemoth lapped every competitor in the space to become the preeminent provider of offsite cloud infrastructure. AWS is largely responsible for keeping Jeff Bezos within the top spots of the wealthiest humans on the planet. Early in our industry there was a saying “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. I would imagine that mantle now belongs to AWS when it comes to datacenters. After years of inconsistent service with many predecessors, we breathed a sigh of relief our first year hosting with Amazon and have enjoyed 99.98% uptime ever since, over a decade later. I would have to say, it has been worth the money.
Alas, we are moving away from AWS.
This announcement will not devote much time explaining why we are moving web servers away from AWS specifically. Although there have been speed benchmarks showing cloud competitors being more performant than AWS, we would not make the leap to say AWS infrastructure has anything significant to do with our decision. Most of the underlying hardware across the industry is the same and even much the software is the same. It would be outside of my expertise to assert any leading cloud infrastructure provider is “faster” or “better” than another. We can only speak to our experience with our specific use case and our rationale to go in a different direction.
Our migration is really about moving away from Plesk™
Go Media has been a fan of the Plesk hosting control panel long before “the cloud” was a household term. Plesk has given our clients and system administrators easy to use tools for website hosting management. Plesk offers a lot of great features, many of which we will miss as we develop our new hosting infrastructure. Ultimately, Plesk itself was never a problem in terms of what it is built for. The reason we are moving away from Plesk is due to what it was NOT built for and that is scalability. Although Plesk is very smart in terms of resource management, it is really a server management tool built for individual server instances. We have managed to scale it in unusual ways to host hundreds of websites. However, this has primarily been an exercise in what is referred to as vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is essentially stacking more resources onto a single platform to try and get more capacity out of it. Although AWS offers heaps of computing power and additional ways to scale vertically, we began to realize there must be a better way.
Enter ClusterCS and UpCloud
Early on in the history of our firm, we tried our hand at running our own servers for web hosting. Although this is somewhat common in the web app community, we found it to be too stressful and outside of our core competencies to justify being on call 24/7. Datacenter technology has come a long way in the last twenty years so maybe self-hosting wouldn’t be as painful as it used to be. For us, we have come to prefer this division of labor with system admin experts and found it to ultimately be more cost-effective… or at least better for our health. The past few years we have experienced an uptick in stress. It began to feel like we were hitting our limits with our current servers and so our search went in a different direction. It is remarkable just how many new vendors have leaped onto the scene this last decade. After pouring over the leader board and zeroing in on the type of cloud hosting design we desired, we decided to go with a combination of ClusterCS for the control panel service and UpCloud as the datacenter provider. ClusterCS offers a managed platform, with service contracts, for the type of cloud architecture we were after: horizontal scaling. This is achieved through a curated combination of leading opensource software such as HAProxy, GlusterFS, MariaDB and CentOS, designed in a way where we can add more computing resources and confidently expect the load balancing capacity to scale in a predictable manner. For a long time it has felt like whatever computing power we threw into our network at AWS, only resulted in short-lived gains.
Who is UpCloud? We honestly can’t say UpCloud was ever on our radar as a viable cloud hosting provider. Based in Helsinki, Finland, UpCloud was rarely mentioned in the typical industry forums. What we did hear about UpCloud was all good things and they came highly recommended by the folks at ClusterCS, who manage hundreds of servers. Go Media decided to test drive UpCloud on some busy sites and small clusters and have been pleased with the results. The console is quick. The servers were even faster. All the necessities in the cloud dashboard were easy to find and worked as expected. Their team was responsive and, maybe most importantly, they are transparent about their datacenter positions. Because we host a lot of small business websites based in the U.S, we prefer to place our servers as close to our client’s business region as possible. We were happy to see UpCloud has partnered with CoreSite to provide their infrastructure in the Midwest. May we someday find ourselves “fired for choosing UpCloud”? It is impossible to tell. But the provider has struck us as extremely talented, ambitious and well on their way to contending with the behemoths. We feel a little competition for Bezos & Co. is a good thing.
What our Clients Want
Speed. Nowadays it has become more and more clear our clients rarely ever need to use the Plesk control panel. They do not lose sleep over where their website is hosted. Our client’s top issue, when it comes to hosting, has consistently been speed – or lack thereof. An unhappy client is what we lose sleep over. Beyond that, most of our clients have come to expect concierge-like managed hosting service with us, allowing them to “set it and forget it” for the most part. It is our job to never rest on our tech laurels. Our goal with this new hosting infrastructure is performance. It will likely take several months to make the transition, but we feel it will be well worth it in the long run. Major web application providers have proven horizontal scaling is the only way to deliver high availability to the masses. Teaming up with ClusterCS and UpCloud will give us the flexibility and performance we have been searching for. We are applying the lessons we have learned over the years to this new build and are very excited about what awaits on the other side of this migration. If you host with us, please be on the lookout for messages from the support team regarding next steps.
Yours in page load speed,
Wil Revehl
Web Developer, CTO
Graphic Design Portfolio Examples to Inspire You + Important Tips
Newly graduated? Actively seeking employment in the field? Super comfortable in your current position?
No matter what your status, the Go Media team suggests you regularly work to keep your design portfolio up-to-date.
Seasoned designers, we know that this task may seem daunting. However, in order to show beautiful work, you simply have to put the time in. Being methodical about adding work is far easier and more effective, in our view. Slow and steady always wins the race.
We have launched a couple blog posts about what your design portfolio should include. They are:
How to Have the Best Graphic Design Portfolio on the Block: 3 Tips and
How to Create a Graphic Design Portfolio
Here are five of our most important tips.
- Only show your very best work. Your portfolio should be well curated. Less is often more.
- Cover all of your bases. If you have excellent work in branding, print, web, illustration, show us. Well-rounded designers are few and far between.
- Tell us a story. We love case studies! Show us your thought process from start to finish. Include illustrations, notes and various rounds. Address failures & successes along the way. We love to see how designers move throughout the design process. No matter what the outcome, we will respect you for guiding us along your path.
- Put as much time into your portfolio as you did completing the project. If you took eight hours to create a logo for a client, take roughly eight hours to work on that respective portfolio item. Dedicate yourself to mocking the logo up on multiple templates until they look perfect. Write, rewrite, proofread the copy to go along with your portfolio item. Construct a thorough case study as referenced above. If your logo appears in a store, restaurant or other location, go out and photograph it! Take time editing the photos so that they are professional in quality. Gather testimonials on your work if possible. Don’t stop until you’re proud.
- Show that you can work with clients & meet deadlines. Students, this one is for you. If you have not yet had experience in the field, ask your friends and family if they need any design work. This will get you some freelance work in the door and show us that you have experience, no matter how minor, working for clients. Get ready to illustrate the work you’ve done in your portfolio, as well as discuss how you communicated with them and managed to meet important deadlines.
Here are some portfolios that have inspired us with notes about why we enjoy them.
Ekaterina Oloy
Los Angeles Based Illustrator, Artist and Visual Storyteller
What We Love: Katia’s Portfolio is instantly spellbinding. Each project is accompanied by a full case study or accompanying materials that help you relate to Katia’s
work. This is the standard that all other portfolio’s should be judged against.
Skinny Ships
Design and Illustration by Richard Perez and Jennifer Derosa
What We Love: The cleanliness and fun spirit of the work. It makes you want to work with them.
Hom Sweet Hom
Hand Lettering by Lauren Hom
What We Love: High-quality, vibrant work that hits you in the face!
Great brand consistency
Ron Draper
Artist and Designer living in the UK
What We Love: Nice high-quality, bold imagery. Some portfolio items tell a story of Ron’s process.
Jordan Metcalf Studio
South African Graphic Designer
We love Jordan’s copy. As you know, we love a story and it gives more substance to his work.
Chuck Anderson
No Pattern Studio – Chuck Anderson
Artist, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Creative Director
What We Love: Chuck’s Portfolio is filled with over-sized, juicy imagery.
The quality of his presentation, in our opinion, is simply on another level.
Kate Moross
Designer
What We Love: Kate’s bold and captivating presentation
Erik Marinkovich
Lettering Artist and Designer
What We Love: Clean and crisp overall. The work is breathtaking! Copy is simple and straightforward.
Creative Mints
A Boutique Human-Centered Design Agency from Prague
specializing in Branding, UI and Illustration
What We Love: Creative Mints shows a beautiful variety of work in their portfolio
Go Media’s Online Portfolio
We couldn’t let you leave without bragging about our own graphic design portfolio!
Here at our Cleveland Graphic Design and Web Development Firm, we love showing off the work we do in the areas of not only design and web, but print, illustration and web marketing.
Our Rich Wonder portfolio item is a great example of one of our case studies. We used illustration to help us
explain our thought process through the project.
We hope you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to add to your portfolio today!
90’s Graphic Design Mood Board
The 90’s were a magical time – a time of the Docs, Game Boys, and the sweet, sweet sound of AOL dialing-up. As everything that was once old is new again, the 90’s are making a come back.
Design trends from this era can be found in posters, album covers and fonts. As artist Dave Perillo has shown, even some of our favorite old friends are back in action. Deservedly so.
What about 90’s design is worth reintroducing, you ask? We created a mood board of sorts to answer this question and hope it helps uncover the truth. Below you’ll find 90’s posters, graphics, album covers, products, and other elements that may inspire you to create your next design piece enhanced with 90’s elements. We have arranged the elements in four categories. We hope you find this helpful. Enjoy!
90’s Design
1 – Color like WHOA.
The 90’s was at once a wave of color and a dash of grunge. But for this moment, at least, we are rejoicing in glorious brilliance of it all. Think Pretty in Pink (literally), color pops, neon lasers and this 90’s cup design that kind of grows on you after awhile. Totally unapologetic!
2 – Chunky Fonts.
If you take a broad look at fonts in the 90’s, you will see a lot of thick lines and truly unique fonts driven by theme. Oh – and we loved a drop shadow!
3 – Photo Posters
The focus around many of the posters or album art in the 90’s was around one simple graphic or photograph. Many of these are iconic posters and I think their simplicity speaks volumes.
4 – From Bold & Vibrant to Black & White (and Red)
Though this era gave us a lot of pink, we also saw a lot of stark contrast – black & white – sometimes with pops of red.
What did you love most about design in the 90’s?
For more 90’s Graphic Design, head to the Go Media Pinterest Board.
Portfolio Spotlight: Rock Medical Branding & Website
Go Media is so honored to have had the pleasure to work with Rock Medical, the premier Orthopedic Consulting Team here in Northeast Ohio, on their logo and website design.
Over the past 16 years Rock Medical has served it’s mission while building from a company of one to over 35 sales and support consultants. While Rock Medical has grown, they had out grown their brand image. Rock Medical came to Cleveland web development and branding firm Go Media to overhaul their brand, marketing materials and website. It was our great pleasure working with their president Tom Ramsay on crafting a contemporary brand that properly reflected their technological sophistication and “surgeon first” company culture.
Transitional logo:
Because of Rock Medical’s reputation & established recognition in the industry we needed to be sensitive in our approach to their brand transition. With the original knee logo mark carrying so much of that equity, a transition logo was created to help ease into the future plans for dropping the knee altogether.
Website Design:
Go Media used our Designer Sites platform to build Rock Medical an intuitive, beautiful and easily managed website. Running on WordPress, Rock Medical’s website utilizes Go Media’s proprietary Page Builder editor – featuring a front end drag and drop interface giving the Rock Medical staff total control over the layout and content of their website. Of course, all Go Media websites are built full screen, responsive and optimized for search engines. The result is a powerful tool to help drive Rock Medical into the future.
Learn more about the full project here:
Designer Face Off featuring Paper Cut Artist Reina Takahashi & Facebook Art Director Shiu Pei Luu
Welcome to Designer Face Off, where we ask two designers to go head to head, asking one another burning questions about their shared passions for design, entrepreneurship, and all things creative. Facing off today are two WMC Fest family members, WMC Fest 2017 speaker alum paper cut Reina Takahashi and WMC: Off-The-Grid workshop leader and speaker Shiu Pei Luu. Reina and Shiu Pei Luu are friends, having worked together in the past at Facebook, so they were excited to face off against one another.
Reina is a full-time freelance paper cut artist and illustrator living and working in San Francisco. Her clients have included Facebook, Lyft, Wired, Better Homes and Gardens, American Greetings, and more. Her Instagram are what dreams are made of.
Shiu Pei Luu is an Art Director at Facebook, as well as a Civil Engineer turned illustrator and Creative Director/Co-Founder of the Beehive Society, a non-profit that fosters creativity through pop-up art shows and workshops facilitated throughout the bay area. Too, her Instagram is an amazing collection of the characters she creates. Go ahead and drool over that, but not before you watch these two chat.
Who do you want to see on our next Designer Face Off? Email us and let us know!
For the full Designer Face Off series, head to our YouTube Channel.
How Do You Know It’s Time for a New Logo?
How to Know It Is Time for a New Logo
One question we get all the time here at Go Media is: “How do I know it’s time for a new logo?” Today, our President, William Beachy, is addressing this complicated issue.
Here are some points to consider should you be wondering if it’s time for a new logo:
What is your current brand equity?
Whether you realize it or not, your customers know you by your current look, so whether you do a brand refresh or redesign, you need to consider what are the implications are / how your customers are going to react to this change. If you have a sterling reputation and everyone loves you, your customers may not react well to any drastic change. If you decide you want to move forward with a new look, you may want to consider that this brand refresh be a small step in an evolution of your overall appearance. This will ensure you don’t lose that recognition factor.
Starbucks has done a great job of this – they’ve been slowly tweaking over a very long period of time – so much so, that the changes are almost difficult to recognize. If you have a bad reputation, the rebrand could be a good thing. For example, airlines that have had major tragedies have completely rebranded to change their look and reputations. Sporting teams with long histories of losing have rebranded themselves, built new stadiums and hoped that that will usher in a decades of winning. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
What will the impact be?
Consider that changing your branding may impact a lot of your sales collateral, your website. It’s going to take a lot of work (and money) to replace these items. If you’re ready and your brand needs this update, however, you do not need to make the investment up-front. For example, you can update your website first, then worry about your brochures later down the line.
What number of modifications are you looking to make?
There are many components that make up a brand – the mark (what people call the logo), the logo type (the name of the company), the color scheme, and all the collateral elements around that. Sometimes, the mark, the logotype and the color scheme look great and it’s just the collateral elements that looks dated. When you update the collateral, everything suddenly looks much better. Sometimes, however, everything does need an update. It just depends on the quality of the branding work.
How will your staff react?
Ask yourself how the family, ownership and staff will react to a refresh/re-brand. Many times, there will be intense backlash within the company itself in regards to a re-brand. If the branding was created by the company’s grandfather on the back of a napkin, there is often a lot of history and heart there. So if you move forward, you really need to explain to your crew why the re-branding needs to take place and keep them engaged in the process. Other times, a re-brand could bring a big moral boost to the company. Either way, keep your employees engaged and you’ll be much better off.
Now that you’ve considered those points, here are some quick do’s and don’ts when considering a new logo.
Do consider a new logo if if no longer reflects your company’s persona.
If your business has been in business for a long time, and your type treatment/mark no longer feels modern or beautiful, that is a great opportunity to do a brand refresh.
Do consider a new logo if if the branding is just bad: Ugly, overcomplicated, not easily recognized from a distance, etc.
If the brand clearly needs to be rebuilt, we will do the work. In these cases, we often mine design elements from the company’s history. These often help us bring bring their past to the present. In this case, we educate the company about how to introduce the new brand to the company’s customers/clients to ensure there is a smooth transition.
Do NOT consider a new logo if your branding is simply boring you.
If you want to do a refresh/rebrand only because you’re you’re sick of staring at it everyday, resist the urge. Keep in mind that your customers aren’t looking at it as often as you are. They might only see it every three months, six months, every year. Brand consistency is very important. So, just being bored with your brand isn’t a good reason to change it up.
We hope this information helped you to know when it’s time to contact Go Media, the Cleveland logo design firm you know and trust, to help you create the new logo and branding you’ve been jonesing for.
Watch our Facebook Live on this topic:
Have more questions for our team? Please submit them to us at [email protected] and we’ll try to answer them here on our blog or on a Facebook Live.
Portfolio Spotlight: Center for Arts-Inspired Learning Website
Go Media, your favorite Cleveland-based web design, branding and design firm, is so proud to have had the pleasure to work on the website for the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning.
The Center for Arts-Inspired Learning is a non-profit organization that brings unique learning experiences to students through the arts. ‘CAL’ as they are affectionately known has impacted the lives of 7 million students over eighteen counties through arts education. As former board members, it was our great privilege to help them on their mission to ignite student learning, creativity and success by building them a highly functioning, intuitive and fun website. Our goals were to increase awareness, drive fundraising and to have the overall feel of the website reflect the creative nature of the organization.
The new Center for Arts Inspired Learning website was built upon Go Media’s Designer Sites Platform. The site is built in WordPress, the leader in content management systems. WordPress sets the standard for ease-of-use, which is key when you have a number of contributing members to your website. This CAL website is enhanced by Go Media’s Page Builder on page editing tool. This powerful and intuitive content management tool allows members of CAL the ability to make live edits directly to pages without having to use WordPress’ backend.
Take a peek at some of the work we did on the website here:
CAL does a very special place in our hearts and we trust the website will assist them to assist their goals in uniting art and education to change lives. To learn more about their programs or donate to the cause, please head to the CAL website.
This Week’s Top Five Links (7/13/2018)
Here are five links, images or videos from the web that stood out to us this week. We thought we’d pass them onto you and share the love. We hope you enjoy them. Please tweet us and let us know what caught your eye or inspired you.
1 – Manrope – a free font by Michael Sharanda on Behance
2. Our Top Reasons to Attend WMC: Off-The-Grid by Heather Sakai on Medium (Shameless Self Promotion)
3. Design Week’s nod to the World Cup
4. The Zany Logistics of London’s Baby Trump protest balloon
5. Top 10 Fonts Used by Professional Graphic Designers
Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week!
3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Building a Strong Brand Presence
How to Build a Brand
What is your brand? Who is your brand? And why should we care? Developing a brand is more than just your logo. A brand represents everything you are as a company. Everything that you say and do shows your prospective customer who you are. It’s your “dress,” the way you talk, your slogan, your signage, your messaging, how clean your offices are, company uniforms, your collateral materials and so much more.
To build a strong brand presence, it’s important that you ask yourself three very important questions –
What is my positioning statement? (Where is my space in all of this clutter? What does my company offer that no one else does? Why are we special?)
What is my messaging platform? (Why should anyone care? What’s in it for my customers?)
What’s my brand persona? (Who is my target customer? Who is my company?)
Close your eyes for a minute. If you had to talk about your company as a real person. Who would you see? Try to imagine your company as a movie star. Is your company Brad Pitt or Morgan Freeman? Someone young and hip? Old and stodgy? Middle aged and reliable? What about your customer? How do they communicate? How does your target customer like his coffee? You should live and breathe your brand persona so much that that answers to questions about your brand should roll off of your tongue. “Duh!” You should be telling me, “We’re an almond latte kind of company!” Or maybe you’re a tea company, or a pop company. We can’t answer that for you–only you can. This is the first question of many you should ask yourself about your brand persona.
Once you figured out your brand personality, it’s time to start working on the visual components of your brand. When creating your brand, it’s important to take its various components into consideration: logotype (the word), mark (commonly referred to as a ‘logo’,) and color scheme.
- The logotype is a distinct font that represents your company. It should be meaningful to your brand. Bold, curious, flirty, simple–fonts speak visually to your prospective consumer and should be an extension of your brand persona.
- The mark, or the symbol, supplements the logotype. If your brand is edgy, be edgy! If your brand is laced up, be more formal. However, always remember that your mark should (not too be too cheesey) help you make your mark on all things visual. It should work well in black and white, not just in color. Additionally, you should be able to use this mark on any design work–print or online. Think about how it will be displayed on social media, on eblasts, on brochures, on t-shirts, or on uniforms… just to name a few visual outlets.
- The color scheme. It should use one or two primary colors, one accent color, or colors of differing value. Creating a strong brand color scheme will facilitate your brand’s flexibility across print and online, and it will also help make your brand visually appealing.
Once you figured out your brand personality, it’s time to start working on the visual components of your brand. This begins with your logo.
Putting in the resources to craft up a quality logo cannot be underrated. Also, we’re going to get on our soapbox right now and tell you that for the love of all that is good in this world, please don’t think that once you have created a logo, you are done. So many brands focus on just this one part of their visual identity. While the logo is vital to a brand’s identity, it isn’t the only visual piece of the puzzle that helps set you apart from your competitors. Your logo, my friend, is just the beginning of your visual brand identity.
Let’s say, for example, you want to create a brochure so that you can tell the world how amazing your company is. Where should your logo appear on the brochure? What kind of header will you use? What kind of typeface will follow? What size font do you plan to use? What kind of photography or imagery will be included? What’s your white space/copy ratio? What kind of voice are you using in the copy? Does the piece feel simple or intricate, casual or fussy? You see, it’s not as easy as you might think to release a brochure. Just like your logo, this brochure should exemplify who you are as a brand–it’s an extension of who you are. Your customers should immediately see and feel the synergy between your logo, your chosen imagery, your words, and YOU. This thought process holds true for every single piece of collateral that you release…no matter how big or how small.
It seems daunting to live up to your brand persona in each and every piece you release. That’s probably why, time and time again, we see a brand that looks and feels different on various pieces of collateral. Maybe you’re using different designers or firms or heck!, maybe an in-house designer is adding his or her flair to your logo, or whatever piece you’re currently creating. Creating a Brand Standards Guide can help keep things consistent. On the Brand Standards Guide, include an example of the mark and logotype. Include fonts. Include colors in RGB, CMYK and Pantone. Include best practices such as uses and spacing. And finally, include example designs. Sometimes, we even see sample copy on a Brand Standards Guide. A solid Brand Standards Guide helps ensure that no matter who is helping push your brand, you’re all pushing the same brand–not spin offs of one another
In no way are we saying that each piece has to look identical. We’re a creative firm–we’d never tell you to go for visual boredom, or ask you to turn into a boring machine spitting out identical pieces, one after the other. Instead, we’re saying that visual consistency is vital to your brand. By following these tips, your customers will create a stronger connection with your brand that they can trust. Trust = repeat business, which, at the end of the day, is what we all want.
Questions? Get in touch! We’d love to help you no matter what stage of the brand process you are in. We can’t get enough!
Project Spotlight: Without Bounds
We are excited to share the website design we completed for Without Bounds Educational Services, a phenomenal education service that provides young students with the tutoring they need to master concepts and prepare for exams. They work with the most talented and qualified educators to offer tutoring in over 25 subjects. From core classes like Algebra and Grammar to 4 levels of foreign language, Without Bounds is ready to take on the unique needs of every student.
Go Media had the pleasure of helping Without Bounds grow their network by designing a website that showcased all of their offerings on a contemporary responsive platform.
Here are a few previews of the work we did. To view the full project, head to the full project.
Responsive Website Design Cleveland
Icon Design
Project Spotlight: Scott Sheldon
Web and Infographics Design for Scott Sheldon
We are excited to share the work we completed for Scott Sheldon, nationally recognized supply chain consultants based out of Detroit, Michigan.
Scott Sheldon’s new website needed to convey the level of sophistication and technical know-how they bring to each and every one of their clients. In conjunction with upgrading to our web platform, Go Media developed intuitive infographics to help deliver technical information with ease.
Here are a few previews of the work we did. To view the full project, head here.
Supporting graphics
Infographics Design Cleveland Ohio
Portfolio Spotlight: COSE-PPA Print Design Piece
Print Design Piece by Go Media
We are proud to spotlight a recent project we completed for COSE, the Council of Smaller Enterprises, a group that has supported and advocated for the small businesses in our region since 1972. This print piece, their 2015 – 2016 Public Policy Agenda, served to compile crucial information for their client base. Because of this, delivering it in a highly cohesive and easy-to-understand way was our goal from the onset.
With content including messages from COSE’s leaders, information on their new policy agenda moving forward, as well as material shedding light on their member-driven process, sticking the landing on the overall piece’s presentation was crucial to the project’s success.
Here are a few samples of the full portfolio item:
How to Get Hired to Do the Design Work You Want to Do
How to Get Hired as a Graphic Designer
(to Do the Work You Want to Do)
When going through the hiring process here at Go Media, we see a lot of portfolios. Some are good, some are bad, very few make us stop and say…”wow, okay!”
The portfolios that really stand out to us are strong in branding, print design and web development, have a bit of edge, and hint at a background or strength in illustration. Why? Because we want to find a designer that:
- Is passionate about the same type of work we do.
- Is stylistically similar to us, but still has range.
- Is psyched about using the same programs as we are.
Really want to work at ____ << dream company here (for purposes of this article, we’ll call it Go Media!)
We want it to feel like your portfolio was created with us in mind. Whether that means removing pages from a physical portfolio or modifying your website for this particular job search, it’s time to make some necessary adjustments that will seriously make our heads turn. If this sounds like it will take a lot of extra time and effort, you’re correct. But, it’s worth it.
Here are our recommendations in regards to your portfolio:
MIRROR OUR PASSIONS – BECAUSE YOU SHARE THEM
As you may have heard us preach, you MUST do your homework about Go Media and know our company inside and out. It will take hours to truly understand our services, as well as our history. As mentioned above, Go Media has a strong background in illustration. So, when designers open up their portfolios, show off their illustration skills and refer to our history, we are really wowed. Without doing any research, however, you will likely miss this important bit of history altogether and miss out on some great conversation with us. And quite possibly, a position here at the company.
PAIR DOWN, SHOW RANGE
After you’ve come to understand our major service areas, you should start to pair down your work to match ours. Once you have narrowed down your portfolio to your strongest print, branding and web projects, you can leave the watercolor painting work you do in your free time to the wayside. It just starts to clutter things up.
From there, show us a sample of what you do best while simultaneously showing range. Illustrate the fact that you can work with any client we throw at you, from gritty, down-home BBQ restaurant, to a quaint cupcake shop, to a biker bar, to the world’s largest healthcare center.
SHOW US THAT YOU’RE VERSATILE
We really like our designers to show that they have a wealth of knowledge working in many different programs. One reason is that we need designers to work in specific programs for very specific reasons. (For example, we need designers who are experts in Photoshop that can work on our mockup templates.) Another reason is that we want to ensure that we can all work on and in the same files if needed. Use your portfolio/case studies as a vehicle to show us that you are comfortable in Adobe Creative Suite and other programs if applicable.
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At the end of the day, in order to get hired as a graphic designer here at Go Media – to do to work you want to do and truly love to do, all you need to do is to show us the work you want to be doing through your portfolio and, in person, a real fire and passion for that work.
And don’t forget to leave out any work that distracts us from seeing the designer that deserves a seat at our table. Good luck!
Portfolio Spotlight: Akron Welding Website and Branding Project
Akron Welding
The Akron Testing Laboratory & Welding School is a family owned and operated business that has been in existence since 1965. ATW serves its local community with a goal of sharing the knowledge and expertise of master welders with students looking to start, or improve their career in the field of welding.
Although Akron Welding has a long history of success, their website was not reflecting all they had to offer. Go Media had the pleasure of bringing their dated website to present-day on a platform that will sustain the growth of their business for years to come. Included in their project was a logo refresh to give ATW a facelift all across the board.
3 Tips for Designing Printed Apparel with Dan Byler
Tips for How to Design Your Own Apparel
In today’s video, we introduce you to Dan Byler, Business Development Guru at Jakprints. Jakprints is a premier print shop here in Cleveland with over a decade of experience in online printing. They specialize in custom full-color offset printing, apparel printing/embroidery and sticker production. Dan really knows his stuff, as evidenced by the video you’ll see below, in which Dan discusses his tips for How to Design Your Own Apparel.
Dan Byler has been happily employed at Jakprints since 2004. He began his career in Apparel Production at Jakprints and over the years worked my way into a Business Development role. He is currently working at the Jakprints Oceanside, California office. He has helped hundreds of clients with thousands of projects during his time at Jakprints.
For more on how to design your own apparel, head to some of our most popular articles on this topic under this category:
How to Start Your Own Clothing Company
Tips for Designing Printed Apparel
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