Author: Joules

Most everyone has heard of instances of photoshop mistakes where a model somehow loses a leg or finger due to an overzealous graphic designer airbrushing away her ‘imperfections’. If you haven’t, please do yourself a favor and google “Photoshop Fail” to see what images come up. It’s so bad it’s good.

I can’t believe how many times these examples of what NOT to do appear in the mainstream media. They took a chunk out of Demi Moore’s hip on the cover of W Magazine, they over-thinned the thighs of a model in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue so that she looks like she’s standing on toothpicks, and they stretched a Ralph Lauren model so much she looks like she’s part giraffe. As a consumer you think ‘rookie mistakes’ and laugh at how stupid it is that someone was paid to do such a bad job.

Well, I really wish everyone would start paying a bit more attention to another kind of bad design, which I’m going to call ‘desktop publisher fail’.

Now, before you get angry at me, I’m not saying that everyone who takes on the task of desktop publishing sucks at it. I’m also not saying that you need to have a degree in graphic design to create something attractive. What I am saying is that just because you put together a flyer in Microsoft Word it does not make you a graphic designer.

Can I please scream that from the rooftops??? Microsoft Word is NOT a design tool! I don’t care if it has lots of fonts, clip art and borders!

Deep breaths…. Anyways, I admit that I am a little bit of a design snob. I’ve found it helpful as a marketing guru to learn and use graphic design programs over the past 12ish years. I’ve also found it worthwhile to take a few graphic design classes and collect a stash of books and magazines that inspire me.

It is so very important that your business has a cohesive look with your branding materials. Think about it, if you see a photography company that has a terribly designed brochure, website or business cards, are you going to trust them to do the photography for your wedding?  If you walk into a law firm that uses 15 different fonts on its newsletter and a mess of colors on each page, do you feel like they’re a professional firm to deal with?

No.

Just as the packaging to a food helps you decide whether you want to purchase it, the packaging of your company influences people to buy your products or services.

Here are the top 5 easily fixable mistakes I see in graphic design:

1. Using too many words and not leaving any white space. When you have a page of nothing but words (as in a newsletter or on an advertisement) there is nowhere for your eyes to rest. White space actually makes your pages more attractive and easier to read. If you must be super heavy on text, adjust the line spacing and margins.

 

2. Including too many accent colors in one design. Just because you can use every color in the rainbow doesn’t mean that you should! Colors should complement your message content, not draw attention away from it.

 

3. Too many fonts on one page. I’ve seen over 10 fonts on a normal four-page newsletter before. I know it’s exciting to have a lot of font choices, but please don’t use more than 3 – 4 at the most. Too many makes your design look messy and immature.

 

4. Playing with font effects. Many amateurs excessively capitalize or play with underlines, strikethroughs, italics, shadows and other special character effects. An excessive use of these effects makes a page look cluttered and unprofessional, so please don’t use them unless absolutely necessary. And then, only sparingly.

 

5. Image scale mistakes. Often it is necessary to change the size of an image or logo that is incorporated into your design. Please, please, please make sure that when you change the width of an image you also change the height. I can’t tell you how many squished logos I’ve seen lately!

 

Pull out a sample of everything you have that represents your company. Are you making some of these mistakes right now?

* There are instances that a graphic designer will use any of these tips to their benefit in their design.  For example, using 50 different fonts purposefully in an advertisement could end up as a masterpiece. However, for the typical inexperienced desktop designer you’re going to want to heed these tips.

I’m having a grumpy kind of day. Part of it has to do with the constant waiting when it comes to anticipating a house contract. I feel very jumpy and edgy because even though right now we have to sit tight and twiddle our thumbs, as soon as we hear about the contract we’ll have to hurry up and do something about it. We’ll need to make a decision about whether to accept their offer, or take the chance of counter-offering whatever they send through. We also get to finally start touring the houses on our own “top 5” list that we’ve been stalking.

Actually, stalking is almost putting it mildly. We’ve kept a favorites list for the past few months, created a spreadsheet of our top 18 and then spent this last weekend driving around to each of them to check out the neighborhoods. We now have a final eight houses on our list, with a top five that we can’t wait to see. Well, my husband has a top one that he can’t wait to see, but I’ve been begging him to be more open minded. Which is something else that’s been making me stressed, I hate to be a bad guy but I really want us to end up with a house that we can live in for the next 20+ years. All of the possible ‘what ifs’ run through my mind 24/7, affecting not only my waking hours but making my dreams even weirder than usual. If there was any question of whether I was really “type A” I think this paragraph pretty much proves it.

In addition to my house selling/buying obsession, Maryland’s annual allergies have also caused me to be a bit crankier than usual. Nobody feels that attractive with itchy eyes and throat. There’s usually a week or two that is just the most horrible for me, so I’m hoping that this is one of them so that I can see the light at the end of the hazy, pollen-filled tunnel.

Last (and keep in mind, this is only Tuesday), we’ve had an unexpected expense this week that is kind of bumming me out. Fortunately, we also received an unexpected check for almost the exact amount of the expense, but still I feel like we’re throwing $500 in the trash. Which I would definitely categorize as Not Awesome.

Anyways, that’s all my complaining that I’m allowing myself to do. In true Joules-fashion, I’m spinning this around back to positive to get out of my head and over it. That and I’m kind of sick of listening to my complaining. It drives me nuts to hear people just whine and complain about things that they can’t do anything about. Of course, it’s equally annoying to hear complaining about something that’s changeable but the person doesn’t actually make the change.

So it’s time to shut my yap (or silence my typing fingers) and go through my bin o’ positive stuff for the day:

• I’m wearing a super cute dress that makes me want to tell people that I’m a pretty princess while spinning around to show them my swirly skirt.
• This is going to be an extremely busy and fun month at work with some upcoming events that we’ve planned.
• My husband is really cute and pretty awesome.
• If we take the people at what they said to their agent, we will be receiving a contract on our house (most likely) this week.
• On my list of stuff to do is to give my dog a haircut and he always looks super adorable when he’s freshly shaven.

I haven’t posted a house selling update in a couple weeks and figured I should get you up to speed. I’m still waiting… waiting, waiting, waiting. And if there is anything I like less than lack of communication, its waiting.

As previously reported, the people who looked at our house on August 17^th were interested enough to have their real estate agent call my agent to ask additional questions. I was freaking out from excitement, especially because we were leaving for vacation on August 23^rd. I was hoping (so hard that it hurt) to get a contract that week. Well, we didn’t hear anything from them and went away on vacation thinking we might get a voicemail while we’re on our trip. When we got back to town, I turned on my cellphone and was pretty disappointed that there were no messages about our house.

We got back to our house Saturday morning and putzed around unpacking, going to the grocery store, and all that jazz. We went out to get a baby shower gift for a friend and got back home at 1:55 pm that afternoon to give the dog a quick walk before running over to our friends house for the shower. Well, during our drive I texted our agent to see if anything had happened while we were gone. She called me back immediately and asked if I had gotten her text about the people coming back for a second showing…at 2:00!

Thank god the house wasn’t a total disaster and I had cleaned it before our trip. We basically ran inside and straightened up everything, put Potter in his crate and hid the suitcases in the back of my truck. Just as we were finishing, their real estate agent walked up.

We chatted with her for a while and answered a bunch of questions about the house. Apparently the people looking at the house live in Southern Maryland, so they were driving up that weekend to see it. Although the parents would be purchasing the house, their two 20-ish aged kids would be living in it. While we were chatting, the kids pulled up and we spoke to them, then the parents came and we talked to them as well.

Yeah, we’re chatty people.

Anyways, everything seemed super happy with the house so we left them to look at it in privacy and drove about two miles away to our friend’s house for a baby shower. About 10 minutes later, I got a call from my agent asking me to go back to my house because they really wanted to check out our homeowner’s association booklet since they hadn’t had one before. I drove back and showed them the booklet and ended up talking to them for 20 – 30 minutes more.

So, at this point I’m freaking out because why would they bother spending this much time asking questions if they weren’t planning to submit a contract?

A couple days go by and I’m tweeking out like a crackhead every time I get a text or my phone rings. AHHH, maybe it’s the call that we’ve got a contract! Nope, nothing. Finally, I hear from our agent that the people are very interested in the house; however they were leaving for a cruise the next day and didn’t want to stress themselves out by putting a contract in and then leaving. They told their agent, if the house is still available when they get back, they’ll take it as a sign and put a contract in.

So, here I am…waiting. Really, how long could their damn cruise be anyways? I’m guessing 7 – 10 days tops, so I’m hoping to hear something the middle of this week.

We’ve had a few other showings in the meantime, as well as another second showing for a different interested buyer. So, join us in crossing your fingers and toes that we get a contract as soon as possible so we can move on to the fun stage of this process… buying our new home!