a quarterly online publication from

Vol. 2 No. 4, October 2005
http://www.kauaidesign.com

I. Branding Your Organization

II. Stoking the Creative Fires

III. Text Alignment: Ragged Right vs. Justified

IV. Back Issues Online

V. Do You Want to Receive The Graphics Grapevine?

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I often get calls from business owners wanting ads, brochures, rack cards, etc. to promote their businesses. After gathering background on the business itself, I’m interested in knowing about its graphic identity. Do they have a logo? A graphic image identified with the business? Typestyles? Colors? Surprisingly often, no such identity exists.

At this point I want to walk with the client a few steps backwards and first develop the visual ground that communicates the essence of the organization to its public. In my perfect world, before we even talk visuals, we would explore in depth:

I want to feel the human connection between the organization and the customer. I want the visual "branding" to capture that.

"The first job of branding is to craft an emotional bridge between your company and the customers you serve...

Everything your company does contributes to the brand-building process and the long-term success of your brand...

Think of your brand as the bridge to your customers’ hearts, and as the glue that holds all of your marketing efforts

together." -Debra S. Valle, MarketingU Inc., Los Alamitos CA

"Branding is the heart and soul of your buisness...A brand is the mind share that you occupy with your clients."

-Sonia Greteman, The Greteman Group, Wichita KS

Ah, but it’s not my perfect world. Budgets, deadlines and competing demands on business owners often squeeze out market research (surveys, focus groups, industry trend analysis, etc.) so we have little substance on which to base our marketing strategies. If this scenario rings true for you, consider the 5-step process below that you can implement in-house to start building, bolstering or repositioning your company’s brand:

I believe that in a crowded marketplace DESIGN may be the most potent tool for differentiating one’s products

or services." -Tom Peters, Management Consultant

"Design is a potent strategy tool that companies can use to gain a competitive advantage. It can enhance

products, environments, communications, and corporate identity." -Philip Kotler, J.L. Kellogg Graduate

School of Management, Northwestern University

II. Stoking the Creative Fires

Developing fresh, insightful approaches to communicating an organization's message to its audience is one of the first challenges of a design project. It rarely comes as a thunder bolt of inspiration from the creativity gods. It most often results from thorough information gathering, multiple approaches, imaginative and resourceful problem-solving and plenty of fine-tuning.

Shaking loose old constraints can be the most difficult part of any creative process. Roger von Oech, author of A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants offers 64 strategies for stretching our creative muscles in his Creative Whack Pack, a deck of cards divided into the four kinds of thinking involved in the creative process. He personifies them as:

The Explorer, whose job it is to discover new resources for creating new ideas
The Artist, who transforms those resources into ideas
The Judge, who evaluates an idea and decides what to do with it
The Warrior, whose task is to implement the idea

Examples include:

Give Yourself a Whack on the Side of the Head. The more often you do something the same way, the more difficult it is to think about doing it in any other way. Break out of this "prison of familiarity" by disrupting your habitual thought patterns.Write a love poem in the middle of the night. Eat ice cream for breakfast. Wear red sox. Take the slow way home. Sleep on the other side of the bed. Such jolts to your routines will lead to new ideas. How can you whack your thinking? (Explorer card)

Drop an Assumption. Columbus challenged the Spanish courtiers to stand an egg on its end. They tried but failed. He then hard-boiled one and squashed it down. "That’s not fair," they protested, "you broke the rules." "Don’t be silly," he replied, "you just assumed more than you needed to." What can you let go of? What unnecessary assumptions can you eliminate? (Explorer card)

Simplify. Editor: "I like your book except for the ending." Author: "What’s wrong with the ending?" Editor: "It should be closer to the beginning." What can you edit out of a current project or idea to make it better? What can you streamline? What can you simplify? (Artist card)

Don’t Force It. An architect built a cluster of office buildings around a central green. When construction was completed, the landscape crew asked him where he wanted the sidewalks. "Just plant the grass solidly between the buildings," was his reply. By late summer the new lawn was laced with paths of trodden grass between the buildings. Thes paths turned in easy curves and were sized according to traffic flow. The architect simply paved the paths. Not only did the paths have a design beauty, they responded directly to user needs. What are you forcing? Where could you ease off? (Artist card)

Hear the Knock of Opportunity. A leading business school did a study that showed that its graduates did well at first, but in ten years, they were overtaken by a more street-wise, pragmatic group. The reason according to the professor who ran the study: "We taught them how to solve problems, not recognize opportunities." Where do you hear opportunity knocking? How can you answer it? (Judge card)

Don’t Fall in Love With Ideas. If you fall in love with an idea, you won’t see the merits of alternative approaches--and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life’s geat pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you’re free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? Kiss it goodbye. (Judge card)

Learn from Mistakes. On his way to creating the light bulb, Edison discovered 1,800 ways not to build one. One of Madame Curie’s failures was radium. Columbus was looking for India. Errors are one of life’s primary learning vehicles. That’s because success reinforces the way you do things. When you fail, however, you learn what’s not working, and you get the opportunity to try new approaches. What might you learn from mistakes on your current project? (Warrior card)

Put a Lion in Your Heart. "To fight a bull when you’re not scared is nothing," says a well-known bull fighter. "And not to fight a bull when you are scared is nothing. But to fight a bull when you are scared--that is something." What gives you the courage to act on your ideas? Having a well-thought plan? Encouragement? Faith in the idea? Past success? What puts a lion in your heart? (Warrior card)

III. Text Alignment: Ragged Right vs. Justified

Our options for aligning text in most software programs include:

Flush Left Centered Flush Right Justified Force Justified

With Justified text, the right margin lines up as well as the left. This is a formal type of alignment that usually allows for more characters per line, thereby packing more words onto a page. It is familiar to us from books, magazines and newspapers and is often used in columns of text. The margins are clean but word and letter spacing can be distorted. Particularly in narrow columns with short line length, some words are pulled apart and others are jammed together. This can make type less attractive and more difficult to read. Dense blocks of justified text can be broken up with subheadings, paragraph breaks, or graphics to give the eye a place to rest. This paragraph is set with the type justified. Force Justified alignment would expand the last line of the paragraph to the right margin too.

Flush Left or "Ragged Right" text is considered a more informal, friendly and readable text alignment. It flows easily from the left margin to a natural break between words, while the word and character spacing maintain their integrity. The ragged right edge provides white space to break up the density of the text and makes it easy to track where your eye left off as you drop down to the next line. To keep the right margin from becoming too ragged, a little extra attention to hyphenation may be required, though this is generally less troublesome to correct than the spacing issues created by justified text. This paragraph, and the rest of this publication, are set ragged right.

Our other two options for text alignment also have their place:

Centered text is elegant on an invitation or a certificate, or in a short poem. An entire page of centered body copy, however, is a strain on the reader. We in the Western world have learned to track from the left margin. Jumping to the next line is fast and fluid if it’s right there where we expect it to be. Text that is indented all over the place is a chore. If ever you want to slow down the reader, centered text could serve the purpose.

Finally, a few well-placed headlines or captions set Flush Right (aligned along the right margin and "ragged" on the left) can counterbalance a page that is too heavy with ink on the left, while adding a little interest and contrast for the reader.

There's no right or wrong alignment choice, but whatever you use, consider your reason(s) for choosing it. Attention to hyphenation and word/character spacing will assure that your text is as attractive and readable as possible.

IV. Back Issues Online