Graphic Design-Jack-Of-All-Trades | graphic multimedia

Using visual communication to make a success of your business Commercial art has proven itself worthy within the business sector. Whereas traditional art or ‘The Arts’ such as fine art for example, is often considered an expensive hobby instead of a stable career path. Commercial art differs considerably. Gone are the days when teachers would encourage their pupils to only pursue a career in Mathematics or Science. There is a future in the visual communications industry too. Since the demand for creative skills are so great within the business sector, it has become very apparent that commercial art plays a huge role in the success of many lucrative industries and businesses. Nonetheless, how can graphic design enable your business to enjoy continual growth and success? What valuable skills can a graphic designer offer your business?Perhaps it’s best to establish what Graphic design entails. Graphic design is the art of combining text and graphics to communicate an effective message using logos, graphics, brochures, newsletters, posters, signage and any other type of visual communication.o Graphic Designers find employment within advertising agencies, design studios, the public sector, reproduction houses, video and film labs, printers, newspaper, periodical, book and directory publishers. Designers can also be found working in engineering service industries or management, scientific and technical consulting firms.o These skilled creatives are able to produce computer graphics for computer systems, design firms or motion picture production firms.o Basic responsibilities include; developing the overall layout and production design of magazines, newspapers, journals, corporate reports and other publications
o As well as producing promotional displays and marketing brochures for products and services, designing distinctive logos for products and businesses and developing signs and signage systems or environmental graphics for business and government.o Graphic Designers are also able to develop material for web pages, computer interfaces and multimedia projects, as well as producing credits that appear before and after TV programs and movies.
This proves that whatever your business or expertise, you’ll most likely require the services of a Graphic Designer at some point…How do Graphic Designers contribute to the world of business?To develop a new graphic design the needs of the client need to be determined. The message the design should portray and its appeal to customers or users for example. Graphic Designers consider cognitive, cultural, physical and social factors in planning and executing designs for the target audience.Does a logo have an effect on your business?A well designed logo also facilitates the process of professionally designed stationery, signage, web sites, television, brochures, etc. If you present a poorly designed logo or you don’t even have a logo, human nature tells people that you may not be doing so well and therefore not worth doing business with. Important factors to keep in mind; Ensure that you can fax the logo to someone and still read it; practice on a dummy letterhead. Consider what the logo may be applied to, paper, clothing, signage, vehicles, etc. This can affect the way the logo is designed and whether it should be a simple block color or complicated with small type which may not transfer to t-shirts well.What impact does package design have on a product? Product packaging can be the most important aspect of your consumer product. Packaging design conveys to the consumer the most important features of your product and ensures that your product makes a great impression and is more visible amongst a myriad of bland counterparts.
How can a professionally designed brochure add to the image of your business?
Brochures are a great way to package a lot of information about yourself, your business and expertise into a format that is easily mailed or handed out at a business meeting or given to current clients to pass on to possible referrals. Using a Graphic Designer can free you from having to make all decisions about your brochure by yourself. A Graphic Designer will see the brochure from concept through to successful completion.Various disciplines within design (To mention but a few)Advertising Design is essential. Your advert has to be good enough to both catch your target audience’s attention immediately and ‘sell’ your product or service to them.
Direct Mail Design is often thought of as the ‘spam of the post’. However, it provides a snippet of information about your company to a vast audience. Even though the return on mailers is often small, if you do a mail drop of 10 000 and get a return of 5% then that means you have a response from a potential 500 new clients. The design of your direct mail has a substantial impact on its success. If your design does not immediately capture your recipient’s interest and imagination, your direct mail will most likely be overlooked…Packaging Design can change the perception that your target market has of your product for the better. Whatever the product, the packaging needs to work within the client’s corporate style and marketplace. If your product is vying for shelf space in the retail market, you need to ensure that your clients see your product before your competitors captures their interest.
Visuals can help your target market to connect with your product or service. Visuals can speak to your audience because they make an impact. One thing’s for sure though, visuals and design has something valuable to communicate. Your business can benefit greatly from these lucrative creative skills. Perhaps, you should leave it up to the professionals.

The Link Between Patent Law And Billy Goats | laws and issues

Patents, like bridges, are prime draws for trolls.But while their bridge-dwelling cousins have a taste for billy goats, patent trolls have a more costly appetite for technology companies and their work. Patent trolls forage for intellectual property on the cheap, then demand booty in the form of royalty payments or legal settlements from companies that actually make things that other people buy. This tactic has become so common and so aggravatingly effective that some technology companies began imitating it with their own patent portfolios.The prevalence of companies aggressively acquiring and litigating computer-related patents have led to calls for legislative reform. In the meantime, the state of such patents range from the perfectly legitimate to the semi-absurd. (In one high-profile example, patent owner Jim Logan sued various podcasters, claiming that his 1996 patent on reading magazine articles aloud and distributing them via cassette tape means that he has a claim on the idea of any syndicated audio content sent directly to the listener.)Software patents are undoubtedly important, because there are new and better software innovations still to be invented. But patents on “business methods” are another matter. Many business method patents amount to little more than the hypothetical or trivially challenging application of a well-established principle to some aspect of everyday commerce. Patents are supposed to protect genuine inventions, not mere ideas. (Time travel would be neat. Maybe I’ll patent the idea of using a computer to run a time-travel machine.)For a more immediate example, consider’s “1-Click” ordering system. 1-Click is not only a registered trademark; Amazon patented the process as well. At least, it sought to do so, with varying degrees of success. Europe denied the application for a patent outright. Canada’s patent office eventually granted the patent, after being ordered by the courts to re-examine the patent’s initial rejection. The U.S. granted the patent; when that patent was challenged, Amazon narrowed it slightly, and the patent office re-examined and ultimately approved the amended version.Why the differences between patent offices? It has to do with the nature of what Amazon sought to patent. If you think of Amazon as a large department store, 1-Click is the equivalent of allowing the customer to say, “Charge it to my account and send it to my house.” Wealthy matrons have said as much in physical stores for the past 100 years. All 1-Click did was compress and consolidate many existing steps: entering your address, entering your credit card information, reviewing everything and clicking confirm. Amazon did not invent cookies (the way such information is stored), and the patent had nothing to do with the way the payment was actually processed. It was just about eliminating redundant steps.The idea of streamlining multi-step processes has been around forever. There was a particular movement toward efficiency in business a century ago, led by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose disciples included Henry Ford. Taylor’s ideas are credited with leading to the principles of mass production that drove early 20th century industrialization. Today, efficiency consultants are common in business. They don’t, by and large, make whole new processes. Instead, they look at existing business practices and suggest ways those practices can be conducted quicker or more accurately.The Amazon 1-Click method simply said: “What if we saved customers’ information when they entered it the first time, so customers didn’t have to enter the same information over again?” If that idea is a patentable business process, we have a problem.The government has decided it is patentable, at least in America. The recently argued Supreme Court case Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International indicates that we do, indeed, have a problem.At issue in the case is a claimed invention that serves as a sort of computerized escrow system. Alice Corp. managed to secure a patent on the system because, though escrow agents are not generally patentable, the system’s computerized component was deemed integral to the process. CLS Bank arguably infringed on Alice Bank’s patent when it, too, set up a computerized system to track the various transactions banks make with one another throughout the day in order to keep any party from promising more than it could deliver.A trial court invalidated Alice’s patents, on the grounds that they represented abstract concepts, which are not eligible to patent. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial judge’s ruling. However, that appellate decision was split seven ways, and yielded no clear majority opinion.It is not clear if the Supreme Court will go further than it has in previous intellectual property cases. While many observers expected Alice to be a decision affecting software patents specifically, the arguments seemed to suggest the Court will instead focus on when, if ever, business method patents are appropriate. In the absence of Congress writing clear rules, the courts are left to decide where the boundaries of patent law are located.Justice Stephen Breyer expressed concern that allowing patents that merely protect the idea of using a computer to do something useful – like time travel – will shift the system’s focus away from encouraging genuinely useful innovation.Experience shows that patents are currently being issued broadly to cover ideas instead of inventions. Amazon didn’t invent the computer, the mouse, the click or the credit card. It patented the idea of combining these existing tools more efficiently – an idea that is exactly what business schools have been teaching for decades. While the Supreme Court may not be prepared to effectively outlaw patents on business methods, I hope it will at least limit such patents to inventors who develop both a genuinely novel idea and a practical way to apply it.And I won’t mourn at all if the Supreme Court concludes that business methods are ideas, not inventions, and are thus unpatentable. It might leave some trolls hungry, but I trust they can find more useful ways to earn a living.

Urban Fashion – The Ultimate Fashion Statement Of The New Generation | Fashion

A distinctive style of dressing originated among the African American youths centering the cities of Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Virginia etc. This style of dressing is known as the Hip Hop fashion or the urban fashion. Urban fashion, as we know it today is not the product of one single city, but all the cities have added some flavor of their own to make it popular. In general, this fashion is closely related to the expressions and the attributes of the hip hop culture. Urban fashion has evolved with the passage of time and it has made its own mark in the fashion world. In the present times it is accepted and followed by people of all ethnicity.In the 1990s, Tommy Hilfiger was one of the most celebrated and prominent brands regarding sportswear though other brands like Nautica, DKNY, Calvin Klein etc were also popular. When Snoopy Doggy Dogg, the famous American rapper wore a Hilfiger sweatshirt during his performance on Saturday Night Live, all the stocks of that particular shirt were sold out the very next day from the New York City stores. This incident clearly shows the popularity of urban fashion among the American youth population.The first one to set the trend of the emerging hip hop fashion is Karl Kani. He started a completely new fashion movement by combining his passions, and thereby he was followed by many fashion designers in the near future. In the late 90s many hip hop artists launched their own fashion labels and clothing lines, for instance, Russell Simmons (Phat Farm), Diddy (Sean John), 50Cent (G-Unit Clothing) etc. This fashion genre has been dominated by the upcoming urban clothing lines and will continue to do so.However, nowadays in the world of the hip hop fashion there has been a resurgence of the old fads with the emerging new ones. In the last few years of the last decade music artists popularized the trend of getting tattoos all over the body. Tygart, Soulja Boy etc are some of the typical examples. Though tattoos have been much common in the film industry, but it has never been of much importance in the hip hop industry.In spite of its huge popularity, the urban fashion had to face much criticism from the commentators of both the inside and outside communities, regarding the cost of the accouterments of this specific fashion. Some even expressed disappointment regarding expensive hip hop or urban fashion brands in several magazines.