Branding Bob D Ward

It's a whole new world out there with companies downsizing in this economy. Hit bad are the advertising agencies. I became a victim to a layoff recently and finding work is almost nonexistent, especially for what I do — print production. Print is certainly not dead but the printing industry has been hit hard by the recession. So in my efforts to reposition myself as a print production artist, I have made some changes in my job search strategy. 

First, my boat house graphic (which I have used on my business card now for almost 10 years) will become more prominent.
I felt it necessary to keep the same image rather than create a new one since the current image has gained much respect and recognition. It's actually a photograph that I took while taking a walk one day on my lunch break when I was working at ad agency Baldwin & Stone, which was located in Harvard Square in Cambridge MA. You may not have heard of Baldwin & Stone (formally called Harcomm) but you certainly knew its clients W.B. Mason or Citistreet. It was a March afternoon and I strolled down to the Charles River and was on the river banks across from the Weld Boathouse, (the name of the boathouse in the image). The trees had no leaves so using Photoshop I colored in the foliage and ran the image through a few filters to give it a painterly effect—an effect that I still use today on many of my photographic images.

I learned about Kuler which is a FREE web-hosted application,
to explore, create and share color themes fully integrated within Adobe Creative Suite (CS4). Essentially if you have a photograph or vector based image and you want to use colors from within that image Kuler extracts the main colors to have the look and feel of that image that you can use in your layout, web page, blog, your bedroom walls, or what ever your color project may be. So I imported my boat house graphic into Kuler and came up with these web based colors that I am using on this website, my business card and all my self promotional items. The colors are saved in a file format called Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) where you can import these colors into color palettes of your favorite Adobe program ie; Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator. The numbers below each color represents the web based color. Learn more about Adobe Kuler.

The boathouse graphic is my self branding image and I use it
on all my self promotion and stationary projects using the Kuler created color palette above. 

This blog, which is built into my new website is part of my strategy to help generate new job leads in an effort to bring
you the latest information in social media, graphics, branding, marketing, advertising, type, color, printing and imaging technology. My goal is to update the content regularly and have useful information for other print production artists as well as graphic designers and photographers. Please feel free to comment or contribute to my blog.