This report is divided into six main parts:

• What is ACME?
• Assessment of existing material and recommendations for future collateral development; designed to assure continuity and to enhance ACME's professional image
• Detailed website assessment
• Corporate and product-level key messages/taglines
• New website outline: reorganization of ACME's product and service offering so they fit with this new messaging approach; this will help to clearly position ACME as experts in helping clients improve their organizational effectiveness
• Recommendations

Contact steve@ryancreative.com for your own independent website review.

Part Two: Assessment of Existing Material

Production quality and corporate identity

Corporate identity (look-and-feel) is critical to any organization's business success, but it is especially important for organizations such as ACME. You sell your services based on perceived quality and experience and although a great deal of trust can be achieved through demonstration of your ability, and through word of mouth, your business cards, website, letterhead and brochures must often operate on their own.

ACME targets a range of clients - from small business right through to multinational corporations - and quite often, you deal with people at the executive level. Large organizations with big budgets (i.e. Bell, the Federal Government) spend millions of dollars in developing, maintaining and protecting their corporate identities with the goal of creating a powerful and confident image. These people are used to seeing 'slick' or high-end material like full-colour glossy kitfolders that can cost $20 a piece to print, and although they might not consciously appreciate what makes one design better than another, they do recognize the difference between material that is produced by professionals, as opposed to amateurs.

Graphic design

Graphic design is a serious business and there are many details in a basic layout that most people never think about. The amount of space between lines of text, colours, choice of images, margins, font size, line-screens, logo position and paper stock are just a few examples of important considerations when designing material.

These details are important because they are based on years of studying consumer behaviour and knowing what sells the message and what does not. When desktop publishing became relatively easy and inexpensive in the 1980s, there was an explosion of 'bad' design in the marketplace, and to this day, many small business owners - in the interest of cost-savings - do a lot of design work themselves. This is okay, only if one knows that they are not a designer, and works within their limitations.

The key to a solid, professional corporate identity, however, isn't totally dependant on money; you just have to lay out some basic ground rules and make sure your material follows proven design techniques - and never try to do too much.

ACME did not contract Ryan Creative Communications to provide a lesson in graphic design but it is important for you to recognize the above information, and to understand how subtle but critical the professional graphic design component of one's corporate identity is. It's never easy to 'criticize with class' but you hired me to give you an honest assessment of your material, based on years of education and experience, and I assure you that this critique is more fact than opinion.

The comments and suggestions in the next section are based on fundamental design principles and guidelines.

Colours and fonts

• ACME uses many different fonts, font styles, justifications, sizes and variations between upper and lower case but you should limit yourself to as few as possible
• Italics, for example, has been proven to be more difficult to read when used for large blocks of text - use italics and bold formatting sparingly and strategically (italics rarely works well on-line)
• Serif fonts (i.e. Times Roman) is best for large blocks of text (novels for instance)
• Non-serif fonts (i.e. Arial) are good for headlines and sub-heads
• Keep website fonts basic because depending on your setup, and that of your audience, fonts can be auto-replaced which means you lose control over the word-wrap (different screen resolutions can pose a problem here too)
• Use of upper and lower case: be careful about arbitrarily capitalizing key words; there is no grammatical logic for doing so and if you're trying to stress the importance of a specific word, consider bold, italics or a different colour instead (also, every word is important, otherwise it doesn't belong)
• Your use of purple remains fairly consistent throughout your material - and this is good - but you should take it a step further and identify one or two more complementary colours for headers and body text

Logo

• The concept is interesting but the design is unfortunately weak (it lacks power and balance)
• It represents not only your company initials, but the idea of integration - and your global reach
• The use of the globe background on your business cards, website and brochure makes for a nice compilation but the logo itself weakens the power of the overall composition
• The logo itself seems to have several variations: one with ACME underneath and another without it; and a third variation in the top left corner of your website - just above the main logo (this appears at the bottom of each page as well)
• You should consider a professional redesign of the logo, or perhaps a modification to this one by adding some depth (3D) and re-typesetting the company name itself - build it into the logo (small changes will produce great results)
• A redesign would be an investment and would be less expensive to do now, rather than three years down the road when you have increased-brand recognition for the existing logo
• The true test for a well-designed logo is that it looks like a single unit, works well on paper, on screen, in colour and black and white and in the fax machine (always test these methods before signing-off on a logo design)

Business cards

• Design is fairly clean, however, there is too much information on the card (this can be simplified using the new key messages from the re-written website)
• Having two phone numbers seems excessive/unnecessary
• Name and title fonts should differ
• Plain, white, uncoated backs are best because they give the recipient a place to scribble notes (and they're less expensive to print)

Letterhead

• Design needs more impact
• Everything you produce should look like a part of the 'ACME set' (this is an art-form in itself)

Brochure

• The cover is weak, but only because of the vague statement: Success through Client-centred Solutions
• In terms of content, this piece shares the same problem as your website so if and when the time comes to reprint, you will have a clear idea of what you want to say - based on your new key messages and content
• There's a great deal of wasted space
• The reversed type is difficult to read (it's bright and hard on the eyes)
• Two colour print jobs are great in terms of cost-efficiency, but you get far more punch out of your colour if you use it sparingly
• Using one full panel to list the partners - without accompanying bios - is an inefficient use of valuable real-estate

Fact sheets, report covers and other documents

Go to part 3...