Importance of Print Marketing

When is the last time you updated your print marketing materials? If you are still using the same old business cards that you had five years ago, you are probably due for a makeover. As designers we are in a profession where our marketing can speak volumes about our talents. For instance, if you were to give a potential client a boring black and white business card with a simplistic logo and a basic font, who is going to be impressed?  Absolutely nobody will give that business card a second look.  However, if your prospects receive a printed business card with a creative layout and a smart use of colors and design, your business card will stand out from the hoards of others that person has received.

The same thing is true with your brochure. You want to create a brochure that discusses your talents and your understanding of the importance of branding and marketing.  The printed brochure should be creative and show off your skills as a graphic design expert. Tri-fold brochures are nice, but other fold options, such as the Gate-Fold, or the Z-Fold should be explored to help give your brochure a distinctive touch.

Some designers have a custom made presentation folder containing samples of printed brochures, flyers, doorhangers, and business cards they have created. This allows the clients to touch and feel the quality of the work. The clients can see the uniqueness of any die cut promotional materials and the variety of work you have created.

Give it some thought, look at your current print marketing and decide if you need to revamp your materials.  It may be just what is needed to get the boost in business you’ve been hoping for.

Next Day Flyers is an online printer that specializes in producing high quality printed materials with an unbelievably speedy turnaround on products such as business cards, postcards, flyers, brochures and more.

About Inkd:

Inkd is a real marketplace that brings designers and businesses together providing more professional print graphic design templates available from independent designers than anywhere else on the web. Everything from easy to use brochure templates,business card templates, newsletter templates – and everything in between. Custom Logos, and even online printing -if you need a quick creative solution – Inkd has you covered.

New Branding Templates from Inkd – Free to all.

Inkd recently created three new sets of free templates – graphic design identity kits, available for anyone to download right away on Inkd. Each kit includes 6 fully editable designs for a business card, letterhead, postcard , envelope , CD, and even a sample logo. These kits are great as a starting point for a new company, or design inspiration for any designer.

The kit called Craft would be ideal for a design firm or creative group,and is a great example template for designers to play with.

Yumi is a fresh, clean design that is simple and very bubbly. Yumi includes some very cool vector art, and could be used for anyone looking to set their brand apart.

Inkd’s Plan kit features a unique design with green as a primary color, and yellow and blue as the highlights. Plan would make a great technology or architecture related brand.

Businesses are identified by their logo: with an established brand all we have to do is see the logo, and it brings up our whole idea of the company. As such, the logo is an essential part of an organisation’s public face. Especially when starting up, the business’ logo is essential. The logo design company LogoBee has been designing custom logos for companies, projects and organisations, big and small, since 2000. Specializing in corporate logos, they handle any kind of company, from entertainment to churches, using a team of professional in-house designers to produce high quality logos to meet each client’s specific needs.
A logo can’t merely be flashy, screaming “look at me!” It has to portray the client’s whole philosophy, hopes and dreams, show their customers exactly what their business is all about. This is what logo design companies like LogoBee provide. From the warm, friendly atmosphere of a traditional pizza restaurant, to the professionalism and reliability of a credit management company, to the exciting innovation of a web company, a logo may be small, but it has to say a lot.
LogoBee recognises that designing a logo is not an exercise in simple artistic abandon; it is certainly a creative work, but it must be carefully refined for the purposes of the client’s organisation, and for this reason they welcome as much information about the business as the client can give. It need not be a design idea (although it can be), but no one knows more about what the organisation stands for than the clients themselves, which is why LogoBee’s designers work so closely with their clients. The logo can thus properly communicate what the business is about.
It is with these principles in mind that LogoBee has become one of the leading custom logo design companies. Indeed, although their portfolio includes high-profile projects such as pro NFL player Clint Hart’s non-profit Foundation, They have a solid base of helping more than ten thousand companies with their logos and are committed to helping businesses, whatever their size and budget. From a low-cost basic package costing under $300 ($200 during the sale) to the most advanced packages which includes stationeries, a Word template and even website design, LogoBee is all about giving companies, big and small, the opportunity to make a good first impression. Even for a business which cannot afford any of LogoBee’s services, their website is a rich source of information for start-ups, documenting everything from choosing a name, to tips for logo design and even tutorials for creating logos. Also available are readymade logos that customers can download for free and modify themselves.

With the increase in demand of mark up services, the number of service providers has also been increased considerably. All of them are offering more or less same services. But the parameters on which customers actually differentiate and select them are:

1. Quality of Coding

2. Time of the delivery of projects

3. Price

4. Customer Service

5. Ordering Procedure

6. Guarantee

7. Discount

8. Present Client base and testimonials

PixelCrayons is one of the industry leaders of the Mark up Industry. It offers pixel-precise hand-coded markup services (PSD to HTML / XHTML / CSS), implementation of designs into various themes/CMS/shopping carts/blogs and website re-coding services. They believe in complete customer satisfaction. Recently, they have announced that PixelCrayons has 98% Client’s retention rate which is just incredible Today, we will be evaluating PixelCrayons quality of work on all the above parameters.

1. Quality of Coding: When you emphasize on high coding quality services, it is very important to check that your website should be neat and clean, structured, W3C validated and should be cross browsers compatible. Catering to all these requirements, Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com offers mark up which is completely hand coded, cross browser compatible, W3C standards compliant and SEO semantic in nature. In the present time, websites have become the first medium of interaction between company and the customers, it is very important that your website should have good functionality and look good to your customers. PixelCrayons helps you to achieve all your business objectives.

2. Time of the delivery of projects: The standard turnaround time is 8 hours per page which is simply good and does not change under any controllable circumstances.

3. Pricing: PixelCrayons offers very affordable packages to its customers. Its clients just do not want to miss out efficient and cost effective PSD to HTML solutions by the best of the professionals at PixelCrayons.

The company offers Markup Service for Web Page and Email Template, and the price depends on the service your choose.

For Web Page Markup, the packages are as follows:

a) Basic package ($99)

Features offered:

Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional XHTML 1.0 Transitional

W3C Validation: CSS, XHTML & HTML

Browser capability: I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari

b) Professional package ($199)

Features offered:

Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Strict,XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict W3C Validation: CSS2 (Advanced CSS Code Structure), XHTML & HTML Browsers Compatibility: I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari 2.x/3.x, Opera, Konqueror Includes: SEO Semantic Code, Load Speed Optimization, Complete Presentation Separation, Maximum Cross-Browser Compatibility

They also give 50% discount on each additional page you ask for.

For of Email Template, Markup the packages are as follows:

a)Basic Package ($149)

Features Offered:

* Inline CSS Styles

* Table-based markup

* Compatibility: MS Outlook 2003+, Outlook Express & Apple Mail

b) Professional Package ($249)

Features Offered:

* Maximum Compatibility

* Inline CSS Styles

* Table-based markup

* Compatibility: MS Outlook 2003+, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, G mail, Hotmail & YahooMail

4. Discount: This is something which is always expected by the buyers from their service providers. Keeping this mind, Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com offers 50% discount on each additional page ordered as a part of the same order.

5. Ordering procedure: PixelCrayons has purposely kept the ordering process very easy and simple so that its customers should not face any kind of difficulty while coming forward with their requirements. Firstly you need to choose the package out of the two. Then, upload the information by filling up the form. You need to check the boxes for your special requirements like for layouts etc. If you want software implementation then, options are available with extra charges.

6. Price Guarantee: Quality of their work is apparent in their portfolio and their confidence is very much visible in the price guarantee they offer. PixelCrayons promises to match their prices to the price of any service provider equitable to their quality

7. Customer Service: Its clients are just delighted with the 24*7 friendly customer support it provides. The team maintains regular correspondence with customers through mails, calls, online chats via Yahoo, AOl, MSN, Skype messengers and through social media too. You can also connect with them over twitter and facebook.

8. Money Back Guarantee: The team is so confident about their quality of work that they have kept complete money refund policy in case the clients are not happy with their work. They do not want that their customers should assume any kind of risk.

9. Clientele, Testimonials and Work Samples speak a lot: Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com serves in 38 countries with a client base of 2800+. It carries an attractive portfolio in its website which you can always check. The team has received so many appreciable testimonials from clients. eBay, its client, says “50 pages in 3 days flat – oh boy! am I impressed? ” Yes, I think we are also impressed by their working style!!” What say..

So, we see that it stands fairly good on all the parameters. Therefore, get your designs coded by the best of the professionals working at Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com and feel the difference yourself.

After the launch of jQuery many web designer who face problem with javascript now moved to jQuery because of vast range of various effect support from jQuery. Jquery is one of the leading JavaScript framework available now. Just a basic of javascript is required to start using jQuery and implementing some great effect with little knowledge. Since some weeks we are writing jquery tutorials for our readers and today we created this beautiful tutorial and in the end of this tutorial we will learn to Create Animated Landscape using CSS and Jquery. So lets start learning it.

Check Out DEMO

Step 1 : Organize Files

First of all we need to setup all our files which required in this tutorial, create one HTML file, CSS file and image folder which holds all our images

Step 2 : HTML Document

Here we need to write our html document first, which contains wrapper with fixed height and width and within it one container which holds all the elements of our page. Check out the code below

<div id="wrapper">
<div id="inner">
    <div id="cloudone"><img src="images/clud1.png" alt="" /></div>
    <div id="cloudtwo"><img src="images/clud2.png" alt="" /></div>
    <div id="cloudthree"><img src="images/clud1.png" alt="" /></div>
    <div id="boat"><img src="images/boat.png" alt="" /></div>
</div>
</div>

Final HTML codes.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Animated Landscape Using CSS and jQuery</title>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="inner">
    <div id="cloudone"><img src="images/clud1.png"></div>
    <div id="cloudtwo"><img src="images/clud2.png"></div>
    <div id="cloudthree"><img src="images/clud1.png"></div>
    <div id="boat"><img src="images/boat.png"></div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Step 3 : CSS Styling

Now some css styling is required. Important thing to keep in mind is to have overlay hidden for container(#inner) and position absolute for all the moving images. Here we will keep our moving images like clouds and boat out of the container with the help of negative left and right margin so that while using jquery we would have a nice effect. Check out the below CSS codes.

#wrapper {
	width:800px;
	height:600px;
       /* main background image with sky, sun, river and ground */
	background-image:url(images/Untitled-3.jpg);
	background-repeat:no-repeat;
	margin-top:10px;
	margin-left:auto;
	margin-right:auto;
	border: 10px solid #666;
}
#inner {
	position:relative;
	overflow:hidden;
	width:800px;
	height:600px;
	margin:0px;
}
#cloudone {
	position:absolute;
	margin-top:2px;
	margin-left:-200px;
	filter:alpha(opacity=80);
  /* CSS3 standard */
        opacity:0.8;
}
#cloudtwo {
	position:absolute;
	margin-top:80px;
	margin-left:-300px;
	filter:alpha(opacity=60);
  /* CSS3 standard */
        opacity:0.6;
}
#cloudthree {
	position:absolute;
	margin-top:60px;
	margin-left:-600px;
	filter:alpha(opacity=70);
  /* CSS3 standard */
        opacity:0.7;
}
#boat {
	margin-top:360px;
	position:absolute;
	margin-left:800px;
}

Step 4 : Jquery

First of all we need to tag below lines to the head of our html document.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>
<script src="landscape.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:1--></script>

Here we will using double animate function to animate clouds and boat. And to rotate clouds and boat will create one function to do this job. Check out below codes first.

function cloudone(){
    $("#cloudone").animate({left:"+=1200px"},10000).animate({left:"-200px"}, 0)
    setTimeout("cloudone()",10000);
}

In above codes, here we moved class id cloudone to +=1200px which means image will move 1200px of its right and to give sliding effect we used .animate function and the time taken to complete the slide would be 10 second. Now another .animate function will move the image to original position in time interval 0 sec and to start the rotation again we have sum the time intervals of both the animate functions and using setTimeout function we started the rotation loop again. This way animate all the images which you want to slide on the canvas. Check out below codes for more clarification.

function cloudone(){
   $("#cloudone").animate({left:"+=1200px"},10000).animate({left:"-200px"}, 0)
   setTimeout("cloudone()",10000);
}
function cloudtwo(){
   $("#cloudtwo").animate({left:"+=1500px"},15000).animate({left:"-300px"}, 0)
   setTimeout("cloudtwo()",15000);
}
function cloudthree(){
   $("#cloudthree").animate({left:"+=2000px"},20000).animate({left:"-600px"}, 0)
   setTimeout("cloudthree()",20000);
}
function boat(){
   //This time we need to move boat to left side so we put the margin to 1000px
   $("#boat").animate({right:"+=1000px"},20000).animate({right:"-200px"}, 0)
   setTimeout("boat()",20000);
}

Now we need to trigger all our functions ( cloudone(), cloudtwo(), cloudthree() ) the animation will begin as soon as the page load. Check out below codes.

$(document).ready(function() {
	setTimeout("cloudone()",10);
	setTimeout("cloudtwo()",10);
	setTimeout("cloudthree()",10);
	setTimeout("boat()",10);
});

Final Codes

$(document).ready(function() {
	setTimeout("cloudone()",10);
	setTimeout("cloudtwo()",10);
	setTimeout("cloudthree()",10);
	setTimeout("boat()",10);
});
function cloudone(){
	$("#cloudone").animate({left:"+=1200px"},10000).animate({left:"-200px"}, 0)
	setTimeout("cloudone()",10000);
}
function cloudtwo(){
	$("#cloudtwo").animate({left:"+=1500px"},15000).animate({left:"-300px"}, 0)
	setTimeout("cloudtwo()",15000);
}
function cloudthree(){
	$("#cloudthree").animate({left:"+=2000px"},20000).animate({left:"-600px"}, 0)
	setTimeout("cloudthree()",20000);
}
function boat(){
	$("#boat").animate({right:"+=1000px"},20000).animate({right:"-200px"}, 0)
	setTimeout("boat()",20000);
}

Check Out DEMO