Okay, as a Graphic Designer I’m always looking to get the best response out of my designs. When people see my designs they have to take action and call, buy or just look on one of the websites that features on the design. There are a lot of things I didn’t know however. You’ll find them below.

1. Did you know the color red takes the users attention?

When you use red in designs that particular spot will get the most attention. I wrote an article where it already came to mind. Test for yourself, divide your mailings in two and use a red color on one half. You’ll probably get more response with the mailing that features the color red.

2. Did you know that animations on a page get attention but are poorly read?

Everybody knows that an animation gets a lot of attention on your pages. But did you know that messages and text in an animation almost never get read correctly? It seems that people get attracted to the animation, but are having trouble reading the text. So keep that in mind when creating animation and it’s wise to use as little text as possible in it!

3. Did you know that arrows pointing upwards give you a better response?

If you use arrows in your design, make sure they point upwards. People see it as a positive thing. Downward arrows are getting negative associations. Test it yourself! Design a mailing with features an arrow pointing to the sky and one pointing towards the ground. You’ll probably discover that the one with the arrow pointing to the sky is getting you more responses.

A social psychologist, Garner, researched the behavior of post-it notes attached to a advert. So how do you get more response by using a post-it? I’ll explain…

Of course you want to measure the responses of you marketing campaign. You don’t only want to get results from your loyal customers. No, also from your customers that aren’t that dedicated to your company. Especially this last group will respond far lesser then your loyal customers.

Social Psychologist Garner did some tests on how to get the largest percentage of your customers to respond to an marketing advert. He conducted three different mailings. One of them had a personal message written on a letter that was added to the mailing. The other one didn’t have a personal message at all and one of them had a post-it on it with a personal message.

This last one had a great impact. More then 75% of the customers responded it to that mailing. The mailing which had a personal message in the letter scored 48% and the mailing without a personal message at all got only 36% response.

Garner wasn’t convinced and did a second test. Again he did three mailings. One with a post-it and a hand written message on it, one with a blank post-it and one with no post-it at all. Again the hand written, personalized post-it mailing got the most response! 69% responded to that mailing. Only 43% responded on the mailing with the blank post-it. The mailing with no post-it at all just got 34% response.

And there were more positive effects. People responded faster then normal and did a lot of more work to even get to respond. This will work not only for mailings, but also for brochures, flyer’s and questionnaires. Try it yourself and find out the result yourself!

The university of Amsterdam conducted a research on how Magazine advertisements are read and how they can attract the reader. The results are nice to keep in kind when creating your own magazine advertisement.

The results were collected with the help of eye tracking. This way every eye movement readers had were recorded. It was possible to get an exact idea on what was looked at.

The results aren’t really that shocking. But they’re useful to use when designing that top advertisement of yours.

• The surroundings from the advertisement are important to get attention from the reader. For example, the color red on the page next to your advert will get more attention. This is also the case when there’s a lot of text on the other side. So it’s important to always ask what’s on the page next to your advert.
• It’s better to put your advertisement on the right page. It gets 8% more attention on a right page then on a left page.
• Big adverts get more attention then small ones (Yes! Really =)). If you can afford it choose the biggest size you can get. Advertisement that cover half of the page are getting 20% of the readers attention. A whole page gets 42% and a double page advertisements gets 70% of your readers attention!
• Use a lot of different colors in your design. Blue does get less attention (only 42%) then green, red or white (49%).
• A heading rule in your design get attention, use it!

So if your designing a advertisement for a magazine, it’s smart to pay attention to the things above. In short, get the biggest possible size available in the magazine next to a page with a low amount of text and no red colors on it.

Photo retouching is something I barely do in Photoshop. I just don’t get to starting of with. It’s one of the things however I really like to see and would like to do. So in my spare time I try as much tutorials about the topic. Of course I can’t keep those tutorials for my own good, so below you’ll find my top 10.

Professional Photo Retouch – Photoshop® CS4

Not a real tutorial, but it shows the possibilities to me and the end result is very nice.

Glamorous Glowing Model Effect on Your Image

This tutorial is short and easy. Even a beginner can do some real nice stuff after he follows this tutorial. That’s at least my opinion. With some really simple options and modifications your picture will get more glamorous.

Professional Photoshop retouching tutorial

This tutorial goes significantly deeper into the retouching. It explains to you what happens and you get to see how this guy does it.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly

Not the retouching you might think of. The techniques used however can come in handy when retouching your own photo’s. On the other side, creating these kind of compositions is a specialty on it’s own.

Create a High Clarity Photo (Dave Hill style)

Everybody knows Dave Hill, at least you should! He always creates some nice HDR photo’s. You can accomplish something similar on your own photo’s with this tutorial.

On the 8th of June this year, we organized a kart event for all our customers. They had to race for 100 rounds, including switching between riders and of course getting some fuel in time. Afterwards there was a BBQ which closed the event.

The whole marketing around the Q4YOU! event was made by myself as you may have seen in my earlier post about the invitation. Today we finished the photo folders. We sent these afterwards every time we have a Q4YOU!. It features a DVD with all pictures from the event and some printed photo’s which are personalized for every client. Below you can find the end result. Let me know what you think of it.

Today I presented my Immersive space to my fellow students and teachers. The presentation went very well and the reactions were positive. Let’s just hope it get’s me through the entire course! Anyway, the space has some bugs in it, sound bugs mostly. Due to incompetence and lack of time I didn’t get the time to fix those. I’m still happy with the end result and it displays my current technical knowledge about Actionscript 3 I worked with for the first time! It was difficult and time consuming, but got the job done in the end.

The space storyline is about Grave Bridge. WW2 is the setting and style. All information is in dutch, so I’ll explain it in short. First you have to collect eight or more mines / grenades. You also have to find the two pieces of information (documents) you have to find in the different scenes. When you’ve accomplished that you can exit by clicking under the bridge. Let me know what you think about it!

• Immersive Space in Flash – Grave Bridge

Note: It seems the online version doesn’t play out the outro when exiting the space. The projector file does however!