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 […]
A Brief Overview of SEO
SEO; it might sound like a fancy executive position in a company or maybe even a high tech, sci-fi piece of equipment, but SEO has quickly become the foundation for a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing rapidly by the second and revolutionizing personal customer experience on all electronic platforms. Standing for Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a powerful tool that is a must for any digital marketing pursuit. Exactly as it sounds, SEO focuses on optimizing sites for search engines as a means to gain organic, audience-driven traffic. Websites rely on SEO tactics in order to boost their ranking on search pages and ultimately their business, because let’s face it, unless your site is on the first few pages you haven’t a hope of being noticed. With SEO, here are a number of ways to achieve a higher ranking, one being the relevance of the site to the search […]