Design Archives - Dowitcher Designs

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 comprehensive...

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 standards...

How To Achieve Visual Hierarchy

How To Achieve Visual Hierarchy Design is not solely about creating pretty things but also about effectively communicating the right message to the audience. To successfully communicate visually, designers consider three main things: typography, hierarchy, and color. Designers must ensure the font type and size are legible, that the first element you see is the most important, that colors aren’t...

Why You Need A Style Guide

Why Your Brand Needs a Style Guide The purpose of a brand style guide is ensure that contributors can create content in a clear way that reflects the brand’s style. Cohesion is important because it establishes a strong brand voice that will resonate with your target audience and build brand awareness. A well-developed style guide is a key tool in establishing brand identity. Also...

Creating a Request for Proposal (RFP)

You’re ready. You have the project funding, or at least enough to get you started. Or maybe you’re sure you’re going to get the funding but you need the official documentation to release it. Wherever you are in your process, you’re ready for qualified bids and it’s time to craft a Request for Proposals (RFP). We know there are many types of RFPs. We’re going to dig into the ones we know best and...

10 Questions To Ask Before Hiring a Marketing Agency

Want to find new customers? Build a stronger brand? Engage with existing customers? Effective marketing campaigns require careful planning and your business or organization just might not have the resources to do it in-house. Hiring a marketing agency can help achieve results for your business. What do you need to know before hiring a marketing agency? This marketing agency wants to help out; here...

What Do Successful Companies’ Logos Have In Common?

Your company logo isn’t the single gauge for success but it doesn’t hurt to have a well-thought-out, striking logo design. It is, after all, the face of your company – your brand identity that shows up all over your website, your signs, your print collateral, your building, and more. What goes into a logo design? Are there any patterns that might indicate the businesses’...

Best Sites for Beautiful Business Cards: Our Top Picks

Image via Zazzle As long as I have industry events, parties, and networking mixers to attend, I will always have a need for business cards to hand out. And I’m sure this is the case for everybody else, too, right? Sure, there’s been a decline in demand for traditional printed marketing materials over the years (you’ll never hear me go as far as claiming that “print is dead,”...

Email Design Trends: 2017 is the Year of Interactive Emails

For about a decade, the technology behind email didn’t change much. But the last five years or so have seen a quasi-revolution in email marketing. Marketers knew that email has one of the strongest (and easiest to track) ROI and they began to see even more return when they leveraged technology that was inline with messaging being distributed across multiple channels. The world went mobile...

Awesome Web Design Trends You Need to be Aware of in 2017

Web design trends come and go. From the emergence of flat design to the rampant use of GIFs, we’ve seen it all. The lovely infographic below by designhill spells out eight web design trends we can expect to see more of this year. Keep reading for my thoughts on why these design trends are so important. (I also threw a couple of my own ideas into the mix.) ~ ~ ~ MOBILE-FIRST APPROACH Do I even...

Talk About Type with These Helpful Terms

Most of us know whether we like — or hate — a font, but we don’t know why. Could it be those curly things on the ends? What about the way it leans, or whether the edges are rounded or sharp? When it comes to typography, most folks can’t tell an arc from an arm. Which is just fine — after all, most of us don’t spend more than five minutes in a lifetime picking out fonts. But if...

iPhone Screen UX

It’s a familiar story: you step out of the car and your cellphone immediately falls out of your pocket. Time freezes and you swear your heart stops in that instant. You’re instantly running through options in your head – how quickly can you get to a store to fix the phone? Worst case scenario, how long might you have to survive sans phone? Because you know, even before the phone...

Tag: Design