Design can be used to enhance the visual appeal of a product or service. It can be used to organize complex information or give meaning to abstract concepts. Sometimes design is used to make a bold statement or to evoke a specific emotion.

Design can do all of those things and more, but the underlying quality always remains the same — to strengthen clear communication.

When USA Cycling approached us with the opportunity to design their High Performance Plan (HPP) presentation, clear communication was the driving force behind the entire project. The HPP weighs in at around 135 pages of information ranging from high-level to technical, broken into 15 sections. We were told that the bulk of the content had changed little from year to year. Our challenge? To make it easy for the reader to digest and quickly grasp the key concepts within the plan. Past attempts had been too busy and not consistent with the USA Cycling brand.

Our first step was to ensure that the base content provided a solid foundation for the design. We had our talented copywriter Tammy Oler collaborate with USAC to edit the existing plan. Throughout the process, Tammy kept the visuals in mind, suggesting modifications that would allow for better communication.

While the copy was being developed, Design Rangers worked to create a high-impact cover design and an interior layout built to let readers find information quickly. The idea was to illustrate the power and passion behind the athletes and their goals.

With final content and the base design in place, we got down to business – creating common visual cues in each section along with a variety of text styles to create consistency and to increase readability. Graphics and charts in each section were re-designed using icons and stylized elements.

The physical appearance of the piece makes just as much of an impact as the contents contained within it. We worked with a local printer to develop a package that would stand out from the rest. Custom 3-ring binders with the new cover and spine graphics were produced to allow for content additions as needed. The binder was constructed with a lay-flat design, a business card window and a pocket in the back to house additional materials. The tabs feature an easy-to-browse design and are reinforced at the hole locations and tabs themselves. The interior is was printed in full digital color on a premium stock. Design rangers also provided a matching PowerPoint template to help ensure consistency.

The final result? A clean, comprehensive guide built to inform and educate. Every aspect of the design and content were refined to make the communication stronger, and USAC is poised to present their plan with confidence.

What an amazing message and a big, bold statement. We often push our clients to make the big, bold statements. It takes guts though and not all clients are willing to put it all on the line. I’m proud of Coleman and their marketing guts. Errr… I was proud until I did some research.

Strike #1 –Web Site. This morning, after I had decided to write a blog on Coleman and the awesomeness of  “The Original Social Networking Site” campaign, I was super excited to go to coleman.com and see how their web site integrated the messaging of the campaign. You should have seen my sad face when the site loaded and… nope. Nothing. After some digging around I finally found mention of the social networking press release and a page titled “Social Networking” which shows the advertisements.

Strike #2 – Print Ads. According to a Coleman press release, the T.V. spots began running in May 2009. They are/were also running print ads, but until I did a little bit of research on Coleman, I wasn’t aware of them. We subscribe to Outside magazine and are exposed to several other “outdoorsy” publications – seems like I would have seen one in there (Chris says he *thinks* he may have seen one in Outside, maybe I missed that page… in that one issue?). My family is their market. They have definitely not reached us.

Strike #3 – Consistency. As designers, one of our favorite things is consistency. In our dream world, the ads, the web site, and the marketing materials all have a similar look-and-feel, similar messaging. Coleman could have really taken this campaign and ran with it. Instead, they are just left with a disappointed consumer.

What we can learn from Coleman’s mistakes. Don’t disappoint your market with an inconsistent message. As much as you may think your customers won’t notice that your web site uses a different logo than your business cards, you are using several different color palettes, inconsistent fonts, etc – they will. You want current and potential customers to see your company’s marketing materials and recognize them as yours – every time, everywhere. This is especially important now that there are so many ways for consumers to find you out in the world ie: Facebook, Twitter, Google search.

Final thoughts. Be bold, be brave, be consistent!

Such was the case when USA Cycling asked us to create a new look for their National Championships race series. These premier events cover 18 cities and 5 cycling disciplines – road, mountain, track, cyclo-cross and BMX. The races and locations are diverse and full of personality, and the graphics that defined each race had become so too. USAC was worried that their image had become too segmented and that people often didn’t know that the events were part of the series, or held by USA Cycling at all!

To date, the marketing team had been using a combination of different logos, text and images at each race year-to-year. To make things more complicated, each venue had been developing their own signage and materials to promote their events. In addition to creating an identity crisis, the growing number of graphic files and signage made it nearly impossible to manage the entire National Championships campaign.

After brainstorming with the USA Cycling team, we proposed building a “graphic toolkit” that would help them to get things under control and create a solid foundation for the National Championships brand. The toolkit would include a new brandmark for the series along with a set of guidelines and graphic files that could be used internally or by race coordinators. The goal was to create a design that captured the spirit and professionalism of the USAC while allowing room for expansion and the addition of venue specific information.

After sketching out many potential designs, we narrowed down the field to 4 distinct concepts. The final ideas were presented as mock-ups with modular elements that could be re-configured to allow for integration of event names and sponsor logos. Designs were presented in color and black-and-white to ensure that the look could be reproduced effectively in a variety of formats.

Concept #1:

Concept #2:

Concept #3:

Concept #4:

The four designs were narrowed-down to two finalists, both of which were integrated into a variety of situations to show how they would work vertically, horizontally and with additional typography and graphics. The final design uses the USA Cycling logo, letting the flag flow into a strong typographic treatment and 5 stars, representing each of the cycling disciplines. The open design allows similar elements to flow around the text while keeping the main focus on the National Championships at all times.

Final Design:

Now that the foundation for the look had been established, the rest of the “toolkit” was constructed. Key elements included:

• Color palette with breakdown of colors for web and print uses
• Logo files – color, black and white, single-color and reversed
• Signage templates
• Logo files with event names and venues integrated
• Online advertising templates
• Merchandising templates
• Style guide outlining guidelines and best practices for using the graphics

All files were provided in an online download area and on CD-ROM for easy access.

True to their original vision, USA Cycling now has a flexible graphic toolkit that they can use to help define the National Championships brand. The files and guidelines can be provided to partners and race coordinators to help them create their own materials while the internal marketing team can focus on promoting awareness and membership.

Want to see the new look first-hand? Check out the 2010 National Championships schedule.

Have you had a situation where a set of graphics elements or tools helped you? Maybe you have something that could use one now? Let us know in the comments.

WOW! What a night. Not only did we receive a gold Addy for the bearski bath & body logo, Design Rangers also won the Best of Print category! We are so happy that Jessica was there with us – she loves that logo as much as we do! We have to admit, it was a bit of an Oscar moment… “did they actually just say our name. what? really? collect yourself. stand up. walk. speak.”

I have to say almost 2 weeks later it still feels a bit like a dream. We are honored and humbled by the award. Really. There was a LOT of great print work submitted to this year – a beautiful promotional kit designed by Sandia for Flying Horse and the Rio Welcome Kit by David C. Cook was amazing. That’s the humbling part – our little ol’ logo. Best of Print. We are proud parents to say the least!

When Jessica offered to write up a press release (yes folks, not only is she a soap chef, she is a wife, a mom, an amazing writer and PR professional!) we immediately said PLEASE! She did an awesome job – please keep your eye out for our little article coming to a newspaper near you!

Jessica, Jenny and Chris heading off to the Addy's

Bearski’s skin-loving products are high-quality, handmade, yet affordable.  Jessica and Christian were looking to give Bearski a hip, cool, and fun personality.  They gave us a lot of great input and ideas – bubbles and lower-case text were kicked around – then… they let us have at it!

Ultimately, a logo should reflect the persona of the company while being engaging and memorable. Sometimes, the design process meanders on it’s way to the ultimate design, and other times, you just get a “Yes, THIS is IT!” moment. After completing one logo concept in particular – we knew we had done it. We felt the logo really had it all – contrast, personality, sweetness, not to mention bubbles AND lower case type. We were thrilled when Jessica and Christian loved it just as much as we did.

SIDE NOTE: We were also thrilled to find out just a few days ago that the Bearski logo has won an ADDY award

After many rounds of high-fives about the logo, we let the logo begin its new life in Bearski’s business cards, product label template and a custom e-commerce web site:

Not only were we passionate about this project, we’re passionate about what Jessica and Christian are doing with Bearski Bath & Body. We are crazy about their products – here are links to our favorites, the coffee soap and Goat Milk TLC. Feel free to list your favorites in the comments or visit Bearski and pick up a future favorite.

Thanks Bearski for trusting us with your image – creating it was truly good, clean fun!

Tammy asked us to design a Wordpress site that would showcase her wordslinging and marketing talents as well as incorporate her blog & post her twitter updates. We really wanted the new site to reflect TAMMY and her hip, funky, professional awesomeness!

Chris started with the Cushy WooThemes template…

used his design magic, customizing the template it into this….

Tammy was thrilled with the look of her new site, and quickly realized she needed business cards that reflected the new tammyoler.com feel. We designed this card for her…

The cards are printed on 16pt paper, and we decided on the rounded corner option, as it played off of the background pattern nicely.

Every now and then our 6 year old son will ask me, “What’s your favorite color?”

It’s a question I really can’t answer. It would be like saying I love one of my children more than the other. Some days I may like one son a bit more than the other depending on the events/tantrums/trials of the day but deep inside I love them both dearly.

Except Peach – I will never, ever like Peach. I don’t know what it is but it makes me kind of nauseous when I see it. Some kind of childhood trauma I suppose. By some cosmic coincidence, they painted the house right behind us peach *sigh*.  I used to really dislike Purple and any variance of Purple but lately I am coming around and can see it’s worth. I don’t foresee that happening with Peach – we will never be BFF’s.

Working with color is one of my favorite parts of being a graphic designer. Colors and how they look and feel together is so much of what we do. Color can add excitement when appropriate. Color can help the viewer feel more trusting of the company or product. Color can evoke emotions hidden deep within all of us (see peach commentary above). Color can make something feel warm or cool, carefree or corporate – the possibilities are endless.

And while our creative instincts ultimately guide us to color bliss, there are a variety of useful tools that help us find just the right hues. Interested in expanding your palette? Check out a few of our favorite resources:

Kuler

One indispensable tool we like to use when exploring color options is Adobe’s Kuler. Think social networking for color. The Kuler web-app allows you to search for color palettes submitted by users based on a word or feeling. Register for a free account and you can create your own color combinations, bookmark favorites, or download a palette as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file. Registration is free and the searches produce many, many great color combinations.

Pictaculous

One of the best ways to find a color palette is to work with what nature has already provided. Upload any image (photos of organic objects work especially well), and upload it Mail Chimp’s Pictaculous. This nifty tool will pull key colors from your image and create swatches for them. It also integrates with Kuler and COLOURlovers to suggest similar combinations. You can even submit images with your iPhone and get palettes emailed to you. By the way, if you’re looking for a great, easy-to-use manager for your email campaigns, MailChimp is the way to go.

Pantone

Of course, before the web we had the PMS (Pantone Matching System) book, which is still our bible. These books, used by printers nationwide, fan out like a paint-sample chart, showcasing an entire rainbow of luscious color options. Specify one of the spot colors and you can have it matched at any commercial printer on the planet. Need to reproduce the color in CMYK or RGB for the screen? There are books for that too.

The pages of our PMS books are worn and tattered as they get used on almost every design project. Even Pantone has moved beyond the printed page though, with its own Twitter page, an app for the iPhone and a pepper mill!

Color brings power and subtlety it brings to design. So, what’s your favorite color? (I promise not to judge if you say Peach!)

So, better late than never, here are the fun, cool, smart, great things we saw or did over the past 2 weeks:

1. We were honored and excited to be asked to design a bookmark for the “No Impact Man” book. Colin Beavan, the author, will hand out the book mark at his books signings. After we designed the bookmark they also asked us to create a on-line ad from the bookmark design – we were happy to do it. The book is quite amazing and the blog also has a lot of information.
2. After working with the “No Impact Man” we decided to follow him on Twitter. One of his recent tweets was regarding the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. As you know (or are just now learning we are big advocates of bikes, bike trails, and SAFE routes for kids to walk or ride their bike to school.) Remember when you were a kid – there was nothing better than the freedom you felt while riding your bike. Consider sending a letter to Congress asking for their support of the Safe Routes campaign.
3. Have you been to Mule Design’s Feed Store? If you love a good T-shirt there are plenty here!
4. We are recent members of the National Parks Conservation Association. Their mission is to protect and enhance America’s National Parks for present and future generations. We love our National Parks and wanted to be a part of assuring their future.
5. Finally, something to make you smile. What a great project!

Please check back for a blog dedicated to the No Impact Man and the work we did for him. We also have quite a few exciting projects in the final stages of completion. We are looking forward to posting them as soon as they are approved and ready for the public eye.

Happy Trails!

Happy Friday Dearest Blog Readers,

We want to share with you some great sites/images/information/etc. that we came across this week…

1. Typedia (it’s like wikipedia for fonts) just launched their site. Here is a great blog post about the creation of their logo.
2. A few months ago we wrote a post about how/why to have fun with your brand. This week we found a great site that features some fun & creative business cards. If you ever need a crazy cool business card you know who to call… (shoot us an email if you don’t have a set of Design Ranger cards, we will send some your way!)
3. Our friend and copy writing partner, Tammy, came across this site and thought of us.  Yes, we love it! Also, on the same site a image for our coffee loving friends (you know who you are!).
4. Lastly, every now and then design*sponge will feature a post titled biz ladies. (The post may be called biz ladies but it is just as informative for biz men.) The article features an expert in the field that will offer advice on anything from writing a book to making a strategic business plan. One post we found very informative was advertising 101 for small business owners.
5. Bonus: once you view the biz ladies link you will know why we found this noteworthy.

Well, that wraps up the Ranger Round-up (say that 3 times fast!). Have a great weekend and of course, Happy Trails.

What if you take your name, your passion for writing, and mix it with your love of science and pop-culture. What do you have? You have the Ehren Space Museum.

A lot of people might think up something similar for their personal or business brand, love what it represents, smile, and promptly abandon ship.

Why? Sometimes people equate fun with unprofessional. Well, at least they do when it’s their own brand. For some reason they forget the countless number of successful companies that make use of creativity and humor in many or all aspects of their marketing. Can’t think of any? How about the following company names:

• Geek Squad
• MailChimp
• Target
• Apple
• Yahoo!
• Google

Or how about these memorable campaigns:

• I’m a Mac, I’m a PC (Apple Computer)
• Sonic drive-up skits
• Anything done by Mini Cooper

Feel free to add your favorites in the comments.

Maybe you love some of the examples above, maybe you hate them. But it’s hard to deny that they’re memorable. They leave an impression, and that’s just what they’re meant to do.

Now don’t get me wrong, being clever for the sake of being clever is not a good thing. Instead of trying to be clever, be creative. Usually your instincts will tell you if you’re trying too hard. Personally I don’t feel like the name  ”Dress Barn” is winning over many female shoppers.

So what makes “fun” work? Three key things:

Can it relate back to the business?
Is the idea a force-fit?
Is it a one-line joke or can it take on a life of it’s own?

In the examples we listed of successful company names and memorable campaigns, each brings an image to mind and/or builds a personality.

So does the Ehren Space Museum pass the test?

• Ehren is a writer, someone who plays on words
• Ehren’s writing tends to cater to readers who are into pop-culture, especially in the geeky corner of the cultural space.
• In addition to his culture coverage, he writes fiction.
• He was a physics major in college.
• He wants his web presence to be a permanent collection of things he’s written.

And like most people, Ehren has a sense of humor.

Seems like a good fit. Now the tricky part – how to pass the whole thing off. It’s a fine balance of integrating the theme without being corny or overdone – not as easy as it sounds. With Ehren the key was keeping it simple and clean. It’s taking the essence of the idea and letting it come forward, not forcing it to come out. The throw-back to the 50’s version of the future is obvious, but it still feels relevant in today’s world.

Just remember, creativity is always a part of any successful business, has it been a part of yours?