Seattle's Valentine's Day Dash - How to Make Love

With Seattle's Love 'em or Leave 'em Valentine's Day Dash at Green Lake coming up on Saturday, February 12th, we thought as the hired graphic designer for the event, we would share with you a practice that we commonly do for all of the Seattle area running races that we design for. The topic at hand is the selecting of event photos and the value that this practice provides.

Step #1 is to find a good photo. We (Viewhalloo Designs) attend the events we design for and take the photos ourselves, so for us having a good photo is easy. For the Valentine's Day Dash, we took somewhere close to 250 photos at last year's event that we put on an external hard drive. In the month prior to designing anything for an event, we review all the photos we took and then select our top favorite 10 to 15 photos. The key focus in selecting these photos is to find ones that will attract the event's target demographic.

Step #2 is to review the strategy to how the event producer wants their marketing materials to look like. Sometimes this actually happens prior to step #1 but our focus at this point is to make sure we understand the "theme" behind the "message" that the marketing materials must have. Is the race producer focusing on a more serious participant, does the event have a costume contest or another aspect that makes it stand out. We are big believers that the photos in any marketing piece are the most efficient mode of connecting to the viewer. We may have a stockpile of great photos but if they don't support the event producer's theme, they won't get used.

Step #3 - Once the photos that support the theme are selected, the next step is to review these photos to see which of them have the best layout in terms of how they will interact on the marketing pieces being designed. We take this into consideration when we shoot our photos but often times, any image that gets used for a poster or on the front of a brochure will need to have some clean space above the people in the photo for text items such as the event logo to be placed on. There's an order to how people's eyes read print material so as important as a photo is, some key things like the event name and date most often need to be listed above. Photos with plenty of sky in them are perfect ones to accomodate this. Other things we consider are clothing color worn, the gender and age of the people in the photo, the volume of the people in the image and the inclusion of key geographical "selling points" such a lake or something else scenic the race route passes.

In considering all the above, more often than not, the photos that we'll decide to use will rise to the top and select themselves. Once they are confirmed, the last step we will do is the editing to those photos to make sure they fit into the marketing pieces we are creating. Common things we do at this point include the cropping of the image to take out certain items within in the photo (street signs, etc), the cropping of the image to amplify other aspects, the varying of the photos contrast to brighten or darken it and sometimes the horizontal 'rotating' of an image so to make sure the participants in the image are moving in the direction that makes sense for the marketing piece that is being created.

As it pertains to the Valentine's Day Dash, we did almost if not all of the above when we selected the images that we used in the event's marketing materials. Here's the image that we started with as well as what the front of the 2011 event brochure looked like.

Here's the photo we started with:

Here's what the final product (the front of the brochure) looks like:



To learn more about Viewhalloo Designs, go to http://www.viewhalloodesigns.com/. To learn more about the Valentine's Day Dash, go to http://www.valentinesdaydash.com/. 

Search Engine Optimization. The Search for some Bunnies.

Have you ever googled yourself?

We think you should. For brands and individuals alike, here at Viewhalloo Designs, one of the things we recommend for our clients is for them to consistently (not daily!) check in on the web to see what information is there when a search is done on your company, brand or person. You can also do searches on word phrases you think are frequently used for the business or service that you do. For ourselves, we constantly search "Seattle based branding" so as to see how we stack up against the other design firms in Seattle. "Seattle based marketing" is another search phrase we think people use a lot so we search that too. For both of these search phrases, we fare pretty well. This though isn't just luck.

As small businesses go, there are a number of super easy (and free) things you can do to ensure that your website will rank high in the internet searches relevant to your business. First step though is to review what search phrases you think most apply to your business. If you are just starting out, our recommendation is to first select the top two or three phrases you think are the most relevant (and most likely to be searched by your prospective customers) and then move forward with the goal of getting mentioned on the first page of the results for your search engine of choice.

From there, the next steps are easy but something still that takes a little work. If you are a small business who is looking for support in this area, email us at info@viewhalloodesigns.com. We'd be glad to help.