Category: Bubblegum

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Money saving tips for you

We hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year. All of us here at Team Bubblegum have young families, as do many of our beloved clients, so we thought we’d help you all little for next year.

We’ve seen people referring to the savings challenge to save 1p per day of the year (1p on day 1, 2p on day 2, 10p on day 10 etc). Daily seems a bit too much of chore for us creative types, so we’ve complied this little poster to help you save once per week.

Find a jar or money box, stick this poster nearby and tick off each week as you save – if you stick to it you’ll have a whopping £667.95 by next Christmas you’ll have barely noticed it.

Download your PDF version here

Please help us help others by sharing among your friends and clients. They will thank you for it!

Catch ya later!

What’s in a name?

I often get asked about the name Bubblegum. “What’s the story?”, “How did you come up with it?”. The short answer is that I can’t entirely remember. Let me take you back a few years…

It was February 2005 and I was coming to the end of my employment as lead designer at a marketing agency in South Devon. An opportunity had presented itself which meant I had decided to go freelance, but these plans were in the early stages and still a bit of a pipe dream. However, I didn’t bank on my plans being thrust into action by said agency, who informed me they were closing the business unexpectedly, with immediate effect and I was being issued my four weeks’ notice, but that there was no further project work to complete. This was a Thursday afternoon.

Without hesitation, I calmly replied that if there was nothing for me to do, then why not just stop now and tomorrow will be my last day (you can tell this was before I had children!). They said yes. Wow. I was going out on my own the following week. Scary, exciting, and still no idea ‘who’ I would be.

The following day I was just finalising some print preparation for the large project we had been working on – a local business directory – when I got a call from the publisher. An advertiser had pulled out. There was a half page gap, did I want it?

Did I?!?!

If I did, I had to act quickly. I can’t quite remember how long I had… about two hours I think, to come up with a name, a logo, an advert and write 250 words about my business. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so fast.

Bubblegum was plucked out of the ether and approaching 12 years later, it kinda stuck. There’s been a few updates and incarnations over the years as you might expect, but deep down we still hold the same values I did when I started out. To provide a graphic design and brand development service to our clients that adds value, to continue to understand our clients’ needs and stay with them as they grow – but to do so having fun, building strong relationships with our clients and really getting to know them.

Now, I’m not advocating that anyone starting a business uses the name-out-of-a-hat method of branding their baby, but sometimes, deep down, you just know. If you want to talk to us about how we can help you discover what’s really at the core of your business and how best to transform that into your branding and design – give us a call on 01392 581 501 for your free design consultation.

Thanks for reading!
Gemma

Arrangement of three ripe fresh onions isolated on white background

Know your onions – jargon busting in the GD world

Think of this as a graphic design glossary…but we’ll try not to make you glaze over! Here’s some of the terms you might hear us talk about and what they mean:

GD: Graphic design or graphic designer

Fonts: The design or style of the text/characters we use. Bold, italic etc are additional styles, not different fonts.

Leading: You might know this as line height; it’s simply the space between the lines. We love leading because it makes large blocks of text easier to read

Typography: This is how we use text alone to create a statement in terms of how we position it, using different sizes, styles etc – all for creative effect!

Bleed: Nope, we don’t have a paper cut. This is the area outside your design that the printer needs to make sure you don’t get nasty white edges. You see, as great as printers are, they need a bit of leeway with their cutting. We don’t put any important info in here, just the edge of any images or background colours.

Trim: This is the final size of the document. In advertising terms, this is the boundary of your advert – we don’t put important info right up to the trim line (see Safe Zone).

Safe Zone: This is an area several millimetres away from the trim or edge of your artwork. This ensures that any shoddy cutting won’t get rid of your important information. It also looks FAR better if you keep your text etc away from the edges. So forgive us if we don’t seem to be using every square inch of the page!

White Space: No, this isn’t wasted money. And it doesn’t have to be white. It’s simply the art of leaving space around an object you really want to draw the eye towards.

CMYK vs RGB: No, we haven’t turned into a computer spouting some crazy language. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black) and these are the colours that we use to make up all the pretty colours you see in printed work. Think of it simply as mixing paint. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. This colour system is used for digital and web-based artwork. This is the same as you might remember seeing up close on an old telly (I’m sure I’m not the only one). When you have full light, lots of every colour you get white, when you have no light, that’s none of any colour you have black. And all the permutations in between make for a colourful display on your screens. If we want something for print we need CMYK – for online RGB is fine – but don’t worry we can convert between the two, no need for you to stress.

Resolution and DPI: When you take a photo it has a certain number of dots per inch (dpi) and a finite number of dots of width and height. With that in mind if you continue to increase the size of the photo the number of dots doesn’t increase. It stays the same, but the dots themselves get bigger. That means there are fewer dots per inch and therefore the resolution is lower. You don’t need to worry too much about getting around this, but when you send in a tiny, weeny photo and ask us to put it on a billboard – this is the reason we can. There simply aren’t enough dots.

Vectors: This is a completely different type of artwork. Vector graphics are essentially made from a series of mathematical curves. Unlike your photos as we mentioned above there are no dots. It’s science. That’s why vectors are scalable, up to the size of a house and far beyond. When we want copies of your logo for use on your marketing literature we really, really, really want a vector. Sometimes it’s hard to find them, like paperwork and Madonna CDs. If you can’t, we can create them for you and it’s often pretty simple. Just ask for our logo redraw service.

There’s loads more we could talk to you about, but we don’t want you to switch off, do we? But we do want you to know that we are here to explain all this and more whenever you need us to. So please just give us a call.

We don’t bite!

Party Candles on a Slice of Birthday Cake

Happy 11th birthday to us!

Eleven years. I might just pause for a second there.

We are so very proud to be able to sing ourselves a big happy birthday today. As with most businesses it’s been a sometimes bumpy road, but the support we get from our clients and associated businesses has always been fantastic! So today we celebrate, but we also say a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s helped get us here.

Now I’m going to enjoy the cake! I might even share with the team.

gettingtoknowyou

… Getting to know all about you

Are you picturing Julie Andrews right now, humming that tune in your head? Or are you thinking I’ve gone slightly mad? If the latter, look it up. The fact is we are a little bit quirky.

Unlike your typical design agency, we REALLY get to know our clients. It’s absolutely crucial to us that we get your business, understand you and how you think, what you want, who your clients are. I’ve had clients laugh at me during their consultations because I ask questions like ‘what’s your favourite colour?’, ‘what do you like to do for fun?’, I comment on bags and shoes (generally women only, but not always), we talk about holidays, families, shopping, politics…you name it. I want to know all about you.

Knowing what makes our clients tick is one of the things that makes us….us. We develop a friendship with our clients, and an instant trust; we will create designs for you that truly represent your business. This is especially key for small business owners – there’s less chance of us getting it wrong.

And we enjoy it too. We love talking to people. We love giving our clients exactly what they want. Happiness and great results all round.

If you think your business needs a friend like us – give us a shout. We’d love a chat.