Now in the midst of chaos going on in my life right now, I’m ever more in need of inspiration…not just for work, but just the spark to want to get up each morning to deal with the new day’s challenges. I know, that sounds bleak right?  Well, I do what I can to keep going I guess….I have to!

Anyway, I revisited an old post I made a couple years back and stumbled across this creative little festival trailer made by this group Strukt. Extra little trivia I liked was that it was all shot using a Canon 7D.

OK, in the world of cool business card ideas, here’s one that’s definitely jumped a few notches up my list. Apparently Tamiya, the company that does those cool modeling sets, has a business card that you can actually pull apart and build with it. Racecar, airplane, boats, etc.

Only problem is that once people pull apart your card, I think your contact information is lost. But oh the fun I’d have with this!  (via GeekOSystem)

Yet another collection of inspirational ideas I stumbled across today. This one being focused on typography on business cards. There’s a few I kinda like here…especially the letterpress ones I don’t see too many people using them here.

I’ve been playing around a few times with UV coat print lately where you have gloss effects printed over non-gloss paper…but seeing as how many people are doing that now on this list, I’m thinking maybe I should try other things.  Maybe that’s becoming a cheesy trend?  (via Best Design Options)

I’ve never been good about bragging about myself. It might be my asian upbringing, or even the fact I grew up here in Hawaii where generally most business people aren’t as aggressive. I remember in my past employer, my manager had to always encourage me to speak out, “you should tell them that you did XXXX and YYYY, you’re good!” she’d say.

/shrug. I don’t know. Some days I feel very confident about my design abilities, and some days I feel very small.

The reason I bring this up today is that I ran across this article talking about the power of word-of-mouth marketing:

Several studies confirm that peer recommendations influence business buyers’ decisions more than any other form of advertising. Some 90% of buyers trust peer reviews and 70% trust online reviews, according to the American Marketing Association. Meanwhile, only 15% of buyers say they trust traditional advertising.

I think this is good advice. If you’re anything like me and you’re not comfortable touting your own abilities, the best way to promote your business is to let someone else speak for you. Testimonials are worth its weight in gold!  (via WebDesignerWall)

I get it. The economy has been hurting and everyone’s scared of spending money. I’m not immune to that feeling myself…it’s this time of year where all my advertising renewals start to happen and I’ve been re-evaluating what my spending strategy will be this year as well. I don’t want to continue spending big bucks on things I don’t think are working very effectively, but at the same time, I don’t want the recognition and awareness of my brand to disappear during this year as well.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a couple of other established graphic designers as friends. Eric Woo just recently celebrated his 25th year for his business which would make him quite the veteran when it comes to marketing through both good and bad times. I stumbled across one of his posts recently which really resonated with me, so I’d like to share it with you:

“During World War II, one London bakery owner continued his billboard advertising despite the massive bombings by the Nazis. Every time one billboard was destroyed he would replace it with another. This strategy not only kept his bakery in the public eye, it also had an impact on his fellow Londoners; they admired his perseverance and tenacity. After the war, his brand flourished and bread sales were nearly double that of his competitors. When the economy is suffering, savvy CEOs and entrepreneurs understand the value of keeping their brands visible and dynamic. When the good times return it is their companies that remain in the consumers’ mind. And that’s something you can’t put a price on.”  – Eric Woo, April 2009

The point is this…things will get better. Before they DO, you better make sure you do something now so that when they’re ready to find a business, they’ll think of you first.

Some beautiful sources of inspiration in the form of “22 Beautiful Examples of Brochure Design” today.

/sigh. I have one brochure project like this that is supposed to be very fancy. Die-cuts, metallic paper, non-standard folds…  sitting in limbo right now waiting on the bosses to approve it. It’s been a year.  I suspect they’re holding off on spending. Yes I want to get paid for this project, but more so I wish the design could see the light of day!

Last week a friend of mine posted a tweet from the BBC that demonstrated the level of work they went through trying to come up with a new website look.

Take a peek…it’s pretty interesting the level of detail and work that they went through. Now the next time you approach a designer and ask for something “easy”…keep in mind that it’s a lot of work to achieve that.

Personally, I think it was a little overkill in this case. The end result, while nice and clean, wasn’t something that floored me. Not that a news organization like the BBC needs to have fantastic graphic design, but I guess I think the end-result could have been accomplished with a lot less planning (get to the part where they’re counting the pixel grid?)

I get it, sometimes when you’re working with a team, this level of planning is necessary to get everyone working uniformly, but having seen many column and grid websites before it’s not like they couldn’t have based their grids off of any number of pre-made CSS templates and just built from that?

Well, in any case, it looks like it was a successful project and I love reading about how creative teams go through their process.

A couple of my colleagues sent this link around lately. It’s a WIRED article that’s a couple years old already about Eye-Tracking Billboards. Try as I might I can’t find any more recent articles about this technology so I don’t know if it was an idea that just phased out of if there have been any test trials of this yet.

But I found it interesting. As a consumer, my initial gut reaction was to reel back from this a bit. It feels a little “ooogey”…a bit like they’re invading my privacy. Everywhere and everything we do these days from surfing the web, flipping channels on our TV, or recording shows on our TiVo is being recorded and analyzed by someone out there. Just having another thing monitor our activity out there feels viscerally wrong somehow. If I walk up to a billboard or poster and my eyes fixate on a woman’s boobs, it’s a little embarrassing having anyone know that.

Yet…as a graphic designer, I can’t help but feel technology like this is HUGE. I spend my career trying to help my clients guess (educated guess, but a guess nonetheless) about what their customers want to see and what makes them react. Armed with information that might tell me XXXX many people react to certain types of design and imagery, can greatly help me achieve the goals my clients want.

Besides, I don’t really care that company YYYY knows I looked at a boobie provided it’s an anonymous collection of data from every passerby rather than having data that’s specifically tied in with my personal information. I think that’s a huge distinction. In fact, it might help designers design more things that I like to see.  More boobies for everyone!

I really dig this Lucha Libre display/portfolio. They’ve even got details in the…err…pubic region.

I really want to do stuff like this, but as yet none of my clients have the budget for something this expensive to make. I WILL find the opportunity though…this would be so fun! (via BehanceNetwork)

I love creative ads.  I just remember in college both in my Marketing and Arts classes the instructors used to give us projects to make fake ads about something (e.g., anti-smoking, drunk driving, etc.) As students, we would try to come up with things that we thought were clever, but in hindsight, we were never quite clever enough to make the instructors jump with excitement.

I remember once I tried doing a Porsche presentation with a group of fellow students and we were SO convinced we had the best commercial. I had this thing about how clever it would be to just show profile shadows of various cars and how Porsche’s profile is instantly recognizable.

MEH….the professor thought it was OK but he certainly wasn’t as floored as we thought he would be.

ANYHOOO, that’s a long segueway into this ad above.  One of my favorite sites Toxel has once again collected a group of pretty clever advertisements.  I’d categorize a clever ad as something that just makes the point instantly…you don’t need anyone to explain it to you, you don’t need a bunch of text copy, you don’t need a collage of images bunched together, etc.  Just simple…

I’d thought many ads found here fit the bill….what do you think? Not too shabby examples of Photoshop work too!  (via: Toxel)