Cleaning out some files for the new year, and ran across a handwritten sheet of inspirational thoughts gathered from various friends, sites and seminars. Thought I would share them with you as you plan for 2012. May it be your best year yet!

• Have a mind open to everything and closed to nothing.
• Be free of attachment.
• You’re not able to give away what you don’t have.
• There are no justified resentments.
• Send blame out of your life.
• Take responsibility for your life and situation.
• Don’t die with your best music left in you.
• You are not able to solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Change your point of view.
• Love a person or thing for what they are, not what you want them to be.
• Treat yourself as if you already are what you want to become.
• You are no accident on this planet.
• Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts that weaken you. Shift your thoughts to empowering ones.

Everyone is creative – so let yourself go and express yourself!

Announcing our first ever contest on our Facebook page. Simple to enter and you could win a bundle of Graphic Zen designed t-shirts. Simply click this link to enter and Like us on Facebook!

Adding to the design brand by offering Graphic Zen designed items. Shown here is this Graphic Zen designed t-shirt – for “Supergenius Industries”. We draw inspiration from classic Looney Tunes cartoons, cult movies and the silly and strange. We’ve added a few more designs to the collection and you can check them out by clicking here.

Your logo is an extension of your brand – a communication tool to identify your company to clients. So, it should be able to capture and reflect the nature of your business at its most basic level. Identity and reputation (which is defined by your customers) should be taken into consideration also.

As a reflection of your company, the designer’s objective should be to design a logo with a professional touch because it is what creates the initial impression on the mind of the consumers. These first impressions are almost always impossible to undo, so you shouldn’t risk a mediocre design.

As simple as it may sound, designing a logo is an intricate process, which is why you need a professional to help realize and conceptualize a workable logo solution. Among the elements that must be considered and combined effectively are colors, shapes, light, space, and type.

The Design Process

The logo design process involves gathering information about your company that will be utilized by the designer in coming up with the design. Here at Graphic Zen, we use a brainstorm session to sketch ideas as an essential step to take before jumping into the actual design process. It’s a refining process – we create initial drafts of the logo, and utilize design elements that will connect with your business identity.  Once a logo concept is agreed upon and the final design is created, color, usage details, and business templates (calling card, letterhead, etc.) can be created.

Oh wait, I never had it in the first place. So can I just call Google and ask them to send it over to me? That seems to be the impression one client had of us recently. Yeah, Graphic Zen and Google, we’re like this. Seriously….and all sarcastic snarkiness aside, that was an actual request of a client recently after we’d done some web design for them. They wanted a higher search engine ranking and suggested we “Just call Google and ask them.” I had to explain that just as they would not give out their company secrets, Google is not about to reveal theirs to anyone, let alone a great Boise web design company like us. Maybe someday Google’s formula will get out, just as the secret formula of Coca Cola is now out, but probably not before we catch Bigfoot and discover life on another planet. Now back to your regularly scheduled logo design channel.

As we get ready to roll into 2011, we unveiled the new Graphic Zen logo for the company. We’re proud of the look and love the various comments we’ve had from clients and friends including:

“Like the colors!”
“Hate this – go back to the old one.”
“I like it – looks like a smiley face.”
“I like the way the Z bends.”

As you can see, not all were positive comments, and that’s okay. When designing a logo, you aren’t able to please everyone in terms of colors and design. We had the goal of coming up with something that we felt represented us well to our clients and our community. Ultimately, it’s these people that decide who we are as a brand, so that’s why we felt we needed a change. Anyway, here’s to 2011 and creating brand new designs and images for you. So, what can we design for you?

Graphic Zen would like to welcome Richard “Chad” Villapando to our development team. Chad is a talented and experienced website coder and will be one of the lead developers for our web division. He’s developed a wide range of websites using HMTL, CSS and WordPress including sites for start up companies and small businesses. Chad also specializes in designing graphics with Photoshop and User Interface coding with CSS/ HTML for website development projects.

Chad also brings some experience in flash animation, domain name registration, webhost management, Joomla,  Dreamweaver and search engine optimization.

You can reach Chad via email at chad@graphiczen.com.

This should be a no-brainer, own your domain name! We’ve recently been involved with projects with clients who let other designers or webhost providers register their domain name “as a courtesy to them”. Great – what happens when you want to switch providers or the designer who used to do your work goes out of business, leaves town, or just won’t return your call? You let someone else have control of your intellectual property and now you are going to have a hard time getting it back.

On one of our projects the client had to secure a new domain name – which sucks for them because all of their collateral material, (cards, letterhead, brochures, etc.) were branded with the old domain name. Luckily the site is down because the server is gone but what if it wasn’t? You would have your customers going to your old site, with outdated info and not much you could do about it.

So the key lesson here is register your own domain name – you own it, you control it. If you need to change webhost providers it’s a simple case of updating the nameservers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to register a domain, the expense is relatively small (especially if you register for multiple years) and it might save you a big headache down the road. Any questions feel free to contact us!

Attention entrepreneurs/business owners: what business are you in? Attended a great business seminar today and was asked that question by one of the speakers. If you answered, “I’m in _____ business”, chances are that you are not as successful as you should be. The speaker challenged us to think that we were all in the “people business”. We need people (clients/customers) to survive and excel in our business. How we treat (service) those clients determines our success and growth as a business. Basic maybe, but true. What say you?