Small Business By Design

Remember that song from Sesame Street… one of these things is not like the other….

I was reading an article today regarding our new president’s campaign branding and that song began playing through my mind. I couldn’t shake the question of what would happen if a beautiful brand comprised of a series of seamless items, were soured by one or more misfitting members.

I noodled on the concept of branding and I realized there was a simple illustration on how branding ought to work.

The essential concept of branding is to unify the entire user experience behind your brand concept —from visual representation, to customer service interaction, to corporate dynamic. Each facet of your company SHOULD mimic the values of all of the others.

So many people are alluded by the concept of a brand. They think it is their logo, their tagline, or their corporate colors. While these are great places to start, a well-crafted brand is so much more than those items. A cohesive brand should leak into every crevice of a business. From the design of your logo, print, packaging or web communications, the technique of your photography, the mission of the organization, the style of your copy, the tone of your customer service interactions all the way down to the atmosphere within your corporate facilities. However, a brand is much more than skin-deep. 

On top of all this, know that your brand is not always what YOU say it is. Your clientele plays a huge part in the definition of your brand. After all, without them, you are dead in the water. You may want to position yourself as one thing, but your sales reports and customer feedback are saying something different. Your customer has an enormous amount of say in “who” your company is, because they are what keep it alive. Brand consistency instills trust with your clientele—they know what they can expect from your brand. If you start shifting things around, your risk rattling your customers’ trust right over to your competitor.

Since small businesses rarely have the money to hire out to a major brand agency to manage the gamut of details, they need to work extra hard themselves to carefully define and then execute their brand. As small businesses often work with many different vendors on their marketing efforts, it is imperative that the business owner or marketing manager clearly communicate their brand’s values to all parties involved and encourage collaboration to produce the strongest, most brand-centric result. 

Some may say that small businesses can’t build a strong brand, that it takes a bigger budget than they will ever have. But branding your business doesn’t need to cost an exorbitant amount of money. Planning and simplicity are the key. Don’t fall prey to the notion that just because you don’t have a huge ad budget you can’t keep your brand consistent and professional.

For a really great read on branding try “The Brand Gap” by Marty Neumeier.

Ahh the famous phrase used by clients everywhere. A friend of mine passed on this silly cartoon that finds humor in this phrase often-uttered by my print clients. It inspired me to write a little explanation of exactly why using web images isn’t a good practice. Bear with me, this one might take a second…

All photographic images (including all website images) are created of hundreds of pixels. These pixels are incredibly small and should be completely invisible to the naked eye when you are viewing an image at full size. However, if you were to zoom in very closely on a digital image you could see each pixel and how each one’s color slowly shifts to provide optical illusions of smooth color transitions that make up your photo.

Back to the moral of the cartoon. The bottom line of this issue is that web images are created in 72 or 96dpi (because web browsers view at this resolution) and print images are created in 300dpi. When a print designer is asked to take an image from a website, it must be scaled up from 72dpi to 300dpi, which essentially means each pixel will be enlarged to three times its original size. This creates a “pixelization” effect. Pixelation appears because the pixels that make up the image have been enlarged so much that you are now actually starting to see each one individually and the smooth optical illusion breaks down. The information in the image has essentially been stretched to such a degree that there are now gaps, and no amount of “photoshopping” can supplement this lost information. Because the pixels are now over-sized, pixelated images will appear blurry in print, which does very little to enforce the professionalism of your organization.

My recommendation to all individuals who are involved in coordination of print design is to always make sure you always keep a copy of the native, high resolution image files on your hard drive or on a back-up disc. This way, when your you or your designer needs high-resolution images, you will be able to access them quickly and easily.