Return on investment is a vital analysis formula to occasionally take a look at, no matter what business you’re in.  It can sometimes take a while to get accurate results in a residual or retail business. Depending on the type of product or service you offer, some returns come faster while others take a long time to truly reveal themselves. You have to be in it for the long haul, plant your “seeds” and wait for them to grow; maybe waiting for the to reach their full potential.  Here is the definition of Return On Investment (or ROI for short) from Investopedia.

A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio. 

The return on investment formula:

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A logo is a huge part of branding and corporate identity.  The goal of a logo is to be memorable enough that it differentiates one business from every other one.  It could just be logotype, with a slight clever twist on, or off of, one of the characters in the brand’s name.  Or, a good logo design might integrate a hidden message within.  A top logo design makes nice use of negative space, and also has the ability to be used in part or in full as design elements within other pieces of the company’s branding and marketing pieces; whether those be printed colateral (business cards, letterheads, envelopes, tri-fold brochures) web design, or even interactive and video production uses.  A logo design can sometimes also work in more than one color, maybe even in black and white.  It could be slapped onto anything, and doesn’t get lost due to having text that is overly small, or an odd shape that doesn’t work well with certain layouts.  The typography could be clean and corporate, or it can also be complex and distinctive to the brand.  Would a company who manufactures dish detergent want to use a font or typeface that screams “alien space invaders”? Probably not, but then again there is always sometimes a rare exception.

Here are some of the most popular logo designs on the Behance network. To learn more about each design project and more about each artist, just click on any of the thumbnails below. Most of these even show how each designer was able to produce the logo to fit all sorts of uses for the companys’ marketing pieces.  Some even show the design process, from sketch, to producing the mutliple variations, to the final result.

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There are a lot of people that don’t really see the value in having a free Tumblr blog, for a few different reasons.  Maybe you’ve got a pretty hopping WordPress blog already, so why should you need another stupid blog to have to manage?  If you aren’t running a business online, and don’t care about getting more hits and search engine traffic, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) probably isn’t on the top of your list of concerns.  If you just want a basic blog that is easy to use and post to, then tumblr is amazingly simple and easy to get started.  It’s even easier than a free wordpress.com or blogger.com blog.  This article is mainly considering tumblr as a tool to drive traffic toward your other websites.  Here are some reasons why I think tumblr is pretty awesome, as a supplement to your existing website or blog.

1. You get all dofollow backlinks to any url you post on your blog. This is great for SEO and developing quality backlinks.

2. There is an endless stream of cool eyecandy, videos, articles and content that you can reblog. What’s the point in this, if there is duplicate text and content?  Well, when it comes to reblogging articles, I don’t really see the point for SEO.  Google and the search engines don’t take very well to duplicate text.  What they do like, is unique text.  So, if you’re going to reblog a video, photo, or other media – try and rephrase the description and keywords, maybe even the title a bit, so that it’s a little bit different.  It might help for a little while, until people reblog the crap out of it again.

3.  Tumblr reblogs create awesome content for tweets and twitter microblog posts. It’s so simple to set up your twitter account, so that every time you reblog on tumblr, it will tweet the description and the link to the site, photo or video you are reblogging. It’s pretty easy to keep the descriptions under 140 characaters, and makes finding cool content to feed to your followers a cinch.

4.  The viral-ness of tumblr is great if you’re trying to promote your youtube videos, photos, music, and more. If people like what they see, then they will reblog it.  Every time it’s reblogged, it will link back to your original post or website!  Every time I post to tumblr I see it as planting a little seed, here and there.  You never know what’s going to start getting popular.  An important thing for this to be the most effective, however, is having enough followers to get the ball rolling.  Remember that content is key, and if people like your taste, the style of the stuff you post on your tumblr blog, they’re more apt to follow you.

I’m no expert, but those are the conclusions I’ve come to – let me know what you think!  Here’s a link to my tumblr stream – please follow me, and I’ll follow you back.

We’re losing our mind a little bit this week, so what better than to pass along the insanity a little to our friends and loyal viewers. The economy still stinks, budgets are still tight, and we realize that.

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In the past several years the graphic design world has been going through crazy changes due to crowd-sourcing and design contest websites.  The situation is similar to the whole microstock revolution, but with some major differences.  Some businesses only want to pay $50 for a logo design now.  Honestly, are those the types that legitimate graphic designers are going to want on their list of clientele? I know I don’t (besides; I wouldn’t even design a web banner for $50).  Design contests have taught these businesses that they can get the choices of 100 different (most mediocre or crummy at best) designs to pick the one they actually might “like”.  This is putting the pressure on traditional design firms and freelancers.  There is also a revolt going on against graphic design “spec work”.  Some of the design firms are even falling pressure to this type of abuse, as they are giving in to it with hopes that the free spec work will lead to actual paid work.  But that’s another blog post in itself.  Check out http://www.no-spec.com to learn more.

We sort of have the same issues and drama going on with microstock (the crowdsourcing issue, basically) when you look at it as a whole. How can a dude like me, who sells microstock photography, actually be against one form of crowd sourcing and not the other?  I’m not trying to come off hypocritical.  I just feel there are pretty large differences between the two.  One major difference, is that as a microstock contributor you don’t have to “win” or have your images “be chosen” in order to make money. Once you understand the technical standards and can get images approved, your “contest” is between you and the buyers. It’s your job to know what they need. How? I learned a lot being on the other side of the business, but you can also learn a lot by doing your own research. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if you know what you’re doing it will be easy to create images that stand out enough that they sell more than the rest of the mediocrity in the collections. I’ve been thumbing through stock for years as a designer, and later as an artist. There are lots of traditional stock images (Rights Managed stuff) that are even as crappy as a lot you’ll find on the microstock agencies.  Nevertheless, stock photos that used to be licensed for $5,000 or $10,000 a pop… now similar images sell for $10-20. In the end, I think what microstock has taught us is that maybe a portrait of a woman standing in front of a tree isn’t worth $10,000 anyways.  Some of the original traditional stock photographers are still crying about it. I feel for them, because I wouldn’t be too pleased about the way things changed either, if I were in their shoes.

As I’ve said over and over; nothing is constant in the creative fields except for change.  You have to learn to adapt, and go with the flow; or just get left behind.  Microstock isn’t going away, and neither is graphic design crowd sourcing.  That doesn’t mean either of them will completely ruin the industry, or that we all have to participate in these new forms of crowdsourcing.  To think that crowdsourcing hasn’t greatly effected the creative fields, would be pretty narrow minded.  In the end, things could change for any of us at any moment, no matter what we do for a living.  It’s just business.  Someone cue Donald Trump…