I loved being a college student. In those days, there was no Internet, and by extension no Google. So as an English major, I spent hours in the library and checked out enough books that carrying them from dorm to class and back to the library, and repeating this semester after semester had the added benefit of providing arm exercises! But I digress. Today’s students depend heavily on information gleaned through the web.  Instead of books, most carry laptops. Information is instantaneous and as I am discovering so is the urge to pilfer, copy, and violate copyrights.

Professors now have software to help them weed out the offenders. And in the business world, this is becoming a serious problem for companies that are on the leading edge of innovation, and who like Dynamic Digital Advertising showcase a lot of their work. Anyone can put up a website and call himself or herself a web master, but to make the site viable when that person has few skills, tempts the wannabe to troll and see “what’s out there” and then copy/paste images and content and pretend like it is theirs. Appalling, and Paul, who monitors our site for such thievery, finds that trollers come from as far as the Middle East and as close as Maryland. 

At DDA, we work to give the clients who select us, the best design be it for a trifold brochure or a trade show graphic. If the new client comes to us for a website, that company has the complete assurance that we start with a blank slate and build from there. The proof is in the looking. Check out our portfolio, where numerous samples of websites, trade show graphics, medical illustrations, video presentations for anything from a medical device to jewelry bolster my claim. If you study our website carefully, you’ll see we fit the classic Aristotle observation, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”  

I am guilty of wanting many things. Right now my main “want” is a new SLR Digital Camera so I can take more professional looking photographs of my kids. My husband and I also want to put two new windows in our living room to make it brighter. We want to get more topsoil so we can finish planting grass where there are bare spots on our land. I want to lose the last 10 lbs of baby weight and I want a new couch for the living room. I can keep this up all day…  But, there are really only a few things I really need.  

Right now I need to finish 3 website design concepts for a cabinet website we are working on. I do want to work on it but I also really need to finish the designs today. I also need to pick up my kids at noon today and I NEED them to take a nap this afternoon so I can get back to work and cross off other tasks such as revisions to a logo design project and begin work on more website design concepts for another client who was so pleased with our trade show graphic design has asked us to work on their website.  So, as I get back to my design work I will also be thinking of reasons to turn my want for a new Digital SLR Camera into a “need”. 

Trade show graphics are in a unique world by themselves. Sometimes the graphics convey particular messages, and sometimes they provide backdrop ambiance. Sometimes the world is an Alice in Wonderland one.

For a previous medical trade show we created a forest of trees out of larger-than-life-sized needles. For the same show, I created several 10-foot by 17-foot trompe l’oiel backgrounds of surgical rooms, with 3-D mannequin parts sticking out of the drawing!

Creating graphics at such a large size has unique challenges and rules. The fonts must be readable, the file must be examined carefully for image quality, and the file size has to be manageable.

Today, I’m working on a 10-foot high, 4-panel graphic and wrap-around pedastal for a company for which we have created other printed literature. I like that the literature and other graphics we’ve created for them are visually integrated with each other. We’re also photographing a product for this company today, so that it will be large enough to use for the trade show graphic I’m creating, and now they’ll have the photograph on file to use in any future projects as well.

I hope that people visiting their trade show booth will, at least for a few moments, feel immersed in a unique world.

How did we ever get along without email? It’s hard to imagine communicating to colleagues, friends, or family any other way. Whether you use email to say hi to your sister in another town or use it to send important files to your colleague in the office right next to yours, email is not only useful it’s necessary.

One of my main projects this week was to design an Email Newsletter for a very important client of ours who has used many of our other advertising services, such as trade show graphic design, brochure design, and website design. Their request was to have us create an Email Newsletter that their Sales Reps could use to send to their customers daily with product sale information. So, not only is email used for communication, we are also using it, and have been using it, for email marketing… which has become a useful sales tool for many companies.

I know I would much rather find a marketing piece in my email box rather than my mailbox. It’s a much greener alternative!  Think about how you would get through the day without email. Would your productivity be slow? Would the phone be attached to your ear all day? Would you be spending more money on postage? While you ponder those questions, I will finish answering the many new emails I just received.