Tips for Student Designers and the Small Businesses Who Love Them: OrangeSlyce Life

When looking for a new background for your Twitter account, or just a color palette for painting your walls, it can be tough for find an appealing palette.  Colors need to complement each other in the right ways and it can be tough to find an expert besides Pantone to help you decide.  That’s where today’s featured community, Colourlovers, absolutely shines.

A community for color lovers
Colourlovers is an excellent alternative to the monopoly on color that Pantone has.  Typically, designers need to pay Pantone big time to get the latest color forecasts.  Most companies actually do this so they can gain access to Pantone’s numbering system for colors.  Companies can then use a standard format so they know which hue they are referring to.  What Colourlovers provides won’t immediately make Pantone irrelevant, but they do offer some great tools for coming up with a color scheme, browsing popular color patterns, and engaging in an enthusiastic community.

Within minutes of signing up, I was able to create a color palette from the standard set of RGB colors, but I wasn’t finished there.  With tools to create patterns from those colors, I was able to create a pretty serviceable background image that tiled nicely.  It’s a shame I went to all that trouble because then I found Themeleon, a simple 3 step process to customize your entire Twitter page.

As I dig deeper in the site I keep discovering more tools that stretch my imagination even further.  Their PHOTOCOPA tool lets you create a color palette from a picture, which is great for when you have source material you are trying to emulate.  Their community is full of people and groups devoted to creating great patterns and sharing them with others.  For example, I found a group dedicated to their love of guitar colors.

Trends is a section focusing solely on what is happening in the world of color right now.  They feature color trends from everything to web design all the way to street fashion.  This is where Colourlovers begins to be a valuable resource to any designer trying to keep ahead of the fashion curve.

It’s impossible to describe an entire community in one blog post, but I’ve already fallen enough in love with Colourlovers that it is my go to source when I’m dealing with color.  Make sure to check it out and share some of your patterns with us!

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A few weeks ago, we gave a few tips on how to design your business cards. Having a well made business card is one of the best investments for the money you can ever make.  That card costing pennies to make, could lead to that big sales deal worth thousands of dollars.  You may be tempted to make your own business cards using whatever software came with your printer, but stay away from that junk.  It’s too easy to tell the difference between a professionally made card and one made on software designed for your grandmother to use and printed out on a printer thats cheaper than the ink used to print it.  Professional printers can be found locally and online, and designers can be found right here at OrangeSlyce!  We’ll go over a few options when it comes to printers.

Finding a local printer
One of the benefits of using a local printer is you can pick them up the day they’re ready.  If you’re on an urgent deadline like a networking event or convention, a local printer can often get your cards finished much faster than an online shop.  You can also feel the paper they are going to use before they print.  Many times they will also have a portfolio on file of either previous print jobs, or samples.  Look through them carefully.  You’re going to be trusting the shop with your company’s brand and identity.  Check to see if they have satisfaction guarantees and shop around for pricing.  You might find Kinko’s will charge less but will have lower quality.  A smaller print shop might charge more but the quality is exceptional.  Check online ratings sites like Rate it all! or Yelp for reviews.

Online printers and deals
If you’re not on a time budget, there are deals to be found online.  Here are just a few I found when searching online.

123print.com – Comes with an easy way to upload your design as well as an online app for creating your own.  They all offer thousands of designs to choose from if you aren’t interested in making your own.  Packages start as cheap as $3.95 for 30 cards and you can get 5000 cards for just under $100.  Be sure to check out their price chart.

Overnight Prints – By offering prints overnight, this aptly named company can be a solution to someone who needs cards quick, but can’t get to a local printer.  Prices start at $1.98 for 25 cards with regular ground shipping, with priority shipping available.  Use the promo code 20BCARDS to get 20% off.

Vistaprint – For those on a budget, Vistaprint offers cards at the right price – free!  Though you still pay for shipping, have a limited selection of designs, and they slap the Vistaprint logo on the back, it’s a great option for those on a budget.  They also have premium cards which allow you to upload your design.  When you’re done ordering your business cards, check out the other products they offer like stamps, pens, checks, car door magnets, post cards, brochures, flyers and many more.

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Customers and employees come and go and fads roll in and out like the tides.  However, businesses and industries try to make plans for these changes.  The universe never gives us a sure thing when it comes to life or business.  A wise Air Force captain once said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” and sometimes things do go horribly wrong.  Business Continuity Plans, or BCPs, are essential for businesses of all sizes.  For example, due to poor planning 44% of businesses that experience a fire fail to reopen.  Planning for the absolute worst may make you seem like a worrier, but when fire, flood, plague, power outage or 2012 happens, you’ll be glad you came up with a plan.  When coming up with your BCP, follow these five phases:

1 | Analysis
Go through your entire business and document all processes and procedures.  Take inventory of all equipment – desks, computers, filing cabinets, even employees.  Get contact info for all employees, suppliers, and major clients.  You’ll need to know every gritty little detail of your business for the next step.  Also in this step, start thinking of possible worst case scenarios for each area.  These could include a fire in the office, a disgruntled employee sabotaging equipment or stealing data, or a security hole that allows a hacker to steal information.

2 | Solution design
Using the information you gathered, start building solutions to potential threats.  Threats can include anything that would disrupt your business – natural disasters, utility outages, cyber attacks, terrorism or even just construction on the street outside your business.  Lumping these threats into groups is a great way to start.  Focusing on data security helps mitigate threats of hackers as well as employee theft.  Maybe this is also a good time to take paper records and start digitizing them, or removing paper and going completely digital.  Have a system to back up your digital records.  Perhaps outsourcing key processes would not only spread your risk thinner, but reduce costs.  This is also the time to review and update your insurance.  Since we took stock of all our assets, signing up for disaster insurance to replace losses is much easier.  You’ve also gathered your employees’ contact information – put together a contact sheet and distribute it to all employees.  If there is a total loss to the building you work in, have your employees plan to work remotely for a period of time while you look for a new building.  Your BCP will be different from other businesses’, so tailor it to your needs and risk tolerance.

3 | Implementation
Now that you’ve got plans and procedures for your BCP, implement it!  Coordinate with your staff and set the expectation that if things go wrong they should follow the plan.

4 | Testing
Once you have your BCP in place, make sure to test it out periodically – annually or biannually should do fine.  Try to create a situation that is out of the ordinary but your business will be able to sustain the impact.  Unplug a server and see if the workaround in the plan is successful.  Run a fire drill and send all employees home for an afternoon to work there.  After each test, review whether the plan kept you in business or if you would have had a much larger negative impact.

5 | Maintenance
Over time your BCP will change as your business changes.  Make sure to update things like employee contact info or department changes and communicate those changes throughout your company.  Verify that your insurance is up to date.  Maybe you have decided to have all employees work at home and there isn’t an office anymore to insure.  That needs to be reflected in your BCP.  Update information security policies and ensure all security software is up to date.  Any new processes also need to be documented.

Now that you have a solid process for ensuring your business will survive catastrophe, put everything together in a binder and make several copies.  Give all critical personnel their own copy.  Keep a few visible around the office and make them brightly colored.  Keep one in your car.  You’ll never know when or where you’ll be when you need to reference it.  This binder will be your strength during the toughest times.

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Lots of people have toyed with the idea of starting their own business, becoming their own boss, or somehow changing the world.  However, most people are downtrodden by bullet points that have been engrained in them, about how starting a business isn’t worth the trouble.  Today we’re going to put some of these ideas where they belong – in the dump.

1)   XX% of Small Businesses Fail
I laugh every time I hear this statistic.  Sometimes it’s 50%.  Sometimes 90%.  It’s the idea that because you are a small business you will fail, regardless of who you are or what your business is.  This automatically puts risk on being an entrepreneur that most can’t stomach.  There are two things wrong with this fact – the definition of small business and the definition of failure.  First, ‘small’ covers such a huge range of businesses.  How do you define the size of your company?  Revenue?  Number of employees?  Carbon footprint?  Secondly, how do you define failure?  Has the time commitment and stress of the company gotten to you and you voluntarily close down?  Or have you missed your revenue target and only made six figures instead of seven?  Most would consider that a successful exit.

2)   It Takes Money to Make Money
You’ll be told you’ll need a building, employees, equipment, and inventory and you’ll need money up front to even get your dream off the ground – yeah, if you’re in a capital intensive industry.  Using all the free tools and resources online, starting a business has never been cheaper.  Starting a blog and selling shirts on Cafepress.com requires exactly $0.00 (that’s American dollars, by the way), and you don’t need to manage inventory.  Even if you need monthly costs for online storage and servers, it’s getting cheaper every day.

3)   You Need a Rock Solid Business Plan
The myth is that you need a great business plan, usually to get business loans or secure funding, in order to be successful.  Having a focus or a target market is a good thing.  Having a document that you will measure the rest of your life against isn’t.  If you do have a business plan, save the trees and don’t bother printing it out, because it will change constantly.  Part of being a startup is flexibility.  Think of companies who are now offering radically different services and products than when they first started – Google comes to mind immediately.

4)   You Need a Great Idea
The inspiration for this post comes from a friend of mine.  He’s a great guy.  He’s even letting me be his best man at his wedding.  He’s the type that has tons of ideas and knows he’s going to be a millionaire because of them – yet, he does nothing with those ideas.  It turns out ideas are like belly-buttons, everyone has them (unless you were born in a test tube).  It’s what you do with your ideas that will matter.  Even if your idea is something that’s been done before, if you do it better your product will take off.  Which leads us to…

5)   You Need to Be First
Many people instantly give up on their dream the second they hear that someone else already has something just like it.  This is actually a good thing.  You now have a real world example that you can watch and follow.  Improve on their shortcomings.  Learn from their mistakes.  Facebook certainly wasn’t the first to offer people a way to connect with their friends, but they have the most users in the world.  Apple wasn’t the first to make great computers, portable music devices, phones or even tablets but they are now the biggest consumer electronics company in the world.

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When designing anything, it’s easy to get caught in a trap of only focusing on the visual aesthetic or making it catch your eye.  Often times design can serve much more engaging purposes.  We’ve talked about services that show you what people look at when they visit your site.  It’s an important tool.  But what if you could also guide what they do when they visit your site or use your product?

Design with Intent
One of the most valuable design references I’ve ever come across is Dan Lockton’s Design with Intent cards.  A Creative Commons licensed deck of cards, Design with Intent contains 101 patterns for influencing what your users actually do with your product.  Divided into “lenses” like Architecture, Errorproofing and Interaction, these cards come complete with real world examples of how to influence behavior through design.  Examples range from the physical world, to our emotional needs as people.

Guilt is a great motivator
Here are a couple of my personal favorites (you should still download the whole deck and check each one out).

I’ve found every single one of these cards to not only be interesting, but insightful and inspiring.  Many of these are obvious and make you laugh when you finally realize they have been under your nose this whole time.  Many of the cards deal with topics we’ve talked about before like the Anchoring Effect.  Check these out and let us know what you think!

• Design with Intent – Dan Lockton

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Part of being a successful business owner is knowing who your customers even are. Before deciding that you need a logo designed or copy to be written, take some time to figure out who you plan on providing your product or service to. Today, Lifehacker featured MyBestSegments, and showed how you can use this tool from Nielson to see how you are marketed to. This is mildly interesting if you’re a consumer, but a powerful tool as a business.

You Are Where You Live
By entering the zip codes in the area you are hoping to target, You Are Where You Live will show you the major demographics according to Nielsen’s lifestyle segmentation systems. Let’s take beautiful Tempe, Arizona for example.

Tempe ranks high segments like Bohemian Mix and Young Influentials. By clicking on the descriptions of the segments, you get explainations detailing traits like income and age ranges, ethnic diversity and education levels as well as housing arrangements. The site explains “Bohemian Mixers are the early adopters who are quick to check out the latest movie, nightclub, laptop, and microbrew.”

Targeted Design
Knowing the kinds of people living in your area should now help you in your design process. Living in an area with finicky consumers with tastes for new and fresh ideas would warrant having a modern logo design and a marketing campaign showing your new products. Having customers with more conservative wants would guide you to choosing a more classic look with familiar tones and conventional advertising.

Just because you are different than everyone else doesn’t guarantee you business success. Finding where you fall in the location you plan on doing business in will make you more successful than just trying to stand out. Guide your design and marketing programs accordingly and you’ll become a part of the community.

• MyBestSegments – You Are Where You Live

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Part of freelance work is flexibility and being able to negotiate the price you charge your client will broaden your opportunities.  However, when going into a price or salary negotiation, it is important to know about what you’re negotiating so you don’t get taken advantage of.

Do your market research
Finding out what the going rate for similar work or jobs should be your first task.  Using the salary wizard at Salary.com, I was able to find the median salary for a junior web designer in Phoenix, AZ was $48,000.  Another research tip is to find other artists and designers and ask what they charge.  Ask how flexible they can be on price.  Get an idea of where you can fit in the market.

Negotiating tactics
Negotiation is an art itself.  Good negotiators are hard to come by so even if all you learn is how to haggle, you’ll have come away from this post with something.

Price is nothing more than a mind trick in most cases.  This is articulated by the phenomenon known as the Anchoring Effect.  I definitely recommend reading the article in depth, but to summarize, whoever names the first price is in the driver’s seat.  No matter how much you negotiate, the first price quoted is the price both parties will subconsciously use to determine who got the better end of the bargain.

Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has excellent posts on how to negotiate – everything from negotiating bank fees, car insurance, cell phones and most importantly – salary.

And to completely round out your negotiating skills, learn from the masters of the art, the ultimate hagglers – rickshaw drivers.

Improve your skills
Using the market research you’ve collected and the negotiating skills you’ve learned, you can increase your income, but there’s nothing like a quality education that will boost your earnings potential.  Having a degree or certification is a key bargaining tool that you can use during your negotiation process and no amount of jedi mind tricks will have the same effect as a degree.

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Nothing says you mean business like Helvetica on a three and a half by two inch, 100 lb. card stock.  Unless of course your business card was drawn with junk home printer software, MS Paint or crayon.  You’ll no doubt be able to find a local printer to professionally create your design, but they need your help before sending them final copy.  Using the right application to make your card and saving it in the right size and format will save you the embarrassment of having a lousy print job.

Vectors Are Your Friend

You’re going to want to get access to decent vector image editing software.  You can go all out and get Adobe Illustrator, or use a free solution like Aviary’s Raven.  The key is that it’s a vector editor and not a raster editor.  Wikipedia has a great article on vector graphics.  Check out the difference between raster and vector images below.



See the difference?  You’re going to want to send files that, when resized, keep their shape and don’t pixelate.

Let It Bleed

You’re going to want to make your design a little bigger than an actual business card.  This extra space is called bleed.  Most printers require this so that when they cut the card to size, there are no distracting white borders.  As an example, here are the guidelines that optimalprint.com uses:

For those not metrically inclined, you’re going to want about 1/8 of an inch around all sides for a 3.5 x 2 inch card.

Saving Your Design

Check with your printer to see which file formats they prefer.  Nearly all professionals will accept PDF files.  PDF files are great because they will save the vector graphics of your design in case any resizing needs to be done.  If your printer won’t accept PDF, reconsider using them – they are likely not seasoned professionals and might botch the job.

Once you’ve got your final design in place, send it off to the printer.  You’ll soon be basking in custom, professionally made, business card glory.

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There is a handful of organizational structures that the business savvy can choose from when starting out. Hands down though, the Limited Liability Company is near the top of the list here in Arizona.

Advantages of an Arizona LLC

• Limited Liability:  As the name suggests, the owners, usually referred to as “members,” of an LLC have the limited liability protection of a corporation.  This is meant to–and in large part does–protect the members from some or all liability for acts and debts incurred by the LLC.
• Flexible Profit Distribution:  LLCs have tremendous flexibility in choosing profit distributions, unlike partnerships for example where there is typically a 50-50 split.
• No Minutes:  Corporate structures are required to have meetings, keep records of minutes, and record resolutions as well as file annual reports.  All expenses of time or cash, all not necessary with an LLC.
• Tax Structures: All business losses, profits, and expenses of the company flow to the individual members.  There is no double taxation where one pays a corporate tax and an individual tax.  In most cases, this will be a tax advantage though there are some circumstances where having a corporate tax structure can be favorable.

Disadvantages of an Arizona LLC

• Limited Life: Unlike a corporation which lives forever, an LLC is dissolved when a member dies or goes into bankruptcy. If you are not the sole member of the LLC, you should probably supplement the organization with a buy-sell agreement to cover such circumstances. Otherwise, you could find the deceased or bankrupt member’s interest going into an estate or being handled by their creditors.
• The Public Option: If you plan on taking your company public in the near future or issuing employee shares, you will be better served by choosing a corporate structure.
• Added Complexity:  Running a sole-proprietorship or partnership will have less paperwork and complexity than an LLC.

In general, you’ll be well served by the LLC structure, but remember to look into the other organizational structures before making a decision. And, if at the end of the day you’re still unsure, talk to a lawyer. They’ll tell you what to do. They always seem ready to do that.

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