We are running at a rapid pace lately and we all wear many hats here and I had to quickly make up a postcard for a upcoming Trade show. I want to talk about 3 services (including ours) that make this really fast (and cheap) for us and how we use ConceptShare to develop them.

I have been using iStockphoto.com recently which is a great social stock art service. High quality photos at good prices. I usually have several tag lines in mind and a few vision ideas. I start browsing with some various keywords and save several to my light box in istock. At this point I have a lot of photo ideas now in my light box and I need to start incorporating them in some layouts to see how they workout. Now I don’t want to commit to any one image until we decide which direction we are going to go in, so I just copy the web preview image from istock. It has the watermark which is ok for now because the look/headline I want to develop first. I do wish they had a save comp like Comstock has for registered users. I just need something to get the idea across. It doesn’t have to be big just lose the watermark. But it’s all good, I start assembling some of the concepts in Photoshop and then I upload them into ConceptShare so I can share them with the rest of the team to help me make a decision. The comps are fairly low res, partly because the photos comps are low res but its just to help me narrow down some ideas and pick a few to develop more. I probably won’t purchase one until we are down to the final 1 or 2 tops.

ConceptShare enables me to setup a project with several concepts and I start adding some initial comments explaining where I was going with the creative choice. This will be the project where all visual design work related to this postcard will reside. I will upload the finals here as well for proof reading as they develop. New people added to the spot will see how the entire piece developed and be able to read the comments to see how we got here. Once I added a few people to the space I await their feedback and go onto something else. It takes less than an hour before the first few comments start to come in. They are very helpful in eliminating some of the choices. Some comments involve larger logo placement, headline changes and some color changes. I make some of these simple changes to the low res comps and upload them again. During the process one of the members is actually working from home. We have very little actually dialog besides ConceptShare comments and chat window.

As we get close to the final we have already gone through 4 rounds of new uploads with about 8 concepts inside of ConceptShare. The whole process happened over a span of about 4 hours. Which really isn’t bad because thats from start to final and I was able to do many other things during the time between uploads. It is very productive and I can see whats happening if I choose to, unlike email or other methods. As the design and headline was finalized I now feel comfortable purchasing the highres istockimage and assembling the final layout. I upload the final print ready version to ConceptShare for one last once over then I am ready to send them to the printer.

I have fallen in love with Overnightprints.com, a fantastic service that enables me to upload any print ready art or design using their wizard (which i don’t use really but good for non-designers). They print almost immediately and ship out next day in some instances and a few days for a bit cheaper. Some local printers wouldn’t even take the file til the week after. The print quality is amazing and you can proof right away. They do brochures, business cards, letterhead and post cards. They are a great service and I ecommend companies of all sizes giving them a whirl.

Have fun,
Bernie

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