You know those people that send out email forwards like it’s their full time job? Well, every once in a while there’s a hidden gem amongst all the unwanted spam. This collection of amazing ads created for AT&T were one of those forwards that landed in my inbox this week. Usually, I won’t even read past the subject line, but this one jumped out with it’s vibrant colour and awesome design (at least in my opinion) and the play on global landmarks. Take a look, what do you think?

I came across this collection of adds from “not too long ago” and had a good laugh at how ridiculous they all are as I’m sure most of you will on first glance. Then I went back and read them all again paying closer attention to the details, the message, style and all the other wonderful things that we as designers look at when picking apart someone else’s work. I’m a sucker for vintage artwork in advertising which is primarily what caught my eye, but take a look at the message and opinions expressed in these ads. Obviously this was acceptable then, do you think that any of these ads would make it to print today? Anyone watch Mad Men?

It’s common knowledge that PDF files have become the standard in just about any field of presenting a digital document. It is cross-platform and browser compatible, and it serves as a great tool for presenting a multi-page document.

Acrobat is much more robust than this of course, with capabilities for form creation, interactive PDFs, video and audio, annotations, digital signatures and even capable of starting a meeting with a slideshow. But for the purpose of this article we’ll focus on creating a regular PDF that you would send to press. For tips on preparing your artwork for print, see our post on Good Practices for Delivering Print Files.

This PDF is created from InDesign and as mentioned in our last article on print preparation, should be the last point at which you prepare files for delivery, whether a proof for a client or a file for a printer.

Making the PDF

Once your file is all ready to go, go to File > Export. Select Adobe PDF in the format drop down menu at the bottom of the window, then press Save. This will take you to a window that looks like:

I suggest you keep your compatibility setting to Acrobat 5. Some printers running older RIPs may ask for the file in Acrobat 4. Do not use version 4 unless absolutely necessary, since it flattens all your transparent objects, and can sometimes yield unexpected results when printed.

Compression

Keep all images at 300dpi with JPEG compression at Maximum quality. Note on this page there are the two check boxes at the bottom. Those nifty little checkboxes allow you to compress your PDF even further. The one to the left is self explanatory, but to the right we have a genius feature. This takes whatever image you have imported into InDesign, and crops out and discards any excess image from the file when it converts the files to PDF. So if your image was originally 8.5” by 11”, and you only used 6” by 10”, it will only convert the 6” by 10” visible area, significantly reducing file size. Just note that this only applies to raster images, not vector artwork.

Marks & Bleeds

The only printer’s marks you will need are crop marks. Offset the crop marks to 0.25”, to ensure they will stay clear of the bleed in the file. Also, make sure you include a bleed in the file of 0.125”.

Output

If you’ve read the previous post on best practices, this is where the aforementioned conversion to CMYK should take place. Occasionally your printer will supply you with a custom colour profile depending on what press they will run your file on. In the event that a profile is not provided, I suggest using the “U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2” which is pretty dependable for accuracy.

Once you have gotten all the settings to your liking, don’t forget to click on the Save Preset button at the bottom left of the window, to save your presets.

Talfazat is the premier online Arabic TV network, streaming up to 35 popular live Arabic TV channels and on-demand Arabic videos, including news, entertainment, music and sports channels and a wide variety of popular on-demand Arabic TV content, including popular entertainment programs, top Ramadan shows and serials, movies, music-clips and more.

Working in Partnership with Neulion, Parachute was charged with the task of designing the new and improved IPTV interface for their popular Talfazat IPTV portal. The new interface included advanced preview options, cleaner more intuitive navigation and a contemporary theme carried throughout the portal. All the artwork was then passed on to Neulion’s development team to integrate with their custom built IPTV delivery system and set up for instant access in the Arabic world.

I have compiled a list of good practices and basic guidelines to ensure that your jobs are delivered efficiently. This is, of course, assuming that you are using InDesign as your final delivery vehicle (which I recommend) regardless of which application you used to design the piece.

1. Ensure The Document Size is The Size of The Document

If you are designing a 5” x 5” card, don’t design it on an 8.5” x 11” document. Make your document size 5” x 5”. There is the case where some agencies require that the artwork have file info on it, in which case you can use the bleed and slug area in InDesign. This is a perfect area to place any relevant ad or file information, that will not print in the final version of the piece. A big advantage of setting up your files this way is that, if a third party is going to be using this file (publication, printer, etc.) once they place the file, they will not have any issues with repositioning or alignment, since the document size will always be constant.

2. Convert All Images to CMYK

This one is a matter or much debate, which I have argued with people even at Adobe. The common practice is to work on your images in RGB. Why RGB?

Well think about it – cameras take pictures in RGB; your computer screen is RGB; scanners create RGB images – does it make sense to design in CMYK? not so much. This statement came up in a conversation I had with an Adobe engineer (specifically Acrobat and the PDF Technology) and to me it makes total sense. The CMYK color space should not come into play until the very last moment of production, right before the file gets to final delivery. Now, one little thing I left out about this conversation with the Adobe person was that he said that one should not even convert the file to CMYK at delivery, that one should leave the color conversion to the printers RIP profiles, which have more specific color profiles, catered exactly for the printer, and, to quote them directly, “and if they don’t have the technology, then find a new printer.”

Now we all know, especially those of us who have worked in production, that building a relationship with a printer that delivers, is really hard to let go sometimes. The bottom line is that you find the best system that works for you, as long as you and the printer are in agreement as to how to deliver those images. One thing that I have done in the past is to talk to the pre-press person handling your job (NEVER THE SALES GUY< THEY ARE CLUELESS), and ask them for their ICC profiles, which you can then in turn assign to those images. They will be more than happy to give it up, especially if it is going to make their jobs easier.

3. Never Paste Images Into Indesign

This is a common mistake I have encountered numerous times, which can become an extreme clock drainer and hassle to try and remedy. The InDesign folks had the good sense of allowing designers to paste images directly into an InDesign page, thereby embedding these images into the file, as opposed to the more traditional way of linking them. Although this was a very noble “feature”, if there is any issue with that image, there is no real way to fix it, outside of copying it, pasting it to a new Photoshop document, and re-pasting once the image has been adjusted. Never ever ever paste your images into InDesign. Stop being lazy. Save the image file and then link it. Embedding images also significantly increases the size of your InDesign file, which can cause more delays if there are any revisions to the InDesign file itself.

4. Always Add Bleed – Usually an 1/8th of an Inch (0.125”)

I know most of you are like “DUH!”, but you would be surprised how many times I’ve seen files, from some big agencies, be delivered without bleed. Add to that the numerous people I have supervised throughout the years that don’t account for a bleed in their design from the get. Create the bleed when you create the file. Make sure as you design your piece, you make sure your graphics or images are bleeding if they are meant to. Again, don’t be lazy. It takes a second to add it in the beginning, but it can take hours to add it prior to delivery.

5. Deliver Your Fonts With Your Files

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I will add that I have seen cases in which jobs have been delayed a day or two due to a missing font.

6. Never Color Body Copy in Four-Color Black

When coloring your body copy, which in my book is anything that is basically under 18 point (depending on the font) never do it in a 4 color black. This is a nightmare for pressmen to register, and there is sometimes no way to fix it, but to get a new file. A 4 color black is a black made up of all four colors, CMYK. This rule, of course, has an exception, which takes me to the next rule.

7. Always Bump Your Blacks

What this means is that, when doing large areas of black (boxes or type), make sure the black has been bumped, or supplemented, with the other four colors. A good formula that has worked for me throughout the years, across both offset and digital printing, is C:50 M:40 Y:30 K:100. Of course, I always suggest that you talk with your printer to get a black bump that works great on their presses, especially since each press has it’s own personality.

8. Always Include A Proof (Digital or Physical)

Traditionally, I like to include a Press Ready PDF with all my jobs, just in case all else fails, and as a means for the printer to go back to something final that they can use as a reference once they run the file through their RIP.

Content in part by: fontografist.com

Just as we did with the Winter Olympics in Vancouver this year, let’s take a look back at the history of Word Cup poster design. It’s pretty interesting to see the progression of design throughout the past century in relation to the geographical location of the games. Which is your favourite?

1930 – Uruguay

1934 – Italy

1938 – France

1950 – Brazi

l

1954 – Switzerland

1958 – Sweden

1962 – Chile

1966 – England

1970 – Mexico

1974 – Germany

1978 – Argentina

1982 – Spain

1986 – Mexico

1990 – Italy

1994 – USA

1998 – France

2002 – Korea/Japan

2006 – Germany

2010 – South Africa

WordPress has grown from a simple open source blogging engine into a very powerful content management tool. With the upcoming release of WordPress 3, the software will be more robust than ever. Below are some of the awesome new features we can look forward to.

Multiple Sites With Single WordPress Install

We will now be able to create multiple sites using a single installation of WordPress, where each site may have its own set of themes and plugins. Your multisite setup can work with sub-domains or sub-directories:

• Subdomains work by using wildcard subdomains. You must have this enabled in Apache, and you must also add a wildcard subdomain to your DNS records. Some hosts will not support this, so you may need to ask your webhost before enabling this feature.
• Subdirectories work based on mod_rewrite. If you are using pretty permalinks in your blog already, then subdirectory sites will work as well.

By default, the Multisite feature in WordPress is disabled. To enable this new feature, you will need to do the following:

1. Go to Tools > Network under WordPress admin menu and specify Network settings
2. Create “blogs.dir” in wp-content folder
3. Add following line in your wp-config.php file: define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
4. You may also need to modify your .htaccess file

Once the above steps are completed, you will see a new menu section called Super Admin. This section will allow adding and managing additional sites in your network. Your base WordPress install is now the main site in your network.

New Default Theme

Believe it or not the long time default theme “Kubrick” has been replaced with new default theme: Twenty Ten.  Twenty Ten is a theme with features like:

• two column layout
• support for custom background and header images
• provides built-in support for microformats, widgetized sidebar, and horizontal drop down menu.

Twenty Ten has been developed keeping in mind that a large number of theme developers use default WordPress theme as base for learning and designing their own themes. It therefore illustrates several new features like:

• Custom Background Images
• Editor Styles
• Improved Child Theme Support, etc.

Custom Menus

This is probably the most useful new feature for theme developers. WordPress 3.0 allows you to register any number of menus and display them in your themes template files using a simple function call. Most importantly it provides an easy to use menu section in the admin area – from where users can easily add, edit and remove menu items. Users will be able to add, edit and remove: pages, custom post types, categories, taxonomies, and custom links to these menus.

Custom Post Types & Taxonomies

Custom taxonomies were added in WordPress 2.8, enabling developers to create new ways to classify content. WordPress 3.0 improves this feature significantly by including support for hierarchical (category-style) taxonomies, and providing end users with custom taxonomy UI for pages as well as for posts.

WordPress introduced custom post types in version 2.9, but a lot of work was left for plugin and theme developers. However, WordPress 3.0 provides full support for custom post types, simplifying the whole process. This is a big deal – developers can now build easy to use CMS solutions for wide range of sites, meeting needs for specific type of content (portfolios, projects, video libraries, podcasts, quotes, chats, etc).

Implementation is pretty straight-forward. All you need to do is register post type in your functions.php file. WordPress 3.0 will automatically add admin section for your new custom post type, enabling content managers to add, edit and update content. To add a template for your custom post type, you will create a new template file named “single-{post_type}.php” (you can use any standard WordPress template tags in this file).

New Template Files

In addition to other enhancements, WordPress 3.0 has also added several new template files in its template hierarchy. Here is list of new template files for quick reference:

• Template For Front Page of Site:
  Will be used for both your latest posts or a static page as set by the admin (File: front-page.php).
• Template For Custom Post Types:
  If custom post type is books, WordPress will look for single-books.php (File: single-{post_type}.php).
• Author Specific Templates
  If the author’s name is “admin”, WordPress would look for author-admin.php. If the author’s ID is 1, WordPress would look for author-1.php (Files: author-{nicename}.php, author-{id}.php).
• Templates For Custom Taxonomies
  If the taxonomy is “sometaxtonomy”, and taxonomy’s slug is “someterm”, WordPress would look for taxonomy-sometaxtonomy-someterm.php (Files: taxonomy.php, taxonomy-{taxonomy}.php, taxonomy-{taxonomy}-{term}.php).

So when can we expect WordPress 3 to be available for download? RC3 is currently available in beta mode for testing. For a stable release, we can expect an updated release sometime between August and November 2010. What do you think about the new tools and features available in WordPress 3? What would you add to the mix?

pVelocity is a highly specialized team of computer engineers, sales and implementation professionals, change management and data mining experts. Beyond implementation, they help their clients embed pVelocity’s Profitability and Cost Simulation Software as a set of working tools that focus Production & Supply Chain, Sales and Marketing, Product Management, and Finance departments, as well as leadership teams, on common profitability targets — locally or globally.

Client Objective

pVelocity’s mission was to take their online presence to the next level. Having an existing site that served it’s purpose for several years, it was time to step things up and make a leap to the next plain. Working in partnership with Amanda O’Donovan [copy writing and project management], Parachute was up to the challenge providing design and art direction as well as web development throughout the project to raise the bar and help pVelocity meet their project goals.

Our Solution

• Analyze and tear-down client’s existing website for a navigational restructuring to enhance user experience and create a more intuitive site structure
• Develop a more contemporary, Web 2.0 style design to bring the website into a modern focus and ensure a relevant interface for years to come
• Development in current XHTML and CSS to ensure cross-platform and browser compatibility
• Content-rich footer for easy navigation from anywhere within the site
• Data collection forms throughout the website to collect user data, registrations and special interest
• Search engine optimization.

View the full case study or visit pVelocity.

Many of our clients come to us with questions about strengthening their business’ image (or their brand). As always we’re very happy to help out and offer some advice based on our experience and success in putting these methods to work both for Parachute and for our clients. If you’ve ever wondered if your brand is working at it’s full potential, read on to find out how well you’re really doing.

1. Brand All Your Materials

We all send emails, swap business cards, send invoices or submit proposals that are golden opportunities to strengthen our branding’s impact with our audience. Whether these opportunities are shared with new clients or existing clients, the key is to take advantage and make sure your materials are branded successfully.

All of your electronic and printed materials should contain your contact details, and social media links to ensure maximum impact. Evaluate what leaves your office. Is it properly branded? If not you may be missing out on valuable opportunities for new, referral and repeated business.

2. Optimize Your Website

One of the greatest tools you have on your site is your website. By ensuring that your website is optimized for the web you can rest assured that you are getting maximum exposure in relevant web searches. For more information on optimizing your website, check out our guide: How To Be Best Friends With Google.

3. Social Media

I feel like a broken record stating the obvious here, but believe it or not, there are still many businesses out there that have yet to hop on the bandwagon and take advantage of social media. Just signing up for the obvious social networks isn’t enough. To make effective use of these amazing tools you need a plan. For example, when launching a new product, be sure to write up a blog post building on the excitement and follow up with tweet on Twitter, which links back to your blog and also hits related trending topics. This will surely attract attention from an audience who shares interest in your business or product.

4. Start A Blog

If you haven’t done it already, start a blog! I have heard many clients over recent years grumble and say “I don’t have time to write a blog” or “I can’t write,” which are both poor excuses. With a little practice and taking the time to read other blogs you will easily get the hang of it. Eventually when you have built up a following, invite other people to write for you. Blogging will do so much for your website ranking; attract more viewers and ultimately more queries for business.

5. Join Industry Websites or Networks

Depending on what industry your business falls into, you may have significant opportunities which can develop by joining networking websites. These websites often allow you to showcase your product or services and sometimes include your rates or prices and company details. All of the above will help create more exposure for you and your brand.

6. Write Guest Articles

Another surefire way to get noticed and strengthen your brand is to write guest articles for other blogs. The higher ranking these blogs are the better. Using these opportunities will give you a platform to share your experience and professional views, which will help generate more interest in your business and brand. If you’re not comfortable writing a full article, be sure to participate in conversations and leave a link back to your website attached to any comments you may offer up in the thread.

7. Create A Contest Or Competition

This idea operates on value, which requires more effort form you, but can yield great returns for your brand and business in the end. Social media is a great way to gain more attention to your brand, for example “If you are one of the first 100 people to tweet this promotion you could win…” Be creative and come up with your own unique idea and you will get more people interested and talking about your brand. If you’ve already set up a blog, we can easily setup a contest system integrated with your blog to make things manageable for you.

8. Free Content

This method can be very simple, but be sure to follow the cardinal rule and make sure that whatever you are offering is of value to your audience. It may be an eBook, a program, a sample of your product, or even professional advice (kind of like this article!). Think about something that requires some level of effort and something that your potential customer will find value in. Remember the more you put into this idea the more you will get out of it and it’s great for making your brand more viral.

Rebar Leadership knows, firsthand, how to re-energize and grow your business, or brand, to take it to the next level or prepare your business for sale or succession. Rebar is comprised of proven business leaders who have transformed challenged businesses into profitable, efficient enterprises and built well known Canadian brands like Buckley’s Cough Syrup. Rebar Leadership brings over 106 combined years of general management, wealth management, sales, marketing and communications expertise to tackle your organization’s problems and strengthen your business from the inside out. So how did we help Rebar come to market?

Rebar Leadership approached Parachute with the hopes of developing a strong brand to carry forward throughout their marketing materials and upcoming website (yes, we’re working on that too!). Making our job much clearer, Rebar had already created a list of requirements for the logo which reflected their vision and goals:

• The brand must emphasize that Rebar reinforces and strengthens companies that our clients have worked hard to build
• Focus on imagery of rebar as iconic representation
• Competitors are cold, corporate, MBA types – Rebar aims to be quite the opposite: approachable, friendly and hip
• Logo must be very clean
• Require an alternative version of the brand for use with company tagline “Strengthening your business from the inside out.”

Taking Rebar’s vision and goals into consideration, we were able to create a successful brand that clearly encompasses and instills all their hopes. Making use os subtle gradients in conjunction with shadows and highlights we were able to achieve a very modern looking brand which maintains a level of professionalism and still screams approachability, friendliness and coolness.

See below for the final results.