Over the last decade, marketers have watched as their industry has been turned upside down. According to research compiled by Hubspot, Digital media consumption increased 49 percent - and that's just since 2013. The small business marketing professional must stay in tune with marketing buzzwords, changes in SEO, data analytics, graphic design trends and new disciplines so they stay in the marketing game.
Whether you're a do-it-yourself-er, a creative hobbyist, or a professional designer, sometimes it's challenging wading through the sea of creative tools available today to pick the right one for your specific project. The default for most of us is to try to make it work with our go-to tools — the ones with which we are most familiar, but sometimes the software in our 'comfort zone' is not the best software for the job.
Let's face it, magazine design can be time-consuming and expensive. When start-up magazines first open their doors, money is tight, and keeping the budget skinny is important. Although you may not have the in-house staff to completely produce your magazine, understanding the process and being able to do some edits on your own can be a life saver. Even if you do have the in-house staff, it might be a challenge getting properly formatted files to the printer on-time and on-budget.
If this is you, and you have a Creative Cloud subscription (usually starting at about $70/mo for businesses), you can rein in expenses and creative control by building your own template. To help you with this challenge, I've put together this step by step tutorial.
In a world where digital marketing and advertising have become increasingly popular, brochures have managed to sustain their importance as a printed marketing channel. Portable, versatile and economical, brochures are an excellent way to convey company or product information.
Brochures are one of the most versatile and prolific marketing media in print today, but often times when we go about creating a brochure for our product our thinking can be a bit limited. Many of us tend to jump immediately to the popular Letter Fold (Tri-Fold) format. Although this is a great format, there are many others that may just be a better fit for your message. So what are the different kinds of brochures? Let's have a look.
Ever need to nail something in with the flat side of a wrench? Word Online is definitely not the recommended tool for doing high-level graphic design, but sometimes we need to work with the tools (and the budget) that we have. So to help you with that, I'm going to show you how to create a trifold brochure using Microsoft's free Word Online tool. If you have the Adobe Creative Suite, I recommend you have a look at our InDesign tutorial.
Newsprint is a highly-economical non-archival paper that best-known for its widespread use by news publishers, high-frequency magazines, classified publications, handbooks, phone books, textbooks, journals, guides, manuals and a variety of other common print products. Despite the recent decline in print publishers, newsprint is still widely used in many modern print applications.
There's no doubt that the tri-fold or letter-fold brochure is one of the most popular brochure formats we see being used today, but one format that tends to get overlooked is the z-fold brochure. In this tutorial, we'll be looking at the basics of how to create a z-fold brochure in Adobe Illustrator CC. But first:
The cornerstone of business stationary is the business card. Where did it come from, and why does it matter?
