The Western Maryland Blues Fest held its very first event 21 years ago. We were lucky to be able to partner with them to create the graphics for the festival, as we have every year since. Once an artist has been selected to represent the event, we take the artwork and use it to create posters, T-shirts, ads, and more to promote and celebrate the blues.

Since Blues Fest is right around the corner, we thought we’d take us all back to that very first poster. Blues Fest posters are highly collectible, and this poster in particular is very rare nowadays!

Not only did we provide the design for the first poster, we sat down with Blues Fest founder Carl Disque to create the logo that’s represented the event since its inception. Carl’s vision both for the festival and the creative direction has guided us through successful events year after year.

This year’s event will feature a fantastic mix of international, national, and local musicians, with performances scheduled from Thursday through Sunday. Delicious food, great drinks, and amazing music make this the community event of the year. We hope to see you there!

The post Throwback Thursday: Blues Fest 1996 appeared first on Icon Graphics.

Bijou, Bongo, and Casey

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We can’t wait to show off the website as soon as it’s live — stay tuned!

Vehicle graphics designed by our Shepherdstown University intern, Yasmeen Alkordi.

The post Tuesday Teaser: Shepherdstown Plumbing Vehicle Graphics appeared first on Icon Graphics.

When it comes to writing content for your website, there are 2 main schools of thought seemingly at odds with one another. Many argue that you should focus on the people reading your content and forget about search engine optimization entirely. They suggest a heavy focus on loading your writing with keywords makes your content too stiff and difficult to understand, resulting in a disconnect from your visitors. But others insist the goal ought to be to focus on search engine robots crawling your site through loading your content with keywords. Their reasoning is that people can’t find your site if search engines don’t, making SEO of utmost importance. In short, the former focuses on human connection; the latter focuses on data alone.

But what if there doesn’t have to be a fight? What if content managed to be good while taking both humans and robots into consideration? What would that look like? What guidelines might inform how you write?

Keep it simple.

For humans:

• Break up your content into headlines and shorter paragraphs. People in general have short attention spans, so structuring your content in a way that’s easy to scan means people are more likely to stay and read.
• Science says the average American reads at an eighth-grade reading level, so you should aim for that in your writing. Why? To make sure what you’re saying is neither too elementary as to be insulting nor too complicated as to fly over people’s heads.

For robots:

• Headlines tell search engines important things about the content that follows and why someone might search for your page in the first place, allowing them to place it more accurately in their rankings.
• Content that’s easy for people to read translates into content that’s easy for robots to crawl, interpret, and categorize. This also means visitors are more likely to stay on your page longer, which will increase search engines’ opinion of you.

But not too simple.

For humans:

• Don’t talk down to your audience. Simplifying your content means communicating clearly, not condescending to your audience.
• Make sure your content gives people the information they need. Keeping things simple doesn’t mean you should sacrifice pertinent data. In the interest of brevity, consider linking to outside articles rather than expanding upon a word, phrase, or practice that’s not directly related to your topic.

For robots:

• Search engines will punish you for too little content.  If you haven’t written a lot on a particular page or post, search engines will assume what you have to say isn’t important and diminish your rankings.

Stay on topic.

For humans:

• Content that goes off on tangents means people will leave your site unsatisfied. If someone reached your page or post by searching for a specific thing, your page or post should be focused on that specific topic.
• Respect your audience’s busy schedule. If you find yourself reaching 1,000 words or more, consider breaking your article into a multi-post series addressing multiple factors of the topic you want to cover.

For robots:

• Focusing on your topic means you’ll naturally include keywords relevant to your page. Search algorithms are getting smarter every day about whether or not keywords are relevant or included to SPAM visitors. Naturally including these words as you stay on topic means search engines will decide your page really is related to the topic you say it is, thereby improving your SEO.

Create value.

For humans:

• Solve a problem for the people who come to your site. Don’t focus on your needs — focus on the needs of your audience. People search to find answers, not brands. What do your specific clients, customers, patients, or users need to know? What do they typically not know? What topics will offer value to the people you want to reach? How can you make their lives easier?
• Become a resource for those who use your product or service. This will establish your reputation as an expert, building trust with the people who visit your site.

For robots:

• Valuable information translates into search engines having an easier time finding and ranking you. When you focus on creating value for your audience rather than for yourself, you’ll organically write content search engines will determine is relevant.
• Inbound links from other sites drastically improve your rankings. When your content is valuable to people, they share it, thereby making search engines think more highly of you.

Be human.

For humans:

• People connect more closely to humans than they do to cold information. Speak like a human, and your audience will stick around to listen.
• Empathy and respect create a meaningful bond. Taking the time to understand your audience and treat them with dignity will result in fewer instances of inadvertent cruelty.

For robots:

• The longer people stay on your site, the more search engines will reward you with higher more relevant rankings. When people leave your site quickly (or “bounce,” as the robots say), this reflects badly on the relevancy and worth of your content.
• Positive human experience means repeat visitors, which increases your rankings.

The verdict? Humans and robots work together.

When you write for humans, everyone wins the SEO battle — not just people and search engines, but your company and your audience.

Looking for advice on optimizing your website for human and robot consumption? Drop us a line — we’d love to help.

The post Humans Vs. Robots in the Fight for SEO appeared first on Icon Graphics.

Welcome, Yasmeen!

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Happy anniversary, Kim!

This week marks 15 years since Kim Kukiela joined our team to make it stronger and more complete. Kim has a keen eye for design, with experience encompassing all facets of design including: branding, collateral materials, event program booklets, T-shirts, websites, displays and more. She’s also our resident illustrator, creating custom illustrations for logos, posters, magazine covers, packaging labels, maps, and anything else you can imagine. Her dedication to excelling in her work, along with the constant encouragement she offers every member of our team, makes her an invaluable asset to our employees, company, and clients.

Here’s to many more years of working together to bring excellent personalized design to our community!

The post Celebrating 15 Years with Kim Kukiela appeared first on Icon Graphics.

Well, you’re in luck. We’re pretty firm believers in pooling the expertise of every member of any project team to collectively produce the best work we can.

But we don’t think the role of graphic designers in any project should be relegated to just “making it look good.”

Here at Icon Graphics, we like to take a proactive approach to our role on your marketing team. Our expertise isn’t limited to graphic design. When you work with us, you get the benefit of over 20 years of design experience and successful marketing and branding efforts, offering you our wealth of knowledge and know-how to make every project a win.

We believe collaborative design produces the best results. That’s why we like to be involved in every step of the process for your marketing projects, from inception to market positioning to design — and all the way through past production.

So what does a collaborative design process look like?

First, together we establish a marketing and design direction.

Before a design project begins, we like to sit down with you to talk about your project goals and establish both a marketing and design direction.

A lot of the questions we ask revolve around the marketing direction and content messaging. We want to nail down the purpose of the piece, who your intended audience is, what production timeline we’re on, and how we’ll be measuring the response to the project. Once we’ve established those things, we tackle the design direction. We want to make sure the visual messaging supports the content, so we discuss how we can help clearly communicate your message through visual style, typography, and packaging (if applicable).

Next, we embark on the process of discovery.

Once we’ve all established the basic content and visual message direction, the project usually gets passed along to us for design. This is when our team begins the creative process of discovery.

Our number one goal at this stage is to find a way to creatively interpret and execute the established marketing and design directions to strongly communicate your message. Often, we work together as a team to research before we begin sketching and creating rough layouts. By that point, strong themes inevitably emerge, and we narrow our focus to develop them further. If we need to, we check in with our printers or our programmer to make sure what we’re proposing is feasible. We don’t want any hiccups down the road!

When we’ve solidified one or two good design options, we check in with you for your feedback. Your input at this stage is invaluable to helping us accurately bring your project to life. With your insight into your company’s and audience’s needs combined with our design and marketing education and experience, together we’ll discover the most successful overall design.

Then we lock down the details.

Once the design is approved, our combined teams can start working on the fine details of the piece.

On our end, we finalize all typesetting and imagery, making sure the entire piece flows cohesively. We double-check the copy, then ask you and your team to look through it thoroughly as well. If it’s a print piece, we communicate with the printer to finalize paper stock and finish, then obtain a printed proof for us all to review one final time. If it’s a web project, we test it thoroughly across all modern browsers and devices to ensure responsive perfection across all platforms. Email set-up and hosting packages are determined and implemented at this time, as well. If it’s an advertising campaign, whether print or social media, we sit down with you to make sure our timeline is synced and we’re ready to publish all content as soon as it’s time. Once all details are finalized and approved, we’re ready to go.

Now your project is out for delivery!

All the details are worked out, we’re on schedule, and we’re ready to launch. Ads have been sent to their publications, social media marketing campaigns are underway, email invites are scheduled to send, direct mail pieces are in the mail, your website is live and receiving traffic, and together we’re monitoring it all.

Awesome! We’re done! Right?

Now what?

Let’s wrap up the post-project discussion.

We don’t want our collaboration to end with project delivery. We want to hear from you how the project was successful. Did you see an increase in sales? Is traffic to your website soaring? Are you getting meaningful interactions on your social media platforms? Did your audience react the way you wanted them to? Is your placement in your industry positively impacted by our work together?

Even more than that, though, we want to know how you think we did. Did our process work well for you? Where did we meet or exceed your expectations, and what would you like to see in the future? Our goal is always your success — but we want to make sure the process and our work together was as enjoyable as it was successful.

No project springs into existence on its own or in a vacuum. That’s why we believe in collaborative design. It ensures that each step of the way, your business and its customers are cared for.

Want to know more?

Drop us a line to see when we can schedule a free consultation.

The post Design as a Collaborative Process. appeared first on Icon Graphics.

The world-wide web isn’t static anymore. I’m not sure it ever really was.

And your website shouldn’t be static, either.

What is responsive web design?

Put simply, responsive web design describes a site that has been designed to display a website’s content legibly and usably on any screen in any context without the viewer having to make any adjustments. The concept of responsive web design has been around for a long time, since the early 2000’s. But it wasn’t until 2010, when web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte coined the phrase in his ground-breaking article on the subject.

Why do I need responsive web design?

Until recently, it was common practice to design a website with only a desktop browser in mind. Designers would choose a width and height as their primary canvas for design, and developers would translate that design into an equally static webpage. There was little concern for how a website might look on different platforms, and it wasn’t unusual for mobile versions to be developed that stripped much of the functionality of the site.

As smart phones, tablets, and other forms of accessing the web became more and more prevalent, the static approach to web design presented lots of problems. It failed to respect the time and availability of users accessing the site on non-desktop platforms, which in turn negatively affected companies whose sites were failing to convert those users into customers or clients because of bad interface experiences. Creating multiple versions of the site was impractical, as no designer or developer can predict with certainty what screens people will be using.

Approaching a website responsively, however, concentrates on the user experience above all else. The design is conceived with the understanding that it will never look the same across browsers and screens and the acceptance that a design shouldn’t be identical everywhere. Instead, the focus becomes marrying a company’s brand with a user’s viewing needs — which creates a beautiful, usable, readable experience for all who visit your site.

Want to learn more?

Take a look at some of our responsive web designs, then connect with us. We’re happy to help.

The post Responsive Web Design appeared first on Icon Graphics.