Graphic Design | 360innovate Blog

Posts Tagged ‘graphic design’

Design Crush – edition 14

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Recently we have been receiving CV’S for web designers and graphics designers looking for positions within 360. This got me thinking about how designers can make a company like 360 take notice and take action. While the CV is very important, in terms of the information that it holds, the portfolio is even more so. Why? Because it shows companies your style and skill set first hand and can be the making or breaking of a future job.

Designing and building your own portfolio site would be the best way to get your work from your head to your potential employment. However if you don’t have your own site to house all your unique work, then don’t worry. There are plenty of resources available to you that still let you have an effective online presence. Online portfolio sites like the examples below would be a good place to start.

While thinking about all this, I decided to write down a few tips that may help any budding designers figure out what to include and what not to include in their portfolio.

Tip 1 Define the purpose of your portfolio. What do you want your portfolio to achieve? Portfolios can be used for many things including selling your services, promoting your services, getting a job, building a reputation and networking.

Tip 2 Whatever you want your portfolio to do, make sure you get the message across crystal clear. Targeting your portfolio to your intended audience is important to make it more effective and achieve your desired outcome.

Tip 3 When deciding what to include in your portfolio make sure you don’t put any old rubbish in. Only include your best work. Remember its quality not quantity.

Tip 4 One of the most important tips is to make it different. Your portfolio is an expression of your work therefore it should be totally unique and should be able to make a statement of who you are a designer.

Tip 5 And finally, with all portfolios, keep it up to date. Its amazing how over time, work can look dated and can make a portfolio (including mine) look less than impressive. So whenever you have completed a new project and its worthy of showcasing your talents, stick it into your portfolio.

Tags: graphic design, portfolio, web design

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Design Crush – edition 9

Friday, June 5th, 2009

This week’s design crush is all about button and icons. Most of the time people click on buttons and don’t take much notice of them, but a well design icon can not only give a site a more professional and sleek look, but it can also encourage users to select the button and give your site that all important personality.

Icon design is tricky, with such a small area to play with, it can often be hard to design a successful icon. It’s all about the details. With icons, there should almost certainly be simplistic detail used; only the necessary details should be included to allow your button to be easily understood. And the more it stands out the more chance you have of people selecting it. RSS feed icons are a popular button to be redesigned to try to attract people to sign up to the blog feed. Here are some examples for you to have a ponder over:

Why would you spend hours of your time designing a new icon instead of using a standard one? The answer is personality. If you want your website and company brand to pack a bit more punch online, having unique elements in your site is sure to deliver. And there no easier way of doing this than having unique buttons and icons. But if you’re not up for designing one yourself, there are many websites where you can download more unusual looking icons to give your site that little twist.

Resources:

Make your own RSS button

Download RSS icons

Tags: graphic design, graphics, icon design, rss, Rss feeds

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Design Crush – edition 6

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Since spring has sprung and as the better weather settles in (much to our delight), here at 360innovate we have come over all green. For this weeks Design Crush, we wanted to talk about using nature in graphics and design that can really transform a flat standard website into something that is full of life and personality.

There are many design trends out there, some come and go, other stick around for a while, and one that always seems to re-surface is the use of nature as inspiration for web design. There are more and more sites out there recognising that with a few clever uses of imagery inspired by nature, you can transform a site and bring it to life. Using shapes derived from nature such as plants and flowers to any type of natural element can transform a rather simple site design into a world of its own, giving it real character and interest. And the best thing about using nature in design is that you have so many options making it very easy to create something that is totally unique to your site. So its easy to bring life into web design using nature as inspiration.

Here are some good examples of how to use nature in web design:

Tags: graphic design, nature, web design

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What’s in a logo…

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

A logo can speak a thousand words, they exude the key elements of a company, their principles and what they stand for. More importantly a logo forms a key part of a customers first impression.

There are many different factors to consider when designing a logo, to have a symbol or to have text?? Often people can relate to a symbol more quickly than words, as symbols can be more memorable than just text, however, a logo cannot work in every scenario. In many cases text can be the most effective solution, using fonts as a means of expressing the company’s personality.

For example Marks and Spencer’s use a simple but sleek logo that consists of M&S. By using the initials of the name, there is almost a symbol logo being created, that has become their identity. This method of logo design can be applied to almost every company name.

Other key factors include the key design trends and traditions that the company’s industry has, this can be a valuable means of inspiration, or it can help identify an opportunity to differentiate the company from the competition.

The main objective for the graphic design team at 360innovate is to create a logo echoing the personality and identity of the company, designing something that will stand the test of time and that will grow with the company. We are no strangers to logo design; our most recent projects include Toa Wema and Caught U Lookin, with We Send Parcels in the pipeline. Not only do we do logo design but we also have OP Graphics as a client, using state of the art technology they can put your 360innovate designed logo on your vehicle livery.

Examples of some of the logo work we have done: