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Many months in the making – Brady (@bradyjosephson) calls it a Labour of Love. I call it an amazing collaborative effort! OpportunityCan is launched! OpportunityCan was created to engage individuals, groups and businesses to get them involved in Opportunity International‘s work of empowering people to work their way out of poverty. This project started with just the logo design and soon involved all the design and icons for the website, Twitter and YouTube. The amazing videos on the website are masterfully made by Bjorn Amundsen (@bjornamundsen) of Herald Design. There are also T-shirts, glass bottles, cards and probably whole lot more to come!

When OpportunityCan officially launched, I discovered that this is my first logo to jump out of a plane at 18,000ft! Get the story here! Spread the news!

What do you get when you cross a group of girls with long hair, a dare and one great cause? The Hair Dare of course! This group of Hair Dare-devils, as they call themselves are gearing up to chop a minimum of 8″ of hair to donate to make wigs for children who suffer from conditions like alopecia, burns and cancer treatments. I’ve been working very hard on my end to secure a salon to give free haircuts, a venue to host the after party and a print house who will print banners and signs for free! I’m still looking for local shops who would like to donate gifts to the Hair Dare-devils.

Did I mention, I have committed to chopping at least 12″ of hair. If you know me, you’ll know that I have had long hair for my entire life. Except for once when I cut my hair really short to spite my parents. M-I-S-T-A-K-E!!! This time, I’m doing it for a much better cause.

So, you’ve got something to say – what is the best way to get it out there?

Trinity Western University (TWU) in B.C. is launching a new MA in Leadership Program in China! They’ve partnered up with Leadership Development International (LDi) in Tianjin, China. You can imagine the timezone madness when we did three-way Skype calls! But we did it!! After much thought, we decided to not print the newsletters, but to send them out via e-mail.

There are many options when it comes to spreading the news.

Traditional printed newsletters. No problem. Grab a designer, feed them content and images and you’ll get a beautiful newsletter that you can mail out to everyone and their pets. If printing cost is a concern, try printing the front and back pages in colour and the rest in black and white.

e-Newletters that look like printed newsletters, but they are sent electronically as a PDF. Same idea as traditional printed newsletters, except keep in mind the file size. No one is going to want a 2MB attachment.

e-Newletters through a mailing list service. This is the best option if you have a large mailing list. The content is opened right in their inbox, no need to download an attachment. Also, give you the option to include clickable links right in the body of the e-mail. Mashable has listed 30+ Mailing List Services. Some of theses services are even free!

Blog. Ah yes, a blog. I’m a big fan of blogs because it gives others a place where they can regularly update themselves on their own time. A blog will keep your customers coming back to your website.

Something else? As cool as newsletters are, there are hundreds of other ways to get your news out there, I’d love to get creative with you… (sadly, it is not new news, that I am dating my job as a freelance designer).

On that note, I’d like to mention the Toronto Graffiti book, which launches January 28th! I’m excited to get my really-dry-from-winter hands on this!

If you are working with a non-profit or a charity or if you are someone who enjoys keeping up the world of do-gooders, then you’ll love re: charity. The re: charity blog was started by Brady Josephson (@bradyjosephson) to give charities a place where they can go to find useful resources to help run their organization. Check out re: charity’s brand new logo!

If you ever get the chance to meet Brady, you’ll see that he just oozes with passion to inspire and empower others to champion the cause to help the poorest of the poor. Brady and I are working on a few more really cool projects, so stay tuned for more updates!

This past summer/fall, I had the pleasure to work with Leeorah Pearce’s chocolate company, Chelsea Truffles. What a dream job, to design her new line of chocolate bars and get it all ready to hit the market. At first it was just a simple wrapper design for the Belgian chocolate bars. If you’ve ever worked with me, you’ll know that I’m a go big or go home kinda person. I didn’t think a simple wrapper would do justice to these decadent chocolate bars. With a only a quick twist of her arm, the project included chocolate mould design and retail counter units to tie everything together to make it impossible to see these chocolate bars and not purchase one… or four. I was in Ottawa this past weekend and spotted the Chelsea Truffles chocolate bars in La Bottega Nicastro!

Gorr Financial just got a logo facelift!  The bold ‘GORR’ represents the strength of the company, while the lowercase ‘financial’ represents their holistic approach to financial planning.

Are you thinking about a logo facelift? Let’s chat. A logo can run you anywhere between $400 – $10,000. Seriously, some big fancy branding firms will charge upwards of $10,000 for your brand identity…. and it doesn’t even come with free botox. I like to stay within the 3 digit estimates.

Tight budget, tight timelines, 8000 name options… oh the things that make my heart flutter.

I’ve had the privilege to help many startup businesses in their very early stages of business planning. One of the hardest parts of starting a business is coming up with a name. It seems like everyone and their dog has a company name these days, as my clients and I spend countless hours debating possible names and searching for available domain names. I recently came across this very good article that basically lists the thought process that I go through when helping clients come up with that perfect business name. I’ve listed their 17 suggestions (it is actually 18 suggestions because they’ve listed #16 twice) and I’ve added 3 of my own

17 Mutable Suggestions For Naming a Startup (click for more info)

1.Make sure it’s legal!

2. Hint At What You Do

3. Make it easy to remember

4. Make it unambiguous when spoken

5. Make it unambiguous in Google

6. Start early in the alphabet

7. The “.com” has to be “gettable”

8.  The twitter handle has to be available

9. The facebook page should be available

10. Keep it short

11. Don’t leave out vowels or add punctuation

12. Try to get your main keyword into the name

13. Start with an uppercase letter

14. Don’t name your company after yourself

15. Don’t Use An Acronym

16. Have a story

16. Pay attention to character sequences in multi-word names

17. Seek timeless instead of trendy

18. Can it be used a verb.  This is especially if you offer a service. Would it be great if your service was so well known that your business name became a verb. You’d be up there with the bigwigs – “Google it”, “I’m going to have to Twitter about this”.

19. Leave Tongue Twisters out of it.  #10 mentioned keeping it short – which is very important. But what is also important is to ensure that your business name is not a tongue twister. ie: Reddened Leather is ugly to say, but Red Leather is rolls off the tongue quite nicely.

20.Check out variations of the business name. The worst would be if you picked a name and someone out there had a similar business name and they had a less than desirable product or service. For example if your organic bakery named Gumdrop and someone out there has a business named Gumdrops (note the ‘s’) and they sell used dentures… not good.

So all in all, naming a business is very hard work, but once you’ve locked down that perfect name, things start to roll and your business will be ready to launch in no time!

I just finished one long week/weekend of learning. How did I get through full-time learning for 20 years?

1)
I completed my Certificate of Not-For-Profit Management from Continuing Studies at The University of Western Ontario! Woohoo *pat on back*

2)
I attended Freelance Camp Toronto this past Sunday. It was great! Met a whole bunch of cool self-employed nerds like myself and learned about nerdy freelance stuff.

In my first seminar (Top 10 Marketing Tips for Freelancers), we got into a discussion about creating effective marketing materials. But how do you know if something is effective? You can design it and hope for the best and measure the outcomes, ie: how much money did I make of this campaign? But then if the campaign is a bust, you’ve just wasted time and money. I mentioned a crowdsourcing website that critiques your designs so that you can be sure that you are releasing an effective campaign. Embarrassingly, I forgot the name of this website when I spoke up. But as promised, here is the information:

Concept Feedback
http://www.conceptfeedback.com/
Upload basically anything design related and be prepared to be critiqued by your peers

Happy designing!

Hooray!!

I’m launched! Special thanks to Collin Gibson for his master web skillz and to Dawn Comber for her mad copy writing advice!

It has been a long time coming. I started part-time freelancing in my second year of University (2002) and full-time freelancing in September 2008. I’ve learned quite a bit in the past 2 years – time management, client relations, fighting with manufacturers, and the list goes on. The next year holds many exciting new projects, check back to see new finished projects. I will tweet about it when I upload new projects.

Random Facts:

• My first freelancing gig (2002) was with 2 russian engineering (Victor and Dragoslav!) students designing an entry swipe card.
• Throughout University, I thought I was going to become a lighting designer.
• I’d like to challenge Karim Rashid in an arm wrestle because he said products should all be designed to be inexpensive and disposable.

Thanks for checking out my site, leave me a comment or send me an e-mail to say hi!

Every year, Humber River Regional Hospital Foundation has a really big ticket event called Flights of Fantasy. This year, the theme was Wild Horse Saloon.  I was given freedom to do whatever I wanted to brand this event. It was a cool project mixing Flights with Wild Horse Saloon! I heard the event was a success and a blast (see pictures), they had real horses at the event!