Last night I watched part of a movie, “What A Way To Go.” The subject matter was serious, very well documented, and the presentation was poetic.

My friend asked, “Do you think that movie was done artistically?” I said, emphatically, “Yes.”

The movie, which consists of a collage of images and interviews, has a consistent background ambience created by music and old movie clips.

However, I mentioned that it looked low budget, and that perhaps it was taken with someone’s home camera. This doesn’t matter to me at all, and did not take away from my enjoyment of the movie or how artistic I think it is, but my friend, who also thinks highly of the movie, felt I was being insulting.

I tried to explain that I was just making a observation, based on seeing many movies, that if the producer created more movies and had better equipment, it would appear more technically “slick.”

Technical skills are very important at DDA, and DDA’s writers, graphic designers, web designers, and videographers pay close attention to them. Although technical skills may be grasped intuitively by some people, if not, it’s no problem, because they can always be learned.

From my work illustrating academic textbooks before I was hired by DDA, I learned many technical copywriting details, like what is the proper minus sign to use in an equation, to add a space before and after an equal sign, and to use straight instead of curly quotation marks for measurements.

DDA’s writers know the rules of grammer, but what makes their writing interesting is their creativity. Likewise, as a designer, I must be aware of rules about typography, what font size to use on websites, how to photomanipulate an image, and what colors are best for certain markets. But all of these rules would be useless if they weren’t fueled by creativity.

Here at DDA, we are all driven by a desire to create interesting and quality work, and that provides great motivation to learn the technical details!

Like smells, colors may mean different things to different people and stir up memories that would otherwise be forgotten. For example, every time I smell Garnier Fructis shampoo it reminds me of when I had morning sickness. This is a smell I don’t ever wish to smell again. Color and certain color combinations also carry around different meanings and create a mood, welcomed or not.

In the corporate world, companies adopt their corporate colors - brown for UPS, yellow for DHL and purple/orange for Fedex - and use these colors as the main focus of their branding. UPS has certainly taken their corporate color and created an entire marketing theme: “What can brown do for you?” Color choice, along with all the other ingredients to a successful design (typography, composition, photography, imagery, illustration), needs careful consideration before beginning a project.

Just now I got a phone call from a client requesting that their video animation be placed on a dark blue background to create a slick, classy look. While I am sure we can create a slick, classy video animation on any color background, for this particular client dark blue was chosen. Luckily there are some general rules when choosing the proper color and as with all rules there are exceptions. Except the rule about running with scissors. That should never ever be broken. 

Here are a few: Stay away from reds when designing for the healthcare industry. Yellows, reds, and oranges are great color choices for restaurants and the food industry as they have been proven to increase one’s appetite while blues have been proven to suppress ones appetite as people commonly associate them with mold or rot. However, blue is a great choice for very corporate companies that want to emote dedication, trust, and loyalty.   

Starting a new design, whether it be a logo, brochure, or a website design is very much like a puzzle that can be put together in a number of successful ways. Imagery, photographs, colors, logos are all collected. The target audience, design goals, functionality are all necessary considerations. Once all your “pieces” are prepared and organized, the real work can begin.

As you prepare your puzzle “pieces,” quite often the design begins to unfold in front of you without much effort. Of course, experience and a thorough knowledge of graphic design software is vital in making sure the “pieces” are put together correctly and efficiently. Fortunately at Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA), our degreed graphic designers and project coordinators have the experience, creativity, and wide range of talents such as digital photography, illustration, proper use of typography, and color that help put together all of our puzzles.