Most commonly, a spot color is a color selected from the Pantone Matching System (abbreviated as a PMS color). Pantone produces a large palette of colors (the Matching System) using very specific pigment recipes. They produce printing inks that match up with each color in their color palette, which they sell to printers as pre-mixed inks. Printers use these inks in their presses to consistently print a specific color. These inks are referred to as spot colors, because they are best for printing solid areas of color, and would not be desirable to us when printing an image that involves several ink colors overlaid (such as a photo).

When having items printed onto paper, the colors are produced in a color space called CMYK (also called 4-color process). When a website is created, the colors used are produced in a color space called RGB. There are also additional color spaces outside CMYK and RGB, but these are the most commonly used.

CMYK Color Space

As mentioned above, the CMYK color space is used primarily for print. The acronym CMYK stands for Cyan (a bright shade of blue), Magenta (a bright pink color), Yellow and Black, which are the four colors of ink used in 4-color process printing. During the printing process, these colors are printed over one another at varying opacities in order to produce a broad spectrum of colors. When the inks are printed onto paper, they are absorbed into the paper. Because the color is absorbed, the CMYK color spectrum is not as broad as the RGB color spectrum. The calibration of the press that your printed piece will be printed on can easily vary from press to press, so if you want to try to keep a color consistent across multiple printed pieces you will want to be sure to stick with one print vendor, and if possible, have the pieces printed on the same printing press. If you are especially particular about having a certain color printed consistently, you may wish to look into printing that color with a spot color.

 RBG Color Space

The RGB color space is used primarily on screen, and you probably encounter it the most when viewing websites. The acronym RGB stands for Red, Blue, and Green, which are the colors of light that are combined to render an even broader spectrum of colors. The RGB color space can produce a broader spectrum of colors since they are created from light sources combining to create the colors. Brighter colors can also often be produced using RGB. Similar to CMYK printing, a color produced in RGB can be rendered differently based on the screen that it is displayed on. However, unlike CMYK printing, it is impossible to control the calibration on the many, many screens and growers across the world that may be displaying your website. Like all things web-related, we need to simply accept that when working with the web there will be slight differences in color across different screens and browsers.

As you can see, producing a color in CMYK and in RGB entail completely different methods. Understanding this will help you understand how there will be slight differences in the color of your printed items versus those viewed on-screen. I compare it to trying to stain a solid wood piece of furniture so that it matches a laminate piece of furniture—these two materials are completely different, and although you can probably mix a shade of stain that comes close to the color of the laminate, like CMYK and RGB colors, they’ll never match perfectly because they are just different kinds of media.

A web presence has become a critical asset to any business, so it is good that you’re dedicated to trying to put your best foot forward, despite your limited resources. If you’ve started searching for themes, you probably already know that there are thousands and thousands of WordPress themes available to you. However, not all themes are created equal. We recently attended a WordPress Grand Rapids meet-up where they addressed this topic, so we’ll recap a couple of guidelines they had mentioned below.

Stay away from free themes

If you Google “free WordPress themes” you’ll get thousands of results. Ignore all of them. While I’m sure not every free theme is bad, many many of them may contain malicious code that will become part of your site if you install the theme. These themes often embed their malware with something called Base64 encryption, which to an untrained user (and maybe even a somewhat-trained one) is undetectable. For more information on this, you can read this highly intimidating post on wpmu.org.

Purchase themes from a reputable source

After reading that, you should be starting to understand that you get what you pay for. So if you are going to use a pre-designed WordPress theme for your site, you should make sure you are selecting one from a reputable source. A quality theme tends to cost about $75 or more, so keep that in mind as you shop. Once you’ve located a theme you’re interested in purchasing, you can go ahead and check the comments on that theme and do a little Googling before you buy to see what people are saying about it. Here are a few theme sources that are known to be quite reputable:

• Press75
• The Theme Foundry
• Woothemes
• Okaythemes
• Themezilla
• StudioPress
• Organic Themes

Themes provide aesthetics, plugins provide functionality

When you start searching for themes, you’re going to notice a lot of themes that tout all kinds of functionality they offer. This can be dangerous because if you choose a theme with built-in functionality, any data that you would integrate with that functionality will be useless if you choose to change to a different theme in the future. This is why it is recommended to choose a theme that offers a bare-bones, aesthetics-only approach, and doesn’t try to provide a lot of additional functionality. Functionality is best added through the implementation of plugins in addition to your theme.

There you have it, a basic list of dos and don’t for selecting your first theme. Hopefully this little post will help you avoid the pitfalls of a sub-par theme, and make a great decision on a theme that can get your new business up-and-running online.

This numbers wallpaper is a bold big brother to our alphabet wallpaper. Available for download for desktop, iPad or iPhone.

Desktop wallpaper
iPad wallpaper
iPhone wallpaper

Throughout the years, design has gotten a reputation as the profession of making things “look pretty.” While it is always a designer’s mission to make a piece as aesthetically appealing as possible—and don’t get me wrong, this is a very important quality for your brand to have as well—design is much deeper than that.

At its core, design is about solving problems

The real function of a designer is to help solve communication problems and make things usable for your audience. A designer’s mission is not simply to make a piece look pleasant, but to help make it communicate the proper message to the intended audience. This means that a great designer won’t simply take design orders, but will push back when things don’t make sense and will try to realign the project when necessary in order to help it work as well as possible.

Aesthetic appeal + usability = win

Please don’t take this message to mean that aesthetics are not important. They are incredibly important to creating a rich experience for your customer, and typically that is heavily influenced by the aesthetics of your brand. However, it is important to remember that no amount of aesthetic design will make a bad experience a good one, so it is critical to allow design to permeate the appearance of your project and into the way it actually works so that you can to provide the best experience for your audience.

Based on this year’s notebook design, this desktop wallpaper will give you a little inspiration for the year. Available for download for desktop, iPad or iPhone.

Desktop wallpaper
iPad wallpaper
iPhone wallpaper

When we create an estimate for you, you’ll usually see some sort of reference to a number of revisions that are included with your project. We believe iteration is important to the design process, and although not every design requires revision, often it can produce a tighter, more unique design in the end. However, in order to provide you with the most accurate estimate possible, we do have to draw up revision parameters associated with the project cost. The number of revisions included with your project will be outlined right on the estimate for your project, and you can always add more revisions on an hourly cost basis.

When it comes to revising your piece, you might be wondering what exactly constitutes a revision. After all, it is a pretty open-ended term. A revision constitues a change or variation to an initially presented—or in-progress—design concept, and is typically a change of less than 1/4 of the design. A revision is simply meant to be a slight modification or course correction to progress toward the final design. A new design concept is not considered a revision. This means that a new design concept would be an addition to the project, and would need to be estimated separately, in addition to the current project estimate.

Hiring someone to design or redesign your logo can be a pretty overwhelming thing. In my experience a logo design is like a business owner’s baby, so it is a big step to trust someone to help you redesign it. Your logo will be a fixture in your business for years to come, so it makes sense that you will want to truly understand the process of designing it.

The good news is that we follow a simple 4-step process, and understanding these steps will can help you feel more confident throughout this duration of the project.

Here’s how a logo design or redesign unfolds:

Step 1: Research and discovery

During this first step, we’ll take some time to talk with you (either in person or via phone or email) to learn more about your company audience, competitors, values and personality. We’ll also talk about your ideas, inspirations and goals for the logo so that we can be sure to take those items into consideration once we start the design. After our meeting, we’ll review our notes, and might have a few follow-up questions over the next day or two. The typical timeframe for Step 1 is a couple of days.

Step 2: Research, brainstorming and sketches

Once we have a clear idea of your business, its culture and what you are looking for in your logo, we’ll take some time to research your competitors (so we don’t accidentally create a logo that is similar to them) and start searching out inspiration and brainstorming and sketching ideas for the logo design. These sketches are a quick, rough way to flesh out many ideas before moving on to creating high-fidelity design concepts. The typical timeframe for Step 2 is about 1-2 weeks, depending on your timeline.

Step 3: High-fidelity mockups

After we’ve brainstormed lots of ideas and refined our favorite sketches, it is time to start working on the actual designs! We’ll take the strongest design ideas we’ve brainstormed and start fleshing them out digitally. For each sketch we decide to build, we’ll do 6-10 variations of before determining whether one of the variations is strong enough to present to you. We’ll go through this process for our top 3-4 ideas and will present to you the top 2 or 3 concepts (whichever quantity was agreed to in the estimate). We’ll present these concepts to you in both color and black-and-white configurations, and will usually create a walk-through video (typically 15-20 minutes long) that will carefully explain the ideas that led to each solution. The video format is nice because it gives us the ability to actually talk to you about our ideas for each solution, but takes any pressure off you to provide instant feedback. The typical timeframe for Step 3 is about 1-2 weeks, depending on your timeline.

Step 4: Iteration and finalization

Once you’ve had some time to digest the video presenting the logo concepts, we can talk at your convenience and walk through any revisions you might like to see. We’ll provide revised proofs to you in PDF form along with notes via email. Don’t forget that the revisions included in your estimate cover modifications to the presented concepts, but not entirely new concepts. If needed, we can absolutely create additional concepts, but will need to re-estimate those concepts as an addition to the project. Once we’ve iterated the logo to its final state, we’ll create a final package of your logos in several color formats (spot color, 4-color and black and white) as well as several types of logo files, including vector .eps, .ai and .pdf files, as well as raster .jpg and .png files. The timeframe for Step 4 is tough to estimate, because it depends on the number of revisions included with your estimate, and how much time needed to review each set of iterations and provide feedback. In most cases, this revision and finalization takes right around a week.

From start to finish, the total timeframe for a logo design or redesign project typically takes about 4-6 weeks, depending on the amount of iterations and the duration of the feedback loop.

In addition to these steps, there are a handful of other things to keep in mind throughout this process. Understanding these items will keep the process moving smoothly and help you set healthy expectations for the finished logo design.

A logo should be an identifier of your business, not of what you do

The purpose of a logo is not to literally portray what your company does, but rather, it should be a visual hallmark that sets the proper tone for what your company is about at its core. It should set the right tone for what it feels like to work with your company.

Your logo should be technically usable

There are technically no hard-and-fast technical rules of logo design. However, the way a logo is crafted can either save or cost you money when it comes to reproducing it across print, web, and interactive media. A technically usable logo should be available in vector format (.ai, .eps or possibly .pdf), should work in all black (or one color), should remain legible when used at a small size, should not use too many colors and should form a solid shape. For more information about these criteria you can check out our post about what makes a good logo.

And that’s it! We know that a logo design or redesign is a big step for any business, so we do our very best to make it as clear and easy for our clients as we can.

Black-and-white geometric composition by Jonathan Sandridge

Halcyon rebrand system by SomeOne

Forecast logo design by Super Furry

Leo Burnett Moscow

Geometric print by Tilman

Lattice design by Leif

Jaqk Cellars deck of cards by Hatch

While we understand why it seems sensible to ask for a sample design, we really can’t do any work unless we’re contracted for the project. The industry term for sample work is called Spec Work, which basically means doing work without any guarantee of payment. There are a host of reasons we can’t perform spec work. We’ll talk about each below:

If we work for free, we’ll soon be out of business

Since design is the product we sell, doing spec work would basically be giving our product away for free. Design is a very subjective product, which seems to make people think there is a different set of business rules for a design firm than for other service firms. Let’s take our industry category (design) out of the picture and put another industry in its place. Would you ever ask a builder to start on your home before you decide to hire them? To tear down a few walls and start building before you commit? Probably not. How about a plumber. Would you have a plumber fix a leak or pipe or two before you contract them to do the full repair? When it is put like that, it seems silly to ask a designer to start working on a project before they are hired. If those comparisons don’t help, take just a few minutes and think about whether you would go to work each day if you didn’t know if you’d receive a paycheck for your time and effort?

Spec work usually equates to uninformed work

When someone requests sample or spec work, they are typically under the impression that a design can be put together quite quickly. However, in order to do a project well, there are several discovery, research and inspiration steps that need to be completed to lay a proper foundation for the project. These phases can take many, many hours. Without going through each of these phases, we would just be guessing at how to solve your design challenges. And we would never want to offer you guesswork as a basis for your judgement or selection of our studio for a project. On the flipside, doing free spec works takes us away from our paying client work, which just isn’t fair to them. You can imagine how slighted you might feel if you were a paying client and found out that your designer was being sidetracked from your project by free speculative work. As you can see, this just wouldn’t be a fair way for you to judge our work and it wouldn’t be fair to our existing clients.

At this point you’re probably thinking, if I can’t see some sort of sample work, how do I know if a designer is right for my project?

Trust is paramount to the design process

With that being said, the best way for you to choose a designer is to select someone who you really trust. Good work simply cannot happen without trust. Ultimately, this matters more than any design sample a designer could create for you. Many designers can produce nice-looking work or can copycat the samples they are shown, but to get truly great work from your designer you need more than a sample to prove they are the right choice. More than anything else, you need to go into the project believing that your designer understands your mission and having confidence that they are experts in their craft and that have your best interest at heart (even so much as to challenge your requests because they won’t be the best choices long-term).

Communication is key

Similar to trust, you absolutely must have good communication with your designer. It is important that your designer truly listen to your wants and needs and be able to reflect that back to you—that they take the appropriate time to explain things and make you feel comfortable and confident. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they should follow your requests letter-for-letter. After all, you are looking to hire a designer because design is not part of your own skillset. However, your designer should listen keenly to you, and you should be able to tell through their emails, conversations and suggestions that they are hearing you, internalizing your opinions and processing them into the type of advice and solution that moves in the direction of solving your business problem. They may divert from your requests, however, if they do so, they should point it out and clearly explain why they chose to make the diversion. It is also important that their communication is timely and that you always know where your project is at. If they’re flaky from the beginning, they’ll probably be flaky throughout the process. Some people might be ok with this, but in our opinion, this is never ok.

The proof is in the portfolio

Finally, you’ll want to look honestly at their portfolio. While many designers have a broad range and no portfolio shows every single thing a designer is capable of, you can get a very good idea of their style from the work showcased there. For example, if you are looking for a complex, intricate design, but your designer’s portfolio is very simple and straightforward, this might not be a good fit, because it is quite obvious that this designer’s specialty is clean, crisp design. Likewise, if you are looking for an illustrative solution, but your designer has no illustrative work in it, it might not be a good fit unless you are open to other ideas. If you’re ever in doubt, remember that communication is key and simply have a conversation with them about whether they feel capable of creating the type of design you are hoping for—you never know, they might have done that kind of work in the past, or they might open your eyes to a completely different idea or perspective you’d never even thought of!

Hopefully this was helpful in clarifying the reasons why sample or spec work is not a good idea. If you want to read more about this topic, there are several additional resources available to you (it’s a pretty hot topic in the design industry!). Check out the links below:

The American Institute for Graphic Arts’ (AIGA) stance on spec work/ »
A collection of articles about spec work by WeeNudge »
NoSpec initiative to educate the public about spec work »