Eric and I have been commuting to work on our bikes for just over half a year now. We started when the weather was gloriously sunny and warm and the leaves were just starting to turn golden, kept biking through the cold and rain, and again in pleasant spring weather. Our odometers are on the crest of rolling over to 1,000 miles, just in time to celebrate Bike to Work and School Day this week.

From day one of our commute, we understood how perfect the transition from home to our downtown office is. We begin, paniers tightly packed with laptops and lunch, by hoping on the old railroad greenway trail for a quiet introduction to the outside world and work day.

The trail meanders until we  abruptly meet a bridge that takes us over I-5, where we watch others make their commute.

Biking through the sleepy neighborhood brings us a little closer to civilization. Plenty of newly planted gardens greet us this time of year, and if we’re lucky we’ll even see a cat or two taking in the morning sun.

A turn onto Cornwall Avenue means we are now traveling alongside cars, safely in our bike lane. Coasting down the hill we see kids starting their school day, smell freshly baked donuts, and gradually enter the downtown area.

More breakfast smells tempt us. Arlis’s is full of people  starting their day with a  home cooked breakfast, and we fly through the smell of bacon as we pass The Daisy Cafe across from our office. If we’re lucky, our downstairs neighbor Taco Lobo has accidentally left on their outdoor speakers and we hear  the perpetually chipper, bass driven  ”oompa-oompa-oom-pa-pa” they play. We have arrived at our office, in the the heart of downtown Bellingham.

The ride home is just as nice, except the transition is from a downtown area to a neighborhood path – a nice way to unwind and put work behind us after a long day.

Make-ready sheets are something that are most likely as old as printing itself. When setting up a press and adjusting details like ink levels and paper alignment, it is wasteful to use precious blank paper. As a practical measure, printed sheets that have been used to set up previous print jobs are used for this part of the process, again and again. These are called make-readies.

This printed sheet's history started three years ago as a notecard. It was then used to test a print of a Shew Design idea book cover, and finally Chocolate Necessities chocolate bar wrappers were printed on top last week while setting up the print run.

This overlap of inks and shapes can often create printed sheets that are quite beautiful. If you’re lucky, a few are worth pulling and hanging up on your inspiration board. If you’re really lucky, the overprinted inks, shapes and impressions solve a design problem or spark a creative idea for a new project.

Colors and textures often overlap in interesting and unexpected ways.

Testing how text reads printed over multiple colors can be a useful reference for future projects.

The world of make-readies is not made up entirely of accidents, however. This part of the printing process is a great chance to experiment with paper and ink combinations. Want to know what light blue looks like on a burnt orange paper stock? What it looks like overlapping a green ink? Ending a print run and having a chance to use the plates and ink that are on the press at the moment is a great time to experiment with other projects in mind.

Chocolate bar wrappers for Chocolate Necessities were printed on a soft white paper.

Thinking ahead for future projects, kraft paper was used at the end of the print run so see how a natural paper stock would interact with the colors and design. Being able to show the client these samples - actual inks on actual paper - is invaluable.

Make-readies are really about the experience of printing and strange harmonies that emerge when you put two unrelated things on top another. As a printer, they give me the opportunity to try out some unusual combinations of colors and impressions and I feel more confident about taking on unusual jobs. I’m also struck by how paper interacts with design. Again and again.

Paradoxically, I save the creative make-ready aspects of the project for the end of a print run – the desert of sorts. What traditional printers would initially do and throw away is now considered the heart of a print project. Happy accidents, indeed.

Pantone is a system that designers, printers, interior designers, and similar creative professionals use to talk about color in a measured way. Each color has a number. PMS 138 is bright orange and its recipe is 14 parts yellow, 2 parts warm red and ¼ part black. Mix those Pantone base inks in those proportions and you will achieve that exact PMS color. PMS 2945 is dark blue and has its own recipe. Pantone 17-1463 is Tangerine Tango, the 2012 color of the year – at least according to Pantone. I haven’t chosen a “color of the year” for 2012, but we did choose a tangerine orange for Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood’s “Tango and Tapas” fundraiser event last Fall. Charming coincidence.

What is amazing to me is that until Pantone added 566 new colors to their PMS collection almost two years ago, the PMS pallet had remained virtually the same for almost 50 years. Certainly color trends came and went, but were printed using the existing Pantone palette of colors.

It’s an amazing system for having lasted so long, but it’s not without its frustrations.  The green section of my old swatch book is faded and tattered from my continuous search for a green without too much blue or too much yellow. The red section is almost as worn from looking for a rich but still vibrant red.  I saw and loved these colors in my designs but there was no equivalent in the Pantone swatch books, and so no option for using it on an offset press with spot inks. It was a bit like a phantom limb.

The new Pantone system  includes new GEO inks, and suddenly it’s as if the lights have turned on. There are many of the missing colors I’ve been looking for and designing for. Thousands of new colors to use. Of course, not every printer uses the new color set (we will have to purchase more inks for our press to mix these formulas) but it’s truly wonderful to be able to use color combos that match the colors I want and see.

understanding your audience is the essence of communication

Website development is inherently challenging, and when a website is complete the temptation is often to take a break and move on to other things. Unfortunately, a brief rest can easily turn into a hiatus of several months or more.

Our company is trying to help our clients break this pattern by thinking of online marketing as an ongoing process involving a coordinated effort among a variety of roles and tools.

One important tool that people can overlook is analytics – or traffic analysis. There are many tools available that perform this function, but the one we recommend is Google Analytics – which is both powerful and free.

Analytics works through a small code that’s embedded in your site that tracks who visits your site, how they found it, and what they do while they’re there. Here is an overview of some of the many things you can learn from Analytics, and how it can help drive your marketing efforts.

measure performance of inbound marketing tools

If your organization uses Facebook, Twitter, email broadcasts, or other online marketing tools, you can easily learn which tools are drawing people to your site in addition to what type of content is creating interest. Folding this information into an internal decision making process can help you continually learn about your audience, refine your content, and invest your time and energy in the tools that have the most impact.

learn what your audience is interested in

Features such as the Inpage Analytics create a data overlay on top of your existing pages that creates a “heat map” of what people click on and (more importantly) what they don’t click. Analytics makes it easy to identify pages and links that receive virtually no activity so you can then adjust your content or navigation concept, and create links that are more compelling and relevant to your audience.

In addition, each page has a “bounce” rate. A bounce is a site visit where only one page is reviewed, a  indication that the visitor either found exactly what they were looking for or (more likely) left instantly thinking they would find it elsewhere. Though of course the bounce rate means different things depending on the page, a common rule of thumb is anything larger than 50% is an indication that something is wrong – most likely in the content.

There are a number of tools in development in Analytics that lay bare the flow people follow when moving from page to page, the things that make them continue to explore, and the things that make them leave. Seen as a whole, the movements become like studying flocking behavior in birds – the fascinating patterns of groups and the individuals that comprise them.

foster an ethic of continuous, relentless self-improvement

The wealth of instantly available information rewards a patient, ongoing pattern of experimentation/evaluation that can help you learn quickly and reasonably painlessly. Studying click through on a series of Facebook posts, for example, can help safely and inexpensively guide a print based campaign.

Email broadcasts provide a good measurement of improvement.Though the people we reach out to continues to grow, a few key numbers – such as the percentage of people who read email and who visit our site – remain remarkably consistent, usually within a single percentage point month after month. This stability helps us make predictions accurately, it also creates a number of ‘what if’ scenarios where we can change one variable to see the impact on our numbers.  The goal is always to do better and to let the audience show us how to do it.

A strategy of continuous observation coupled with healthy curiosity about doing things better, year after year, help us to be better communicators and a better company. It can for you, too.

I thought The Devil Wears Prada had a wonderful insight into the culture of design and the mindset of designers. You may be able tell at a glance that I am somewhat a stranger to fashion, but there was much of this movie I could relate to – none more so than the scene above.

I think the reason I could so easily relate is I feel that, fairly late in life, I made the transition from being like the Anne Hathaway character to being like the Meryl Streep character. I can see this scene from both character’s point of view.

Here’s a design / branding version of the Meryl Streep’s cerulean sweater, and it comes from another “devil” of sorts: Martha Stewart.  In just over ten years, a distinctive type family linked with her personal brand went from iconic status to something nearly despised by some as the “next Papyrus.” Here is how this played out.

Archer back in 2000 when it first emerged. It is quintessentially "Martha."

Archer is what’s known as a slab serif, a type of typography that is industrial in a graceless masculine way. It would be at home in 50s and 40s boy scout manuals, US army paperwork, electronics kits, and hardware catalogs. I speak in generalities because there are many exceptions. Hoefler and Frere-Jones rethought the concept of a slab serif, preserving the sturdiness of it but adding an element of grace. From a type nerd point of view, it was like something totally new under the sun, a brilliant reconciling of two opposites: boiling, frozen water. This was in 2000. The font was Archer, the client was Martha Stewart Living magazine.

Archer is a graceful, beautiful slab serif type family

And it suited her to a T. The typeface was a masterpiece – versatile, beautiful, tough as nails, smart, smart, relentlessly smart – just like Martha. And (so far as I could see) possessed by her and her alone. It was used brilliantly, and part of that brilliance was that it was invisible to all but a few. You’ve doubtless heard of Martha, but this is probably the first you’ve heard about her typography – yet it continues to be a powerful presence in her brand.  Archer is her font.

I coveted it and  searched for it for years until I stumbled on an announcement of its release as a “new” font from H&FJ. Later, I figured it out that type families are commissioned for private use and then often later become available to the public. That was in 2007. There were seven years between Martha’s use of this font and it’s public release.

You can surely guess the rest of the story. Now Archer is everywhere and designers of a certain type are starting to roll their collective eyes in horror of it all. I guess they’re right. Archer has become the go to font that buttoned up organizations are using to create a home crafted, earnest, but still sophisticated voice. Once this goes stale, they will move onto the next thing.

Twelve years later

Enough already

I look forward to that cycle – including the inevitable backlash among the designers – finishing soon. This type family can then enter into a cultural equilibrium, joining the pantheon of wonderful, time honored type families that designers use (and use sparingly) for years to come. This will only happen in the distant, distant future when all recent goings on have long faded from memory. Say 2016.

Maxell

Volkswagen. Original text: “Think small.”

Guinness. Original text: “Have a Guinness when you’re tired.”

iPod, Apple.

Bethlehem Steel. Original text:  “New York. Brought to you by Bethlehem Steel.”

Pepto Bismol

Smokey the Bear. Original text: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaign

Marlborough. Original text “Marlborough Country”

Nike. Original text: “Just do it.”

Family Planning Association. Original text: “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Original text: “This is your brain on drugs.”

Tootsie Pop. Original text: “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.”

Raid.

Ajax

Adding  warmer colors to the design would break the brand concept. Not optimal. Instead, we applied a very light branded  green to the background. This slight, almost imperceptible change didn’t seem to break with the brand and made the end result that much warmer. Problem solved.

The cause of the issue lies in the nature of how print vs. screen. I think it’s the nature of reflected light, which is inherently richer and more complex than light emitted from screen, especially when reflected by an organic surface such as paper.  Printed through high end production process on quality paper, the design that seemed crisp and inviting on print, seemed stark on screen.

The take away was for us to think about the subtle message carried by the background, and how creating a quality product is being sensitive to those details. More importantly, it is another example that observing the spirit of a thing is more important than observing it to the letter. In this case, we adjusted our pristine white paper brand concept to accommodate the realities of computer monitors.

Just as an architect designs buildings to “breathe”, to respond to wind by swaying back and forth, or a carpenters builds furniture to accommodate how wood shrinks and grows with temperature, good branding is about building systems that flexibly (and usually invisibly) accommodate different circumstances without being breaking down.