Blog | Page 30 of 32 | Autumn Lane Paperie

Here’s a pick-me-up for you!

11 May

At Autumn Lane Paperie, we know that without our clients we’re nothing & we appreciate you folks more than you could ever know! We’ve discussed ways that we can show our appreciation but the main issue is that you all cover such a broad spectrum of society that there’s simply no way that we can do it at one go, so we’re starting a new thing for us – small giveaways! The upshot of this is that we’ll put up various freebies from time to time (we’re planning on at least a couple times per month) that will be available to anyone & everyone.

Following tax season & closing in on the end of school, we thought the most appropriate freebie for our opener would be based on COFFEE! Our day definitely starts with a cup of coffee each here, black for me & with cream for Beck, to ease us into the workday with a smile on our faces. After lunch, we’ll usually have another cup of coffee to beat that 2PM food crash – again, black for me but iced for Beck. Any guess as to who fixes the coffee?

We’ve also made our own cold-brewed coffee, which can rival that of any energy drink or amphetamine cocktail! Just kidding on that last bit, but seriously, that stuff will cause you to see an entirely new part of the light spectrum based solely on the vibrations it gives your eyeballs if you overdo it! For those curious, cold brewed coffee is exactly what it sounds like – you immerse fresh, unused coffee grounds in water & leave it at least 8 hours (the ratio is up to you!), then strain the brew through a coffee filter. What you have is then the much-touted cold-brewed coffee & is excellent in coffee-based smoothies, iced coffee, etc. Definitely a pick-me-up that you won’t want to put down (or share).

We’d like to offer this 8×10 printable graphic to everyone that shows our love (and probable dependence) of the java & say we hope you enjoy it. Preferably with some coffee.

To retrieve the printable, click the image & or this link & download your PDF file from Dropbox!

-Beck & Jeff

3 Things to Consider When Hiring a Logo Designer

Branding· Starting Out

4 May

This is the first post in a series of posts designed to address common design process-related issues & questions encountered by the small business owner & creative professional. Our goal is to answer some of the frequently asked questions from small business owners & creative professionals to professional logo designers in small, easily digested chunks – if we wrote it all in one post, nobody would have time to read the tome! Hopefully, you’ll find this series useful.

In our first post, we’ll address 3 common issues faced by a new business owner or someone who is rebranding their business (you). These items are:

I know I need a logo but I have no idea where to begin & I’m not sure what I want or which designer to use for it!
All I need is the logo, right?
I’ve found a designer I like, I can just pay them to design a logo for me & expect it to be perfect with no input from me, right?

While we do offer the services that we’ll be discussing, we understand that we aren’t a perfect fit for every instance – a perfect example of this may be traditional corporate logos. You may have noticed that our shop doesn’t sport any of these & the reason is that it’s not a style that we find particularly inspiring & we want to enjoy what we do for our clients as much as they enjoy the finished product. Our goal is to educate & empower the small business owner & creative professional to understand the world they’re entering so they can identify the best designer for their needs. Having been on both sides of these questions, we can offer a unique perspective that can be difficult to come by & we know that it can be overwhelming to someone who didn’t expect a process to deliver the best possible product for their business, so let’s dive into these 3 points of working with your logo designer & provide a foundation that will make your design process much more enjoyable.

Question 1: I know I need a logo but I have no idea what to use or where to begin.

To answer this question, there are a few points that are key for a successful logo design & business branding process which you should keep in mind:

Have you taken the time to browse sites like Pinterest or Etsy to see what styles are available & which of them appeal to you?
If you have a particular design style/aesthetic that appeals to you & your target market, have you noticed any designers that produce the same style?
Do the designers that you’ve noticed make themselves easily accessible to the public?

The single most important piece is that you’ve settled on a style that works for you. Once you’ve done that, the rest falls in place fairly easily. If you love shabby chic logos, great! Choose a designer that majors in that & falls within your budget. When choosing your designer, though, be sure that designer makes themselves accessible to you via more than just email or a contact form. If you don’t have any way of contacting them, you’re entirely at their mercy & we’ve had more than a few clients tell us that they paid their last designer in stages & the designer stopped talking to them following the final payment. When we ask if they were able to contact them on the phone or if they had an address, they reply that the only method they had to contact them was over their website or via email. If any contractor you deal with doesn’t make themselves immediately available to the general public and imminently identifiable, we feel that is a sign that you should be very careful when dealing with them. Better yet, pick someone else!

Once you’ve identified a designer, they may have preselected packages that your needs fall within or you may need to work with them for a custom package, just be sure that you’re going to be happy for years to come with what you’re getting. Professional designers will use either a questionnaire or have a series of questions or an interview to determine the best design for your needs – logo design is certainly not one size fits all! Once you’ve agreed on a package from your designer & filled out the questionnaire or completed the interview, trust them to deliver a quality product & stick with the concept. Often, business owners are tempted to get outside feedback during the design process & their sources magically exhibit a profound depth of knowledge in graphic design & marketing, which results in the business owner asking to dramatically change course in the middle of the design process. Trust your designer & stay true to yourself & your target audience, we can’t stress this enough!

Question 2: All I need is a logo, right?

The answer to this is – it depends on your business model. The odds are pretty high that you will need more than just your logo, though, in the form of branded collateral items. What are collateral items, you ask? A few examples may be business cards, website headers, brand-consistent website graphics, thank you cards, etc. Unless your business & website are super simple & clean & you’re not interacting face to face with people, you’re going to need branded collateral items to present a well thought-out, professional image to your target market. How embarrassing would it be for a business owner to have an awesome logo and realize that they have an engagement in a day or two which will require business cards but they didn’t think to have business cards designed & printed, so they’re left with a rush job that falls far short of presenting a cohesive, professional appearance for their business? It could mean the difference between landing a valuable contract and not. Similarly, there are very nice website options readily available in free versions but to present a unique look for your business brand, unless you can use a generic template, your business website isn’t going to make sense to your visitors. If you can use a generic template, that may mean that your branding is missing what it needs to stand apart from the competition, too. While there are approaches that this can work with, we generally don’t advise our clients to fade into the generic background with everyone else.

Question 3: I’ve found a designer I like, I can just pay them to design a logo for me & expect it to be perfect with no input from me, right?

We’ve all been in a situation where we paid a professional to complete a job & thought to ourselves, “I’ll just get out of their way & let them work their magic!” While there are certainly professions that this is applicable to, business branding is simply not one of them & telling a designer that you trust them to design something awesome with little to no input from the you is a fatal mistake you need to avoid. We’ve spoken with clients who used large, popular designers local to their area & used this approach & were disappointed as a result. What would make a large, thriving graphic design agency fall short when presenting their client with multiple logo concepts (designs) from which to choose? The client had no input into what they wanted! There are so many directions that a design can follow, even within the design aesthetic that appeals to a person, since what we’re presenting to the client is that most subjective of all things – art.

We’ll be back next week with our next segment on helping you to not only survive but thrive during the design process!

Where are the good guys?

blog

25 Mar

In a world that’s getting smaller every day, it seems counterintuitive but it holds true, nevertheless, that it seems like it’s getting more difficult to find skilled craftsmen (and women) who are willing and able to work with you. This has been further exacerbated by the fact that people are, if nothing else, creatures of habit and we do what we know – the old, “this is how we’ve always done it and it’s worked so far, so why should we think of changing it” mentality. The same holds true for small business owners – I daresay more so for the small business owner than most folks, given the fact that they’re putting it all on the line every time they trust someone to help them with something. After all, this is their livelihood that they’re working with.

So where’s this going? Mostly I want to talk about something good and very out of the ordinary which happened and helped us get out of a tight spot. Surprisingly, it didn’t cost us an arm and a leg and we ended up with something much better than we had previously. The individual who helped us (another small business owner) didn’t seem to think that what he did was anything special, which makes it even better because it’s totally genuine. I’d like to take a few minutes out of my (very busy) day because of that and tell anyone who happens to read this about something that could save your online bacon one day.

Meet Budd Grant: family man extraordinaire and web hosting god. (I totally lifted this pic from his Facebook page)

So what did Budd do that’s so awesome? Budd made it better and easier. For the past few months, we’ve been tearing our hair out at ALP over email issues. We’d email people from our business accounts and they either wouldn’t receive them at all or they’d end up in their spam folders or show up very late about half of the time. Any business owner will tell you that communication is key to a successful business and with clients complaining that they never received our emails, we were doing a lot of damage control. Since our clients are so awesome, they understood that this was due to circumstances beyond our control, especially when we would forward our emails to them using another account. Coupled with our email issue was an issue that we’d noticed with our site’s performance. Now, we’d been pretty happy with our host but it’s a big box host that everyone knows and they have a business model that’s all about the bottom line. We can’t fault them for that. After all, it’s business and we read all of the documentation. We knew what could happen. But when it came to the point that we were looking at a minimum of $500 per year for our hosting alone and really what was being pushed was the $1700 per year package, we had to take stock of things. Immediately. I knew Budd was in the hosting business from a closed group I’m a member of, so I contacted him out of the blue – he didn’t know me from Adam. Budd was gracious enough to answer my numerous and very focused questions with no guarantee that he’d get anything out of his time. Another thing that business owners hate is having their time wasted by window shoppers, so Budd’s flexibility was notable. Budd showed me how to check on our shared hosting email spamminess (link) and to my horror (but not surprise) we scored a zero out of ten every time I tested it, with the service telling us that our email would never see the light of an inbox. To compare, our Gmail accounts scored 8.5 out of ten. So that answered that question.

This still left us with the question of hosting – what to do, what to do? After all, our site was pretty well established and had gotten fairly complex. The thought of what we would need to do for our main site, let alone our subdomains, was daunting. Budd very patiently helped with every step of the way and ensured that all of our content was put in place exactly the way we left it and the performance is better than what we had previously.

Budd’s business is, well … Budd. He’s a one man show, with a life of his own. This means that we’re not always going to be able to get him on the line at all times in any of our “emergencies” that may pop up. But we’re ok with that. Budd is nothing if not transparent about everything he does and the quality of service he delivers is second to none. Couple that with his expertise in the hosting arena and you’ve got a massively winning combination when it comes to reliable, quality hosting and email for your business. I have to say that I find it personally very satisfying to have a definite individual that we can say we’re doing business with for anything, rather than a faceless, big box type of company. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great for certain things but for us, Budd’s business was the best fit this time.

Something else I’d like to point out about using Budd as a hosting provider and the fact that he’s a one man band – he’s always going to be the guy you talk to, so you don’t need to explain your situation to him every time because you spoke with him previously and he has that scary memory that all of us nerds have (we remember FAR more than you might realize). It’s very gratifying to have someone as invested in your success as you are, as well.

So if you’re in the market or you’re having issues like we described, check him out (his site is here)! I promise you won’t be sorry that you did. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, our email score is a perfect ten, now. Cheers, Budd!

ALP Clip Art has moved!

blog

25 Feb

Where’s the clip art?

Hey there, ALP fans! You may have noticed that we had a few clip art sets here on our site but we decided to move it to another location in order to keep upcoming site changes cohesive. We encourage you to head over to Lily’s Etsy shop and check out her clipart collection, which will have a new set added every week for a while. We’re happy to help our Princess in her artistic endeavors and we’re sure that if you don’t see something you want, she can design a set just for you!

Some of you may not be aware, but Lily is one of our secret weapons. Whenever there’s a task that requires an art ninja, she’s our go to gal. Lily does far more than clip art, too, she will take on commissioned pieces for nearly anything you may need, from portraits to comic book scenes to landscapes. If you have anything that you’d love to see done artistically that’s outside of what we offer here at ALP (which is all branding & website related), hit Lily up for a quote. We know she’ll take care of you.

Entering 2016, we’ve got some plans, business & personal – what about you?

blog

29 Dec

Hey there, ALP fans! We’re starting to think it would be fun to hear from you all on our site in addition to other social media outlets, so this is our initial reach out to invite dialog on our blog. We’ve got an unbelievable workload, between creating for you awesome clients, handling the business side of things, and running our own family, so we aren’t able to reach out as much as we’d like to you all. We’d like to get the ball rolling by starting a discussion on 2016 goals, business & personal. Share as much or as little as you’d like!

Having finished our first full calendar year at Autumn Lane Paperie, we’ve got some definite plans for our business goals & directions we’d like to go in, so we’d like to share those with you all. Of course Beck will continue to produce her gorgeous & budget-friendly text & graphic pre-made logos & Jeff will continue developing & upgrading ALP WordPress themes this year but one thing we’re planning on expanding this year is our Design Resources section. Look for this to include more fonts, clip art, photographer’s templates, & overlays which are ALP originals. We’ve begun moving in this direction on Etsy, as well, with our Design Resources shop. If you have specific items you’d like to see in our Design Resources section, we’d love to hear about your ideas, reach out to us & let us know what you’ve gt in mind, use “Design Resource Idea” in your subject line.

Another direction we’d like to move in involves some more work with other WordPress theme developers, initially, so if you or someone you know develops themes, please contact us!

Of course, business is what we do day in, day out, but the reason we do it is for our family. We want to ensure that they have all of their needs met, as well as have some amazing opportunities that not everyone has when they’re growing up. You may be aware already that we’re a blended family, which is part of how we’re able to do this for them. Our kids all get to divide their time between South Carolina, Florida, & California routinely, which is something that very few children get to do when they’re growing up. I remember growing up wishing I could just see the beach like my friends in school but the first time I got to do that wasn’t until I was in high school on a school trip to Daytona, Florida. Our guys get to see both US coasts as well as the Smoky Mountains & Carolina foothills on a routine basis, as well as interact with different people from various places, which will help them to make more informed decisions later in life. Without them, everything we do for work is all academic & empty!

On a more personal note, we’ve started back into our exercise schedule as of yesterday & oh my gosh! We are so sore today ..

Here are a couple shots of the whole gang from Christmas this year – Mary Grandma, on the right in the first photo is 90 years young! Let us know what your plans, business & personal, are this year, we’re looking forward to hearing from you all!