Designing and publishing a hospital radio magazine

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, cafe interior

I have been asked to help publish a magazine by a hospital radio station. Anyone who has had any sort of stay in a hospital will tell you that hospital radio with it’s music, news and entertainment is a welcome diversion at a difficult time. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital One of the bigger hospitals in [...]

Exciting business card design

f1-steering-wheel-business-card-thumbnail

This is an illustration I did for a business card which I designed and created in Illustrator and Photoshop for a motorsports development fund. Rather than the standard old 86.6 mm by 53.98 mm rectangular thing they asked for a graphic representation of a Formula One steering wheel. It’s great when clients come up with [...]

Flash gallery templates reviewed

flash-icon-150-thumb

I have a love/hate relationship with Flash. It gives you great freedom when designing, allowing you to use fonts, graphics and animation with carefree abandon. On the other hand, Flash sites are currently less likely to rank well with search engines than comparable HTML sites and the file sizes are generally larger increasing the wait [...]

Barack Obama pop art design

Barack Obama with globe pop art picture

London time: This is now the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America. Here is a couple of interesting quotes, first from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 talking to the BBC: Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two [...]

Designing title pages

progression-title-page-thumbnail

Designing the title slide, front cover or homepage is almost always the most important part of any job. And this particular area will rightly be where you and your client spend the most head-scratching time. There was a good reason your mother always told you to tuck your shirt in, first impressions count. It’s impossible [...]

Using vector illustrations in designs to deliver your message

vector-illustration-of-man-and-woman

Do you ever wish you didn’t use stock photography so much? Recently I’ve found myself trawling through pages of stock images from sites such as Shutterstock, iStock and Fotolia, usually looking for a well-presented young professional smiling to camera. These sites contain some good photography but I’m always worried that the stock approach lacks creativity [...]

Doing eye-catching designs in Illustrator

Eye-catching-swirl-spiral

I’m always on the look out for simple eye-catching ways to communicate a message. I think this is a great example of a visually appealing background that could be used when there are no images, graphics or other ways to improve the typography. This is especially useful in direct marketing (email or mail shot). How [...]

Ways to beat a design and marketing slump

recession, credit crunch, slump, downturn, slowdown

Personally, I have noticed other recessions far sooner than this one. It seems like months and months of dreary economic forecasts had passed before I got an inkling that it was going on. Anyway, here’s some ways to defeat the dreaded downturn. Diversify Do something you’re not doing at the moment. Web designers should diversify [...]

Design and marketing in a recession

Recession needn't give us an uncertain future

Recession, credit crunch, slowdown – these are bywords of the moment and you would be forgiven for thinking that we’ve got to tighten out belts and prepare for hard times ahead. The natural inclination for some businesses might be to scale back on marketing activities in an effort to save money. But, last week it [...]

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