The Secret to Our Pricing

I feel bad for companies trying to price out web sites and print promotions these days. The pricing they are getting is all over the map. So many companies come to us after trying one or two of these cheap methods to get their work done, and after seeing the result, they ask us to do it right. Unfortunately at that point, they are way over budget. Ironically, had they gone with us in the first place and done it right the first time, they would have saved time, money, headaches and – best of all – gotten better results.

Mixer Event and Logo

I recently put together a very large multi-association event through the Long Valley Village Association called Joint Association Mixer (JAM). Since I was organizing the event, we decided to design up a quick event logo, display and web banner, so I figured I'd show it off.

Celebrating 5 Years!

We are celebrating five years as a company today! I started the company back in 1998 as a freelance business, but in May of 2005, I broke off from employment and officially became self employed. Paul Kiesche Design, LLC. has grown every year and we're proud to have come this far. I'm happy to report that we have gotten this far with our own sweat and tears...

Way Before Adobe

It's always good to take a look back at where the things that we take for granted today originated. With Quark Xpress, Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word can sometimes make it easy to forget that not too long ago setting a page of type meant hours of pain-staking work and an eye for fine detail.

Carnivals of Illustration

It was a ton of fun to be invited back to the Learning Carnival for the 5th year in a row! The Learning Carnival is for the gifted and talented students of Morris County schools. I think they allow kids from grades 3 to 5. The workshop I present is on illustration.

ADCNJ Awards Dinner

I recently attended the Art Director's Club of NJ (ADCNJ) Awards Dinner. We were notified that we won a medal and they would announce it at the dinner. We've won awards with them in the past, but this time I wanted to attend their big event.

Sitting on the Social Media Fence?

It is a major understatement to call the social media landscape immense. Millions of people, even in conservative estimates, use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the many other types of social networking sites. Facebook's user-base alone currently outnumbers that of the entire United States. Inevitably, those kind of crowds are going to draw the attention of businesses looking to get their brand message across, as well as "experts" who proclaim they know best about how to do that.

Lessons Learned: Nothing Less than Perfection

I'm starting a new series of posts called "Lessons Learned". The series will share some advice based on the lessons I've learned as a business owner over the years. I think we all need reminders of the lessons we learn and I hope this can help save you future headaches.

Lessons Learned Series
1. Nothing Less Than Perfection
With this economy clients are demanding lower and lower pricing. I don't suggest it, but you can decide to lower your pricing if you really want or need the work. However, don't make the mistake of thinking you can spend less time on the project or lower the quality of your work to compensate for the lower rate you are receiving.

Showing in Chester!

I've been showing several paintings at LeReve gallery in Chester for a little while now. Today I delivered the remaining paintings. So, for the month of April, LeReve will be showing my full collection of Giclee painting reproductions. 

Art Law 101

I get many questions about legal issues and copyrighting artwork. This event looks like it may be good for anyone who wants to learn more about art law. I'm always hesitant to post about copyright issues as I'm not sure if I'm always up on the latest news. This may be worth checking out.

Featured Artist - Discover Jersey Arts!

We are really excited to get some great new exposure throughout all of New Jersey! We're honored to say that Discover Jersey Arts has announced me as their Featured Artist of he month for April.

Showing in Califon!

We are happy to announce my paintings will now be featured in a Califon, New Jersey Gallery called Main Street Frame Shop. 

The gallery just moved into a new, larger space down the road from where they were previously located. The owner, Kathleen, is very nice and I am very proud to be among the other artists they represent. Swing by the gallery and have a look, maybe you'll see something you like!

Medal Winning Design!

We just received an announcement that we won an Art Director's Award, from the Art Director's Club of New Jersey, for our work on the Earth Wise Beverages website we designed! It won a medal in the "Web Site Design Product/Service Promotion" category! They will announce what medal it won at the annual exhibition dinner.

The work was selected from over 400 entries by the judges for the Art
Directors Club of New Jersey's 47th Annual Exhibition.

Theatre and Art at the Barn

This past Friday, March 12th, the Barn Theatre in Montville, NJ opened it's latest comedy production, Epic Proportions. They invited me to show my paintings in their ticket area/gallery. We had quite a turn out and it was fun to see some familiar faces. Thank you to everyone who made it out. All twelve of my paintings are on display for the duration of the show. I've posted a few photos I took during the show.

The show was a ton of fun and we had a good laugh. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys comedies.

Rock Bottom Brand

Wow, it's really bad when your product is so bad you need to admit on national commercials and then chase down people that said it was bad to try and prove to them you changed. That's what Domino's has done in their latest advertisements.

Ensure your project is printed right - use a designer

Attempting to cut costs, more and more clients are deciding to handle the printing themselves rather than going through their design company. This is very unfortunate as it's causing printing issues such as communication confusion, loss of quality, and added costs of redoing print runs. To help you understand why print management is important, we put together a list of five reasons you should let your designers manage the printing.

Slaying the Dragon

In the web design and development world, there are few things as maligned as the dreaded Internet Explorer 6. Originally created in the early part of the decade, almost since it's inception it has been hated by designers. There are Facebook groups such as Uninstall IE6 Day, website initiatives, web developers who will outright not design in IE6 (or create a redirect page to encourage upgrades, and even Microsoft – the creator of Internet Explorer – has put out monetary incentives for people to to upgrade to IE7 or IE8.

However, with around 10% marketshare (depending on who you ask) of internet users, there is still a large chunk of people that force websites to hold back on what they can do. Many people don't even realize how much of a problem this is. Web pages don't render properly in the aging browser, some file types will not work, many flash movies are incompatible, and – most worrisome at all - IE6 is a major security risk.

Google would like to change all that.

The Magic Touch

The big news in technology and user interfaces has undoubtedly been the iPad; Apple's latest wonder device that will change the world. Furthering the success of the iPod Touch and iPhone, Apple created an enlarged device so that you could have a multi-touch with you where ever you could go.

But what if, instead of buying an single device that has multi-touch, you could add a touch display to any computing device you have? Or, better yet, anything electronic at all?

Why We Don’t Make Speculative Presentations

Creative Business created this letter for companies like mine to use. I think it is really well written should be shared. We use this as our policy.

A Creative yet Creepy Christmas Short

In the office, it can't be said that we don't like a creative Christmas movie. The fact that this one has a quick twist that reminds me of the Twilight Zone only adds to the delight. The short animation Alma is the first film directed by Rodrigo Blaas. Blaas, on a creative break from Pixar, has already won awards and mentions for this animated short, and when you watch it you'll know why. We enjoyed this movie and thought you would to.

To find out more about Rodrigo's work on Alma, visit the official site. Hopefully Alma won't be the last of side projects we see from Pixar Talent.



Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.