Tag: graphic design

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!