Bnpositive's Blog

You are here: Home / Archives for images

images

By 1 Comment

Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet – Infographic

2016 Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet

This is a great resource for making sure you're using the best sized and optimized images for use across your various social media outposts for your brand. If you're doing any kind of business online ignoring the potential power of social media will most likely not go well for you or your business. However, too many businesses put all of their digital eggs in one social media or spread themselves across too many sites that may not have a good return on investment for your potential customers. If you're customer targets aren't active on a particular social media service, you might want to grab your business name to protect your brand on that service, but you probably shouldn't invest too much effort into feeding that channel with content.

And regardless of what social media site you choose to invest time in for your business, you should really never forsake having your own website for generating business leads. Publish your content first on your own site, that you have full control over (which is why I generally don't recommend services like Wix, SquareSpace, etc. for a full business site. You just don't have all the control you may need over your site and changes you may need to make for your business goals.

But when you're sharing content on social media, be sure you're at least making the effort to optimize the visual content you're sharing to the platform it's being shared.

Just click on the image to enlarge if you need.

SOcial Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet 2016

MakeAWebsiteHub.com

By Leave a Comment

Business Branding Standards: Critical to Your Image

Cow

Visual branding standards are one of the most important aspects of a business’s reputation and brand. Many might ask what are visual branding standards?

To put it simply, visual branding standards are a set of rules and choices made about your brand. This is generally done in order to present a unified and consistent corporate brand identity. For example, if you receive business cards from several people at the same company all of them will have the same design, logo placement, colors and font.

Any material that your business puts into production, has to comply with the branding standard your business sets. This is why many companies require that all external communications and materials be approved before they either go to print or are sent out electronically. To find more information about print standards take a look at quality print company websites. You should also have an idea of what looks good in print, and online, so speak to people who have the knowledge and experience to help you.

When it comes to setting branding standards there are a number of key components of the brand for which rules must be created. These include: logos, communication materials, and, as implied above, contracted printers, who can double check to ensure what is submitted complies with the rules you have laid out.

Logo Brand Standards

Visual branding needs to speak to the nature of the business and create a feeling for the customer in line with the product or service offering. When it comes to logos, disjointed or inconsistent use of a logo creates a feeling of cheapness in the mind of the customer. An excellent example of this would be a coffee shop with a different color and sized logo on each size of cup, or a slightly different shade of the color on the branded merchandise, with inconsistent sizing and placement.

Poor printing can also defile brand standards. The best example of this is a pixilated image, or logo, which looks like it was printed on an 80s era inkjet printer. It does not exactly conjure up the professional brand perception your business is aiming for.

When it comes to logos and brand standards design is important; with the critical question being, does the logo represent the company properly in the first place? If you are unsure, here are 10 logo design sins not to commit.

Communications

Email and regular mail communications represent the two most common interactions most consumers will have with a modern business. This means it is important to set up a series of policies and procedures to monitor external communications and ensure they comply with the brand standards. An important component of these procedures should be a random audit of outgoing customer touching emails, voice mails, and regular mail, to ensure compliance with the policy.

There are many policies to set forth. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What, if any, header is going to be used in your email communications?
  • How big is the logo?
  • Is it present in the employee signatures?
  • Is there a set letterhead being used?
  • Are the employees using the designated font? Or do some break policy, and use comic sans, for example?

Routine audits, and good internal communication, will ensure compliance with communications brand standards and related policies.  A full article can be found here detailing tips and tricks for producing well-branded communications. This article is a great resource to provide to employees to ensure they are sending professional high quality communications.

Printing

The last key component of a strong brand strategy is to contract a single printer. Your business can then provide this printer with all of the information and rules on your corporate brand standards. This way when an employee sends in an order for printing that does not comply with the standards, it will be rejected and sent to communications for review.

Similar to the above, it is also important to audit the output from your chosen printer from time to time. This will ensure the printer continues to produce a high quality product for your business.

By Leave a Comment

A Nice and Useful Image Slider Effect

There's been a new feature and functionality on the web that I've noticed recently that I believe is both as good looking as it is functional. It's an image effect where what appears to be a single image has a vertical line dividing it that can be moved or slid from one side to another that reveals another image. In the implementations I've seen online as shown below, it frequently is used to show the differences between a "before" and an "after" photo of some sort.

In the example below that I saw on the BuzzFeed website, the functionality was used to show a "Then" and "Now" photo of the various cast members of the fantastic movie, The Princess Bride. What really makes this functionality stand-out in the example below is that the two photos that were used were sized and cropped appropriately so that the transition from one photo to the other appeared almost seamless. Facial features didn't shift or mis-align as you moved your mouse cursor from one side to the other.

Image Slider Effect - B

In the example shown below, the functionality was used in an ad on Pandora, one of my favorite web site applications for listening to music while I'm working. In the usage on the Dodge ad you were able to slide the image to go from the old Dodge Challenger to the new Dodge Challenger with the slide of your mouse. Again, a very nice usage and effect. However, with the example shown below, you can see how the two images weren't quite sized and aligned quite as well so there was somewhat of a less-than-smooth disconnect between the two photos as you played with the slider.Pandora Image Slider

Either way. This is a nice effect online. I'd like to see how it's done and maybe use it in the future somehow. I could have definitely used it in my previous post about the before & after photo of the original Cracker Barrel store in Lebanon, TN.