Project completed....

...and handed in to Patrick tonight.

I have just returned from presenting Patrick with half a rain forest's worth of papers and notes.

My PDP 5 / PDP 6 "Personal Branding" is now finito!!!!

Have fun, Patrick!

In house items....

My immediate thought when thinking about our personal branding was the items that our customer and the general public see - our vehicles, banners, press adverts, business cards, promotional items such as the banner stand, stickers on CD's and DVD's etc.

But we have some "in-house" items that carry our brand. We use job sheets, quotation forms and note paper that all have the Kramers roundel displayed. When we are on site discussing job details and referring to our paperwork, then our clients and their staff are further exposed to our branding.

Also,when on site, we wear polo shirts and fleeces which carry the roundel prominently. And our tool boxes are badged with our logo and telephone details.

Then, there are the invoices and quotations that we post or email out. Additionally, all of our emails carry our full contact details, the Kramers roundel and the "K-Man" icon form our cards.

Obviously, we have our website which is where many potential clients stop as their first port of call and which carries our branding. The website also provides them with samples and images from our portfolio.

New item....

I designed and had manufactured some resin domed badges to advertise Kramers Designs & Signs Limited. They are to be placed on vehicles that I letter.

Each badge measures 100mm x 60mm and is digitally printed onto self adhesive vinyl; they are full colour on black and a resin is then poured onto the cut out sticker. This then sets with a domed appearance. I ordered 100 at a cost of £1.50 each.

MODULE COMPLETED.....

module completed...at least for the purposes of college, the challenge of keeping Kramers Designs and Signs Limited fresh and exciting remains.

Our latest (and first) press ad...

In support of a very lovely client of ours. This advert appeared in an 8 page colour supplement in the Halifax Courier on 28th March 2008.

Vehicle leaflet...

I designed an A5 flyer to promote our vehicle lettering service.
In order to intrigue people, we came up with the question,

"Are you driving naked?"

Revamp in 2007...

We wanted the new business cards to be a distinct departure from the ones we had been using. There were practical reasons for this as I had neglected to include our email and postal address on the current cards! Doh!

By this stage we had also made the move to refresh and update our website and saw this as a great time to combine both media into a unified identity. Joanna Flynn, who had created our first website, agreed to do our new one.

Our new look needed to be a departure from the black based previous one - a radical and dramatic departure was our intended aim. As we are involved in graphic design and print, and because we each wanted our own cards to be instantly recognisable as "his and hers", I chose to make use of two colours from the CMYK colour range - CYAN (boy) for my cards and MAGENTA (girly) for Sarah's. Well, I thought it a good idea!

We also wanted to introduce some simple, bold images that would be a great way of easily indicating the services we offer to clients. The images I chose were sourced and purchased from iStockphoto.com. The orange image was chosen to be a vivid image against the cyan and magenta backgounds and to signify our "fresh" approach to our work. Also, Jo would be able to cleverly turn its segments into buttons to navigate our website.

In our experience of the sign, vehicle and graphics industry, many companies have very traditional and, dare I say, boring approaches to their own corporate identity. Ours needed to be vastly different from the ones that our cllients were used to seeing.

As KramersDesigns is a small operation, just myself and Sarah, if we got this design wrong we would be able to react to any customer feedback very quickly. Any costs we might incur by a further redesign would not be too prohibitive as our print runs are small.

The new cards have been in use since late June 2007 and many people have been impressed by the vibrant design. My portrait has also been well received and has not traumatised too many clients - yet!

The new look website went live on July 1st 2007 - our second anniversary - and has been very well received by many people who have been impressed with its clarity, content and ease of navigation. I am very proud of our site and am delighted that visitors seem pleased with it. This is all down to Jo's hard work and expertise.

My cards - front and back