Whether you work in creative field or just dabble with your imagination at some point you may have noticed that occasionally your muse can go missing. You hit the wall or your brain just straight up stops working usually as a deadline is looming. Just because the talonX team are professionals doesn’t mean we don’t experience the creative block phenomenon – if anything those in creative fields experience it more often than they let on. Jackson Pollock, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway all had ways that they kept their creativity rolling. Hemingway would stop writing while he was ‘on a roll.’ He would famously stop writing mid-sentence so that he would leave himself a great place to come back to later, his reasoning was that it would enable him to easily step back into inspiration. Unfortunately, we’re not all Hemingway’s and creative block strikes usually when you need to be […]
Inject Your Brand With Personality
Personality, you have it and your brand needs it. Gone are the days when you could simply put words to a page. You have to stand out from the crowd, differentiate or die as the dire saying goes. One of the tools at your disposal is brand tone or brand voice. Just like people, brands can have a personality and the most successful brands have strong ones. Think of Franks Red Hot Sauce and their ‘I Put That Sh*t on Everything’ slogan. Irreverent, funny, and a little spicy. Those descriptors can describe not just their slogan but their commercials, logo, and website. How about Apple and their ‘Think Different’ tagline. Accessible, inventive, and personable. Now, personable is not be confused with personality. I say personable because they literally put their CEO front and center. There was Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook. You know who else is approachable, conversational, personable […]
Logo Design For Dummies
Ok. The title is misleading. This blog post is not just for dummies. It’s for the people out there who have had an idea. Call it a spark, a lightning bolt or a lightbulb going off, you have had a brilliant idea for a product/service/business. You have the idea, the plan, the funding and a name – now you just need the logo. Designing a logo or getting one designed can be such an exciting experience. That excitement can be a double edged sword, especially when that motivation and surge of ideas comes together to create an overly busy and impractical logo. We have compiled a list to help you stay grounded and remind you of the things you should keep in mind when getting logo work started. Storytime – Your logo should “tell the story” of who you are. If you are a fishing lodge a fish is good […]
The Importance of Visual Hierarchy in Web Design
Gather ‘round kids, it is story time with talonX. Ok, well, less story time and more blogging time – but same thing different name. Today, we are going to talk about logo placement, web design and how to marry the two. Building a brand is not the easiest thing to do, but building a brand in the digital age is even more daunting. The sheer amount of companies and brands on the market now is staggering. In Calgary in 2010 there were over 52,000 businesses with employees. That is an absolute minimum of 52,000 brands that are competing with each other for time on an audience’s social media page, mobile device and google search. It’s pretty much guaranteed that there is a business or twelve that is your direct competition – and that is why your website has to be branded and designed strategically. Your website is your first line […]
Colours to Use in Web Design
I’m feeling blue. He was green with envy. She went red in the face. Colour is not just around us, it is inside of us. Colours help us decide what to eat, how we feel, how we communicate. It is not just what we buy, colours help us determine the brands that we will buy from. They kind of have their own personalities. Have you ever dealt with a graphic designer who agonized over finding the exact right shade of blue? That is because finding the right colour is one of the ways we can market to a person’s subconscious. For instance, consciously red means stop, but to your subconscious red can jump up and down and scream GO! But why? RED Red is an attention getter, it screams look at me! If a person looks at nothing else on a page they will notice the red. That is why […]
Does My Website Need an Upgrade?
TalonX started out in Calgary as a company designing kick-ass websites and from there grew into the even more kick-ass creative agency that it is. Web design is still the foundation of our work, so naturally people call us up to talk about website related problems and to ask us web design related questions. One of the most frequently asked questions is: “how long will our website last?” or something to the extent of “Our website is XX number of years old, should it get a redesign?” As a general rule there isn’t a set number of years where your web design just suddenly fails, there is no doomsday clock ticking down in the background that makes your current website suddenly become irrelevant when it hits zero. Well, if your website was designed in 1999 it is safe to say you need a new one… but that is a bigger […]
Video Vultures – Get Your Audience to Eat Up Your Message
Since “talkies,” or short videos with sound, came into existence people have been fascinated with videos and video marketing. Do you remember how wonderful it was to go to the movies when you were a kid? How it was such an experience and you could look forward to it for days. Do you remember having to actually go to a physical store to rent a movie and then rush to get it back on time to avoid those late damn late fees? How we interact with video just isn’t the same anymore. Since technology has improved and made it easier for the average person to point and shoot a video it has changed the video experience. People have become savvier and almost jaded, storytelling has had to be become more complex to capture imaginations the way it used to. The evolution of video technology and storytelling has also changed how […]