by Whit Gurley

Not all studios are created equal, folks. We who strive to do great design work for reasonable prices wish there were a universal measuring stick by which the non-design-savvy could gauge the strength and fairness of the design companies they evaluate. Sadly, there isn’t, and clients around the world pay too much for too little every day of the year. Here we offer you a typical example of this all too pervasive price/performance gap.

Tales of post-game woe

First a little backstory… GamePlan Wealth is a consulting company that seeks to make the following statistics a thing of the past:

• 78% of NFL players retired for 2 years are either bankrupt or under financial distress
• 60% of NBA players, within 5 years of retirement, are broke
• Numerous retired MLB players find themselves in financial situations just like the NFL and NBA

Stunning, isn’t it? Granted, thousands of professional athletes retire every year, and we’ve heard enough headlines in the news about former world champions going broke. We know that some athletes just can’t manage their off-the-field affairs especially well, but… this many? We commoners who don’t make tens of millions of dollars per year find it hard to fathom, but, well, it’s a complex phenomenon. And the business experts, many of them former pro athletes themselves, know that phenomenon backwards and frontwards. They can help a willing client move from “clueless mega-star” to “informed post-game success story.”

Two strikes…

For a company in this position – facing luxury-accustomed clients on a daily basis – a sharp, strong branding presence is paramount. GPW had the misfortune of investing in a freelance designer who was more talk than action. To make a long story short, he designed a mockup for their corporate website that didn’t properly represent their mission and goals, then informed them that it would cost a whopping $5000 to create a site based on that design.

A last minute game-changer

GamePlan’s luck turned when they discovered AEI. We were able to build for them an interim site based on that design for all of about $1000, then embark on a “real” design project that would go on to present their company and mission in the spotlight that they deserved. Besides being based on a much stronger design and layout, the new site employed a number of rich media add-ons (such as a dynamic intro animation on the home page and an interactive services wheel) that really put the icing on the cake. The grand total for a site redesign project that ran circles around our competitor’s efforts? Around $3500.

GPW couldn’t have been more pleased with the end results, and AEI went on to produce a second, Spanish version of the site, blog and social media site graphics, and business cards for the entire company. The business relationship has been immensely enjoyable for both sides, and Angled End looks forward to continuing to help GamePlan turn the career tide for athletes everywhere.

Whit Gurley is the owner and
chief design geek at AEI.

First, let’s start with those primary colors. The fact of the matter is that RBY is only one set of primary colors, the one that makes the most sense for simple color “math” that our eyes and brains can comprehend. “Yellow and blue make green,” as the Ziploc ad went, is a simple calculation to generate a new color by combining two others. This is what’s called “additive” combination.

While that particular additive set of colors is frequently used for arts and crafts, its closest neighbor, RGB, is used in light projection, such as that of your TV or computer monitor. Here, yellow and blue can still make green, but only after green and red are combined to make yellow in the first place! (visual example ») In the RGB space, black is produced by the absence of colors, while white is produced by combining all of the colors at full intensity. In this way, RGB is the “opposite” of…

CMYK, which is a “subtractive” color space, in which adding color, in this case ink or pigment (in cyan, magenta, yellow and black) reduces the amount of reflection, making the color appear darker. As such, it is the absence of color that produces white (assuming that our foundation is a white surface) and the full combination of colors that produces the richest black (note: while CMYK contains black as an ink, darker blacks are achieved by adding some amount of the other three colors as well).

It’s also worth mentioning, especially when discussing the ramifications of these spaces in graphic design, that their output is far from equal. While RGB devices can produce nearly any color that the human eye is capable of detecting, CMYK falls far short of that (tints of orange and green are especially deficient in this space). This is why it’s important for business owners to see how their artwork appears when it is converted from RGB to CMYK, since much of the artwork’s original richness can vanish in that process. Print designers generally work in CMYK from the start so that they’re never surprised by this color shift.

by Sandy Gans

Many small companies and local businesses are still not effectively leveraging internet marketing as a means to boost their customer base. Simply having a website is not enough. With 97% of consumers using the Internet to research products or services in their local area (source: KelseyGroup.com), you need to ensure that your business is not only easy to find on the web, but that customers are drawn to you more than your competition. A huge part of this is making the right first impression with your site. What does the appearance your website tell people about you?

Image is everything!

We are often astounded by the number of great businesses that are highly-skilled at what they do, have invested much time and resources into perfecting their service, and have a loyal following of customers as a result, but let themselves down when it comes to attracting new business by having a poorly-designed website, or (gasp!) not having a website at all. To those of you who still don’t have a website… seriously? It’s not 1995 anymore, folks. Being absent from the web is tantamount to being absent from the universe. If you don’t have a site at all, people may assume you no longer exist.

Yes, first impressions count

And for those of you who think having any old website is good enough: wrong. Let me make my point by way of a personal example. A friend of mine and I setup a lunch date a few weeks ago. I was in the mood for Vietnamese, so I did some online searching and found what appeared to be a decent place near her apartment complex. Denied! My friend insisted that we eat at the place right across the street from her. After checking their online presence, I was… skeptical at best. Let’s just say that they failed to convince me that anything they provided was of high quality, and their Yelp.com rating was only 3.5. But I gave my friend the benefit of the doubt. She was right, of course – the pho was outstanding, and what’s more, I loved the atmosphere, very brightly-colored and retro. It’s now my favorite Vietnamese spot, but I would never have discovered it if I hadn’t been dragged there by a local patron. This restaurant very nearly prevented me from patronizing them because of an online presence that gave me a negative impression.

Send the right image
to the right market

This restaurant’s first big mistake is, #1: not publishing their own website. Rather, they have a web page in an online restaurant directory. This gives me the impression that they are not doing financially well enough to host their own site, which in turn makes me believe they do not get a good deal of business (which makes it probable that they have lousy food). But that’s simply not the case – they are often busy even on typically slow weeknights. Mistake #2: no pictures of their amazing food! After all, we eat with our eyes first. How better to get the mouths of potential customers watering than with photos of beautifully prepared dishes? Mistake #3: their website has not carried over the modern, fun, colorful theme of the restaurant’s décor, and there are no pictures of the restaurant’s interior, so I cannot get a sense of the ambience by looking at their site. Being a trendy, professional 30-something (I like to think so, anyway), I not only want to eat good food, I want to do so in a place where other trendy, professional 30-somethings are eating. This business is clearly missing out on a huge opportunity to attract their target demographic by not playing up the fact that this is not only a great place to eat but a fun environment. This selling point would set them far apart from their competition and encourage even those that do not live locally to go the extra mile to give them a try.

You have all of the control

These principles apply not just to restaurants, but to virtually every business. You want your customers to be sold on your product or service before they ever enter into your place of business or talk to you on the phone. “Making do” with a sub-par website could, in fact, be worse than not having a website at all, as potential customers can be turned off by the image you are portraying of yourself via the website. Think about it: if a customer has nothing else to go on, they are going to base their opinion of your service and reputation by what they first see and hear about you. And unlike reviews on Yelp, you get to control the image you project from your website 100%, including highlighting the positive reviews customers and professional associations have bestowed on you.

Take action

Getting a professional looking website that conveys the right image and successfully speaks to your target market is cheaper and easier than you may think. A basic, 6-8 page website from Angled End costs in the neighborhood of $900, and you can be assured that our work is always tailor-made for your brand (we do not build from templates). We take the time to get to know your business and market inside and out before we even touch our design tools. This allows us to create a site for you that will immediately grab potential customers’ attention, highlight what makes you unique and give you a significant competitive advantage in converting a “shopper” into a devoted customer.

Sandy Gans is Director of Sales and Internet Marketing at AEI. Feel free to contact Sandy with any questions, or to get a quote for a design or internet marketing project – sandy@angledend.com.

Many businesspeople out there have never heard of these terms, but virtually all of them have encountered both kinds of graphics. We’re not talking about graphic file formats here (JPEG, GIF, PDF, EPS, etc.), we’re discussing the fundamental categories that those formats (and others) fall under.

The concept is simple, but understanding how and when each type is used is trickier. Most of the graphic imagery that you see on a website is in bitmap form, which means that it is composed of a grid of colored pixels (or dots). When these pixels are all put together, we see an image. All photographs fall into this category, as do images in the following formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG and TIFF. There are many others, but these are the most common.

There are two problems with bitmaps. The first is that they cannot be scaled up, meaning that they can’t be made larger without degrading quality. After all, the image only contains those pixels and nothing else, so if you attempt to grow the image, the best you can do is to “stretch” it, which reduces sharpness. The other problem is that they are inefficient at displaying flat areas of color with sharp edges, at least relative to the other type of image, which is…

Vector images, which don’t use pixels at all, but instead use points (coordinates) to indicate where corners and curves are, as well as colors contained inside each shape. Most logos are created as vector images (even if they’re later represented in bitmap form), and most other “flat-looking” graphics are generated this way. Vector graphics can be contained in PDFs, EPSs and many Flash-based sites, and can be scaled to any size without losing quality.

When to use each type of graphic depends on its final use. If you’re creating something for the web, you’re mostly restricted to bitmaps. But you’re better off using vector images for printing, so long as the graphic can be represented with lines, flat shapes and gradients.