Phoenix 10 Archives - Phoenix 10 Design

Save money and get great creative results. Win, win.

Strapping on a rocket pack and a (highly dubious) safety helmet is one creative way to try and impress your potential customers. We like to save you the stress and bother of burning your suits (and carpets) by proposing an easier cost-saving solution. Welcome to Phoenix 10.

The typical business owner marketing scenario

As an owner you want to attract new customers to your business, whilst spending your time providing those products and services you specialise in. It's a busy time and you try to fit your marketing tasks in as and when you can. Your dedication and confidence in growing your business will lead you to a typical marketing crossroads. Do you turn left and attempt to create your own marketing materials, designing your advertising and branding in order to keep your costs down? Or do you turn right towards investing in a specialist design service?

This is where Phoenix 10 helps narrow that choice. In essence, we build a new path through that crossroad enabling you to progress with professional and stunning marketing material at a cost that is manageable for you. We have spoken with numerous customers attempting their own branding who became disillusioned with the outcome. They felt they just couldn't produce the results that reflected the high standards of their services. In reality tying to reduce costs in this area slows business growth and makes it doubly hard to attract new customers.

At the other end of the scale we have worked with customers who have hugely overpaid for creative input. Whilst we appreciate and respect the agencies charging £70+ per hour, many of which do a fine job in utilising their numerous resources for you, do you really need them for all creative tasks? This approach is fine for bigger collaborative projects on large scale websites or huge rebranding projects. But do you really want or need to be paying that hourly rate for all of your design requirements regardless of complexity? Do you want to pay £70+p/h for your leaflets, flyers, adverts, email designs and website updates once your brand is established with guidelines in place? These are the run-rate projects that typically rely on a single designer working on them, where huge cost savings for design can be found.

How we achieve these great creative cost savings

Our slimline business model has been built to provide experienced design at an hourly rate that is almost impossible to beat by conventional agencies. We solve your creative investment dilemma by allowing you to invest a little and achieve a lot. With no central location to pay for, office rents and rates, or sales commission to cover, a far higher proportion of your investment goes towards creativity. You speak directly with the creative people that matter. You only ever pay for the time it takes to create your artwork and the tools needed to do the job.

Does this mean we pocket a higher percentage of a creative project spend? No. We have moved the cost savings of these operational efficiencies directly into our hourly rate so that our customers are the people who benefit. For every project.

What this means for our customers

If you take a look through our testimonials we receive common praise. Our customers are very appreciative of our pricing structure and hugely impressed with the creative results they receive. We share in the enjoyment they get from being proud of their marketing and the extra confidence it gives them in successfully selling their services. They now get to spend more time impressing their customers with the skills they can offer.

We will make your business rise

We want you to become one of our customers so you can directly benefit from these cost savings with our creative services. All it takes is for you to contact us and ask for a quote. From that moment we believe you will enjoy your experience with us. Whether you need website design, social media adverts, help with your SEO and Google advertising, or print related materials like brochures, leaflets, stationery, pull-up banners and exhibition stands. We can save you money AND provide outstanding results in attracting new customers to your business. Give us a try.

Crafting you a logo that works.

At Phoenix 10 we like to kick-off a logo design project with an open and quality conversation with you. We aim to learn about your company culture, values and the way you conduct your business. This is in preparation for adding the appropriate personality to the logo during the design stage.

The audience and the competition

Finding out two key components will impact the overall direction of design:

Who the logo is targeted at (audience)
Which companies are you up against (competitors)

Matching the style of the logo to the correct audience is achieved through good research and communication with you. Finding out how your customers think, dress and live provides valuable information in supplying you with an effective logo. For instance, a business targeting teenagers may have a bold, bright and edgy style compared to those targeting an older demographic.

The second part of the process is researching your competitors. Knowing who you are up against enables us to set you apart from their styling to provide strong competition, rather than copytition.

Logo usage

Where and how will your logo predominantly be used? The answer is essential for a designer to know what they can and can't do in terms of design. If your business is displayed mainly online then we could use the full RGB range to add depth and highlights. If you require lots of printed items or offline material then we would either stay away from this, or plan for alternative imagery for print. Likewise, if your logo needs to fit a specific purpose (a certain type of vehicle for example) we would ensure you have a logo to accommodate this.

Sketching and brainstorming

Peer into a designer's sketch pad and you will find a whole raft of brainstorming ideas, many of which will never be seen. Each sketch leads a designer towards a more usable concept to present to you. This quick phase is the most simplistic in separating the good from the not-so-usable.

Refining concepts

Usually the best 4 - 7 ideas will make the digital concepts stage for presenting. This process of feedback and refinement is usually the most time consuming stage, with some back and forth in developing one or more concepts further with you.

Building the brand identity

The finished logo is just the starting point on the journey of brand identity development. There will potentially be dozens of elements to design, covering both digital and print use. Business stationery, signage, physical branding as well as web and social media imagery to name a few. On completion of these brand assets an associated brand guidelines document can be created. This provides some helpful assistance on how to use your new branding and work with the correct colours, typography, layout and imagery. Staying on-brand ensures you maximise your design investment and communicate consistently with the people that matter most. Your customers.

Working within your budget

Whilst all these stages are useful processes for the designer to go through to provide a logo that works, it's equally important to respect your budget and give you the best we can for your investment. Our process for working with a smaller start-up may be different to a corporate organisation with a bigger brand to develop, organise and maintain. This certainly doesn't mean reduced imagination and creativity, but we would look to reduce the number of initial concepts and refinements in the digital planning stage to keep your costs down. This makes us hugely competitive on price for both small and medium sized businesses.

Do you require logo or brand development?

We would love to work with you on a branding project. Whether you need a full brand makeover or an enhancement to an existing brand, we can provide a service to make your business rise and shine. Get in touch today to start your exciting project with us.

Goodbye green and hello purple!

Inventive and imaginative,
Ultra Violet lights the way to what is yet to come.

Announcing the choice for Pantone’s Colour of the Year, Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said: "We are living in a time that requires inventiveness and imagination. It is this kind of creative inspiration that is indigenous to Pantone18-3838 Ultra Violet, a blue-based purple that takes our awareness and potential to a higher level. From exploring new technologies and the greater galaxy, to artistic expression and spiritual reflection, intuitive Ultra Violet lights the way to what is yet to come."

Some history of the colour purple

In the meaning of colours, purple and violet represent the future, the imagination and dreams, while spiritually calming the emotions. They inspire and enhance spiritual enlightenment.

The colour purple has been associated with royalty, power and wealth for centuries. Queen Elizabeth I forbade anyone except close members of the royal family to wear it. Purple's elite status stems from the rarity and cost of the dye originally used to produce it. These days, this connotation often translates to premium products or services.

The dye, and the cloth made from it, was so famous that the Greeks called the land of Tyre and Sidon (equivalent to modern Lebanon) Phoinike, "the land of the purple". It required 250,000 shellfish to produce one ounce of Tyrian purple dye, making it very slow and costly to produce. The preferred method was to collect vast piles of shellfish and to allow them to decompose in the sun (classical authors attest to the stench). Production and export of the dye began around 1,200BC and fuelled the Phoenician expansion across the Mediterranean. By the third century BC, Tyrian purple was worth more than gold: a pound of it cost three times the yearly wage of a Roman baker.

When you mix together red and blue, what do you get? Purple. Often associated with luxury, power, wisdom, creativity, and magic, it is the balancing colour between red and blue’s colour psychologies. Whilst red brings intensity and energy to the colour, blue brings relaxation and stability, and together they make purple the perfect balance of the two.

We can introduce the colour purple to your brand

Whilst it doesn’t quite ‘pop’ with attention in the same way yellow or orange does, it stands out because it is not used as often as red and blue. It is rarely used as the primary colour, with it appearing in only 5% of the biggest brands in the US. Implementing as a secondary colour to supplement the main brand appears to be the norm.

It is our belief at Phoenix 10 that colours should be used in a flexible way, allowing brands to convey a range of emotions to suit any given advert or communication. We try to resist defining a brand with a single colour unless absolutely necessary. Our own 'freedom to design' philosophy allows us to use our logo in a range of colours to suit the different seasons and messages we promote. If we need heat our red or orange is called upon. For a cool and relaxing feel our blue is fit for purpose. We too have a purple version up our sleeve!

We would love to work with you on introducing purple to your branding. Whether you want to embrace the colour with a full refresh, or supplement your existing colours with some new life, we can provide all the purple assets you need to use this new colour of the year. Get in touch today to start your exciting project with us.

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