Design Archives - Dowitcher Designs

Lobster: The New Comic Sans?

Lobster: The New Comic Sans? Lobster. We have all seen it. We have noticed it because Lobster is a beautiful font, with its neat details, strong personality, and a large number of ligatures, carefully designed by Pablo Impallari. The font was created in 2010 and introduced to the Google font library. It started popping up on websites, on packaging, in logos and ads. No one could resist it—...

Lessons in Brand Sentiment and Adaptation: Sherwin-Williams

Lessons in Brand Sentiment and Adaptation: Sherwin-Williams Last year my spouse and I bought a real fixer-upper of a house, and one aspect of the fixing-up process involves coating every square inch in a fresh layer of paint. So every other weekend we make a trip to Sherwin-Williams for supplies, and every other weekend as we pull past the sign and into the lot I think: what the heck is...

Best Practices for an Engaging Annual Report

Best Practices for an Engaging Annual Report It’s that time of year again. The dust has settled from your holiday marketing campaigns and it’s time to reflect and report on last year’s activities. As you probably know, both for-profit and non-profit organizations produce annual reports. An annual report is a formal financial statement sent to shareholders and other interested parties. It’s a...

Design Ethics You Need to Respect

Design Ethics You Need to Respect Design is so much more than the colors and fonts you choose to use on the page. Great, thoughtful, ethical design can make a person feel assured and at ease. It can make a person hungry. It can make a person more likely to trust the information they are reading. That’s a lot of power in the hands of your design team. And not to quote a superhero comic book,...

From Fool to Cool: The Art of a Brand Refresh

From Fool to Cool: The Art of a Brand Refresh It can be easy to get comfortable with the strategies, branding, and promotions that have always worked just fine. The phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” may come to mind every time someone suggests putting time into a brand refresh or design makeover. But after a while, you may pop your head up and realize that your audience has...

10 Fonts to leave in the 2010’s

10 Fonts to leave in the 2010’s Entering a new decade is as good a time as ever to do a design ‘house-cleaning’ and discard the design choices that should be left in the 2010s. Many of these fonts are still beautiful fonts, and that in itself is the issue. When a font becomes popular, everyone wants to use it which can bring the beautiful type face to a sad, early demise. There are quite a...

Revisit your Audience Personas this Holiday

Oh, the holidays… Love them or hate them, they are a great time to boost engagement from a larger audience. When you use the right strategy and targeting, you can grow your audience in a way that benefits you for the New Year and beyond by looking at your audience personas. But is your company’s targeting strategy in November and December the same as...

UX Design Principles + Trends

Did you know almost 90% of consumers say they are less likely to visit a brand’s website after a bad experience? It’s true, a negative experience online mars our opinions and often leads to you losing out on a sale. People base a large portion of a brand’s credibility on how their website looks, feels, and complements the user journey. Simply having a website isn’t...

Why You Need A Style Guide (Even If You Think You Don’t)

That’s right: your business needs a style guide, no ifs, ands, or buts. We talk quite a bit about branding at Dowitcher HQ and a style guide is a really handy thing for clients’ to have prior to embarking on a design project or marketing campaign. What is a style guide? A style guide is a document that helps creators make consistent, on-brand content. It’s a set of...

Accessibility of Typography [Infographic]

Designers need to know how to measure typographic accessibility, or how accessible a font is. This is a pretty fascinating idea to me as it’s not something I’ve thought much about (not a designer!). Choosing an accessible font for your website and collateral is important for all brands. We often consider inclusive design and accessibility enhancements that can be made to our...

Want to write a compelling creative brief? Ask these questions.

Want to write a compelling creative brief? Ask these questions. A creative brief provides the vision and parameters for all work done on a project. It summarizes marketing touchpoints and ultimately makes it easier for both the client and the agency to track progress. Creative briefs document the client and agency relationship throughout the project while guiding the process. Here are...