Doing wonders for typography on the web… We are now able to display different typefaces for the web, thanks to typekit. I have a feeling this will change the shape of web design in the future and will render some early internet browsers obsolete (about time).

www.typekit.com

Average promotional design spend

The average promotional design spend is £28K, with 36% of that spend being outsourced, to the greatest extent in construction.

The sector with the highest average spend was wholesale, with an average spend of £44K, possibly reflecting the nature of competition in the sector.

Companies with over 250 employees have the highest average spend at just over £170K and the average spend appears to increase with company size. This would support a model for promotional spend where the design effort in promotional is proportional to the size of the company, i.e. there is a scale affect that does not plateau.

Promotional design as a percentage of turnover
The promotional design spend as a percentage of turnover is highest for other business activities, with 2.2% of turnover spent in this category, followed by wholesale at 1.3% and manufacturing third at 0.8%.

These results indicate that the relative need for promotion is highest in other business activities, whereas it might be expected that as a competitive differentiator it would be most required in wholesale.

There appears to be little relative spend in construction, again identifying it as a very different sector in terms of design input. The relative promotional spend peaks for companies with between 10 and 49 employees (0.6%).

The other three size categories all have approximately the same spend at around 0.3% of turnover. This may, if company size is strongly linked to age of the company, indicate that as companies grow they go through a period where there is a need for relatively greater design focus on promotion.   

Average identity design spend

The average spend on identity design was £9.6K, with almost half (46%) of that spend being outsourced. This level of outsourcing is much higher than the other elements of design.

The highest average sector spend was in the wholesale sector at £14.8K and the lowest was in construction at £8.3K.

In the same way as technical and promotional design spending increases with company size, average spending on identity design increases for companies with greater numbers of employees.

Companies with greater than 250 employees spent on average £43K on identity design, which is in strong contrast to companies with less than 10 employees where the average was £1.2K.

Identity design as a percentage of turnover
Similar to promotional design, the highest average spend as a percentage of turnover is in other business activities (0.63%), with wholesale second (0.40%). Again, construction has a different profile and lower intensity of spend than the other sectors.

The inverted u-shaped pattern for design spending as a percentage of turnover present in promotional and user design is repeated for identity design. For companies with between 10 and 49 employees 0.2% of turnover is spent in this category. This is double the level of companies with between 50 and 249 employees and four times higher than both small and large companies.  

So what does this mean for Australian design studios
Past design surveys conducted in the UK have been supported by similar findings here so it is fair to assume that this survey will equally apply. At least it is an indicator of what is spent on design and hence a target to budget for when pitching new clients.

www.designbusinesscouncil.com

Finally, it has happened. The new Australian Infront site is live!

Please check it out and support the Australian design community.

www.australianinfront.com.au

With the relaunch now live, I have decided to once again register with Infront and participate in the forums. I have also setup a directory listing, in the hope that some creative collaborations might pop up. So if you have a project on the cards, please get in contact. Viva Infront!

Full article is available here:

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=1001829

Eat.Sleep.Surf – nothing more to say.

A layout exercise designed to utilise the publishing specific capabilities of Adobe InDesign. Layout ranges from the inside cover through to page 5.

I designed this A2/A3 type poster to showcase the ‘heroman’ typeface I created. The Heroman font is a heavy serif typeface, with distinct characteristics, and a definite personality. Primarily a display font, lighter Heroman font weights can also be used effectively for short blocks of body copy. Taking inspiration from Bauhaus, and the bold French typefaces of the 1970’s, Heroman almost conveys comic book sensibilities whilst still evoking a contemporary slightly Asian manga vibe. This is achieved in no uncertain terms, by the use of dramatic curves on the upper part of the letterforms. There is also slight curving on the top of the vertical strokes of the H, I, J, K, L characters, to remain consistent with the rest of the family

There are also subtle tweaks employed to enhance the letterforms, such as an elevated cross bar height for letters requiring a horizontal line within the form itself, such as E, F, G, H, A, B, P, R, and S.  The bottom half of the letterforms are based on blockforms, directly countering the curved top halves of the characters. This gives the typeface a solid foundation and consistency amongst its letterforms. There are however a few characters that break some of these structural guidelines, such as the letter R which dips its diagonal limb below the baseline. It is this minor breaking of the rules which gives the Heroman font its character and personality.

As part of my design studies, I had to create a type specimen book on any typeface family that had a variety of cuts/weights. I decided to go with a bit of a forgotten classic, Eras ITC. After researching the font, I discovered its french heritage, and decided I was going to have fun with the book, and leave the boring homogenous type specimens behind, and instead, opt for bold, lively and dynamic sample text and compositions, much like the font itself.