How to create your Corporate Identity

“A Brand is more than just a colourful logo”

Corporate Identity means many things to many people, but in general it is creating a company’s personality and then presenting it effectively, through differing types of communication. You will then enhance the perceived value of your product or service, helping to differentiate your company from your competitors and creating your own ‘Corporate Brand’. Your company needs to be readily recognisable in order to stand out against the many different and mixed messages in the mainstream. You need to identify how you want your company to be portrayed (your brand values) and then acting accordingly to make it happen. Below are some tips of how to get started:

1.    Take your company’s brand values, then think about how they might be portrayed visually through your company brochure, business cards, website, letterheads, adverts, e-mails, signage etc. (your Corporate Design). You may have an idea of an image that best represents one of your brand values, or a particular typeface you wish to use. Or you may have an idea of the style you wish to get across, i.e. businesslike, creative, fun, down-to-earth, friendly.

2.    Think about the physical applications in which the identity will be used – i.e. your logo may need to be seen on letterheads, websites, even large posters or vehicle liveries. All these different applications need to be taken into consideration when creating the guidelines for using your logo and associated corporate design.

3.    Then comes the stage where you will probably need to take your ideas to a professional designer to help develop the visual look of your new identity.

4.    The designer will normally begin by designing and developing a series of logos, based on your brief, going through a staged process bringing you closer to the one which is your final identity central to your corporate design.

5.    The designer will also consider different applications of the logo – i.e. it will need to encompass all usage requirements in spot colour, full colour and single colour applications. It may need to be ‘reversed out’ for use on a darker colour background, or a low-resolution version made for use on PowerPoint presentations or websites. It may need to work on a vast scale, i.e. for billboard advertisements, or considerations may need to be taken into account if your logo is to be animated.

6.    Once the final logo is agreed, the rest of the corporate design will then be developed choosing the right typefaces and sizes, complimentary colours, placement and size of logo, strap line usage, additional graphic treatments, etc. This is needed to ensure a visual consistency across all your non-verbal communications.

7.    Your designer may then use these guidelines to create a series of literature for you as required, and/or create a ‘corporate identity’ or ‘brand’ guidelines document that sets the rules to ensure your new identity is applied consistently.

Now that you have your new identity and have invested time and money in its creation and development, ensure you use it! A well-designed Corporate Identity won’t hide flaws in your product or service however, but as long as you don’t have them, your new identity will almost certainly make a strong statement about the kind of company you are!

This article is written by Rachel Toy, a freelance Graphic Designer working in the design industry for over 15 years. Her company, Spirit Creative Ltd, is a full Graphic Design Agency serving Beds/Bucks/Herts, providing logo design, business cards, leaflets, brochures, web sites, web hosting, exhibition graphics and more! If you would like us to help your company with any of the above then do not hesitate to contact us on info@spiritcreative.co.uk

The Letterpress Typesetting & Printing Process

Letterpress Work on a Proofing Press

Well after a really interesting course at St Martin’s College learning how to print using letterpress techniques, I thought I would share with you some of the things I learned.

The best part of the course was being able to work with actual, physical, moveable type. This gave me a much better idea of the physical size of type, spacing and it’s relation to the page. I feel computers, whilst they help speed up the process, take the physical side of things away from us. It does wonders for your creativity no end if you get away from it once in a while and revisit a manual process.

Typesetting

Letterpress printing is a physical process. It starts with the type itself, the size of which and the spacing around it. You can get type (individual letters) in metal or wood blocks, in various sizes. They are measured in points, picas or lines. There are 72 points to one inch, and if you recognise the term, it is still used in computing today to select the size of text you use in your document. The spaces between the words and the lines themselves are also measured in points and again are physical pieces of lead. These are used to help set the lines or paragraph of text and have pleasing spacing between. The term leading comes from the actual piece of lead that sits between the lines of type to separate them from each other. There are other pieces of furniture for creating space around the type area, and to fill the frame it sits in (called a chase, ready to be put on the printing machine later, to take the impression from). There can be made of lead, metal, wood or plastic. When setting up a page in the chase the pieces must fit exactly. A bit like a jigsaw puzzle really (and this part was really good fun!).

Letterpress Typesetting

So, the first thing was to get used to setting a line of type. This is done using a composing stick and you set the width of the line of type using the adjustable knee. As it all needs to be accurate, a piece of furniture of the required width should be used to set the line size initially. Then a piece of leading is placed in the stick before composing to help with removal of the body of type later.

The type is then taken from a wooden type case or drawer which contains all the characters of a particular typeface and type size. Each character has it’s own set place in the drawer, and a map is often used to help find them. So each character needed is taken out of the space in the drawer and placed in the stick reading upside down, and left to right (so it is right reading when printed onto a page). Each line is separated using a piece of leading, and each character separated using the required spaces again (en, em, thick, thins, quads etc).When setting it is important to make sure everything is square, level, tight and all the lines are the same length (inserting extra spacing as needed)  to help you later on. Care should also be taken not to move the body of type once set, or let it fall out of the stick as you will have to start all over again!

Letterpress Type trays

Two terms may also be of interest – type high; which is the standard height of the type blocks 0.918 inches, or 23.3 mm, and kerns which are the parts of the letter that stick out, such as in “f”. When setting these next to another letter they do not fit right due to the overhanging piece, so a special ligature should be used such as “fl”, another term that has been transferred to computer typesetting today.

Once the body of type  is set, and if setting large amounts of type, when the stick is half full it is time to transfer it to an imposing stone with a type galley at the ready. The type is carefully slided onto the galley ready to assemble into the final forme, and then locked into chase (metal frame used to hold the type in the printing press).

Letterpress forme in the chase

Letterpress Printing

Various printing machines can be used, such as the smaller Adana presses gradually making a comeback today. It is this we will take as an example (as we have also bought an Adana 8×5, with associated bits from an old printer on e-Bay!).

The  first step is to transfer some ink to the platen. This is done by placing a small blob of ink onto a sheet of non-absorbent material such as sheet metal or glass and using a hand roller to evenly distribute the ink over the surface. The inked up roller is then used to transfer the ink to the platen in a thin layer, again evenly.

Then it is time to insert the chase containing your forme. The machine rollers should be in their lowest position whilst you do this. There is a bed next to this area with a laygauge to help position your paper (the bed should be packed with suitable material to help raise the paper to the appropriate height to help a good impression). The sideways position of the paper is fixed by a small piece of lead glued in place, or a laygauge pin.

Positioning the lay gauge on the Adana Letterpress

The gripper is then positioned correctly and the handle should be depressed lightly to check positioning when it will be fully depressed. Care should be taken so that the laygauge and gripper does not hit the type, as this will damage the type.

Once checked, the handle can then be depressed several times to ink up the rollers (transferred to them from the platen), then with the paper or card in position, depress the handle firmly until it makes contact with the paper and makes the impression.

This first print is referred to a trial ‘pull’, and can be used to check positioning adjusting as required. Going back to the point above, if the type is uneven, more packing can be used in the bed to help this. As you print your work, check regularly to ascertain when re-inking of the platen is needed.

Letterpress Business Cards

Useful resources

[Book] General Printing, an illustrated guide to letterpress printing ISBN 0-9785881-4-2

http://www.caslon.co.uk – suppliers of reconditioned Adana machines

http://www.ebay.co.uk – great place to find old letterpress machines, associate equipment and old type

http://www.harringtonandsquires.co.uk – traditional letterpress printers

http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/shortcourses/ – letterpress courses at St Martins College, London

http://bpsnet.org.uk – The British Printing Society

http://www.gfsmith.com/ – Gorgeous papers!

Work flow for Graphic Designers

Congratulations, you made it as a freelance Graphic Designer! You’ve got some clients in the bag, have completed a few jobs for them, and now they are coming back to you for more. So how do you start to organise yourself so that you can get the work out on time, keep a record of everything, and send an accurate invoice out when the job is complete?

This is something I’ve revisited lately after my New Year’s resolution to be more organised in business. It’s easy to let time and job management slip when you are on an interesting job, get bogged down with details, or the deadline is gaining on you. But if you get yourself organised in the right way from the start, it should only take you a few minutes to keep your system up to date, giving you all the information you need about a job at invoice time, or should a client ask you for an update.

So, here is an outline of the system I use which has evolved over time from various influences, such as past employment, web articles, software and how I need to work today. You don’t need expensive time/job logging software, just a few simple tools that you will probably already own.

1. Start a job numbering system and log all jobs that come in on a spreadsheet or notebook. I use the syntax SCxxx, where SC stands for ‘Spirit Creative’, and a consecutive number at the end.
2. On your spreadsheet or notebook, set up a few columns such as “Job No., Client, Job Title, Deadline, Value, Date Invoiced” etc. This should give you an historical and quick summary of all your jobs, past and current, seeing what has and what needs to be done. Make sure you fill the information out as you go!
3. Then create a job sheet for each job, again this can be done on a spreadsheet, or you can design one in your graphics software of choice,  and print off as you need them on your laser printer, keeping in a ring binder. The details you put on this sheet will depend on what you need to know about a job, but an area to keep a time log on the job, with details about what you did, would be a good place to start. On my job sheet I have also set up a few Excel formulas to add up the number of hours, multiply them by my hourly rate and put the total into a table/area called marked ‘Invoice details’ which I then cut and paste into my Word invoice template when the job is complete. This table also has room for the clients name and address, along with the job title. It is an invoice within the job sheet if you like.
4. When you begin the job, start a new folder on your computer with the job number and title in it’s name. Keep everything electronic to do with the job in here e.g. information, text and pictures from the client, your design work, PDF proofs etc.
5. You might also like to set up a whiteboard system so you can see quickly at a glance (without having to look at your computer) which jobs are currently in (or live), and need working on. Again the columns you might use are “Client, Job No., Description, Due, Status”.  As the job status changes, is completed, or a new one comes in, you can quickly rub out, or add what is needed. My status codes are P (proof), C (contractor), Pr (printer), H (hold) and INV (invoice). I only ever have live jobs on here and they get rubbed off when invoiced. Again this can be done via a spreadsheet or with Google office tools (great if you need to share the information with colleagues not on your site).

With all of the above set up and being kept up to date, you should be able to see at any time where the job is, if it’s been invoiced, have all the information relating to it in one place, be able to invoice for everything, and feel much less stressed as a result!

This article is written by Rachel Toy, a freelance Graphic Designer working in the design industry for over 15 years. Her company, Spirit Creative Ltd, is a full Graphic Design Agency serving Beds/Bucks/Herts, providing logo design, business cards, leaflets, brochures, web sites, web hosting, exhibition graphics and more! If you would like us to help your company with any of the above then do not hesitate to contact us on info@spiritcreative.co.uk