by

Nicole Maziarz

Being a graphic designer, there are many essential tools that I can’t live without. Outside of a computer, design software (Adobe Creative Suite), books (always filled with valuable literature and great sources of inspiration), pencils sketchpads, printer, and scanner, here are a list of “must have” tools for today’s graphic designer:

Lorem Ipsum
http://www.lipsum.com/
This dummy text is great to use in a design when the final copy hasn’t yet been approved by the client. It can give your internal team and client’s alike a good idea of what the finished product will look like even when the content is still in development. This can help speed up the client approval process.

Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
This site is filled with great articles, design tools and tips,  from today’s most innovative designers. Whether you are looking for a specific CSS3 question or just some inspiration, this site can be super handy. Be sure to favorite this site to stay up-to-date on today’s best design practices.

Psdtuts
http://psd.tutsplus.com/
If you want to practice and improve your Photoshop skills, this site/blog has incredible tutorials that take you step-by-step in creating great graphics. The site is filled with detailed tutorials, free guides and more. Designers should be constantly improving their Photoshop skills and this site can be a fantastic tutor.

Art Directors Tool Kit
http://www.code-line.com/software/artdirectorstoolkit5/
Just recently, my creative director introduced me to this amazing design tool. It was so helpful and saved me a great deal of time when searching Pantone swatches for color palettes I was creating for a new logo design.  It includes swatch libraries, layout tools and many other solutions for all the hurdles designers are expected to leap each day.

These tools can help you grow as a designer, share this with your team  and creative coworkers today and stay tuned for more tips on making the most of your creative projects.

Nicole is a Graphic Designer at Zer0 to 5ive

Zer0 to 5ive recently added another award to our extensive list of accolades. This time it was the industry coveted PRSA Silver Anvil! Considered the icon of best public relations practices, the Silver Anvil is awarded annually to organizations that meet the highest standards of performance in the industry. Symbolizing the forging of public opinion, the Silver Anvil recognizes successful programs that incorporate sound research, planning, execution and evaluation.

0to5 won this year’s Silver Anvil in Integrated Communications in recognition of their work on CashEdge.Inc’s innovative “Popmoney” campaign.

The campaign was a tremendous success exceeding all goals and ultimately resulting in tremendous media coverage, seven new customers and a pipeline of hundreds of prospects. The campaign achieved more than 250+ million media impressions, including more than 150 articles, 25 interviews, 5,000+ release postings, 85+ tweets and retweets.

Our special thanks goes out to CashEdge Inc. and everyone who helped make this campaign such a smashing success!

By the Zer0 to 5ive Team

by Marybeth Sheppard

Congratulations to our client, Airclic, for the recent launch of their new website and corporate strategy.

Airclic develops mobile software products that dramatically improve the performance of an organization’s supply chain, logistics and field services operations. Airclic’s products save time, money and improve customer satisfaction.

Earlier this year, Airclic saw the opportunity to take advantage of SaaS-based solutions to further drive adoption of mobile software. Their recent launch includes the first of several SaaS-based products.

This marks a major milestone for Airclic and will be an instrumental element for building and sustaining considerable growth and success. With Zer0 to 5ive’s help, Airclic was able to create a new and engaging brand image, promote their core technology to multiple markets and tell a more compelling story.

See for yourself at www.airclic.com

Marybeth is a Principal at Zer0 to 5ive

Image courtesy of OraSure Technologies

Before you clear the last thing off your desk, attend the holiday party and hop on the plane to Barbados, remember to add that one last item to your December check list: employee holiday donations. Despite the tough economy, millions of people are planning to donate during the holiday season and many of them could be employees sitting right under your firm’s roof. It only takes a few quick steps to recognize these altruistic individuals within your company.

I recently worked with a client that had several employees actively involved in a local community event. We quickly discovered that spreading the “good word’ about holiday donations is a fantastic way to strengthen corporate morale, improve your firm’s reputation within the local community and help some truly deserving individuals during the holiday season. And it is fun for your employees! Here are five tips for spreading the good word about your employees’ holiday donations:

1. Ask around the office – Find out if your employees are planning
to participate in any holiday drives. If nothing is planned, suggest a local organization for your company to participate in. There are a myriad of deserving holiday charities to choose from. A quick Google search can help provide some options. The local United Way chapter and other volunteer organizations usually post the details of their holiday drives to their websites.

2. Draft a media alert and pitch to the local press – Draft a media alert with an event summary and send to local reporters. Writing an alert is a great exercise for creating content to later share with your company and stakeholders. Here is a sample media alert from a recent client’s employee involvement that summarizes the details in a “who, what, when, where, why” format. Offer up a time for interview and photo opportunities with your employees and local volunteer organization reps.

3. Take photos and videos – Go to the event and take photos or conduct video interviews to capture all the details. All this can be done now with a basic digital camera! It’s a good idea to label photos with names of employees when sending to the media. Be sure to add your photos to your company’s website or social media pages later on.

4. Write a summary email – The summary email is important for building corporate morale within your organization. Pull a summary from the media alert (attaching photos of employees who participated) and send in an email to members of your organization. Take a shot at sending a few summary bullets and photos to reporters for their newspaper’s community section or briefs.

5. Post a recap to your company site – Create a wrap-up summary and post to your corporate website. Include any relevant media coverage in your news section. Recap the event in your next company newsletter and be sure to share your holiday story by posting to your company blog, twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

These are some of the fun and easy ways to show the holiday spirit of your employees and solidify your company’s connection within the community. Follow the tips above and ensure your employee volunteers are recognized this holiday season!

Post by Mike Levey, Zer0 to 5ive Senior Strategist

It’s said that you are judged by the company you keep…and we keep some pretty hot company.

This morning, Datamation announced its list of 85 cloud computing vendors shaping the emerging cloud. Two Zer0 to 5ive clients — Appistry and Mashery — made the list (and rightly so…text below is from the Datamation article):

72) Mashery
A core concept in cloud computing is the Application Programming Interface, or API. Companies that allow access to their Web applications – say, for instance, to developers or clients – do so through an API, which is a portal to the infrastructure.

Mashery, founded in 2006, has built its business on the centrality of the API. The San Francisco-based company provides a SaaS infrastructure for supporting a firm’s API. Its management and monitoring tool allows a company to control details like who has access to its data via an API. Among other advantages, this enables businesses to form Web-based partnership with other online businesses – which is the core of cloud computing.

Mashery has garnered an impressive customer list, including Alcatel-Lucent, Hoovers, Netflix and Best Buy.

Notable: Mashery’s management team – here’s their blog – includes Oren Michels, CEO, who was president of Colt HR and Winebid.com; and Ajay Arora, VP of strategy and services, who held executive positions at newScale and Centrata. Mashery has so far raised $2 million in venture funding.

80) Appistry
Appistry’s flagship product is the CloudIQ Platform, which aims to make it easier for companies to use both public and private clouds. CloudIQ Platform incorporates the CloudIQ Manager, which was released earlier this year and makes it possible for enterprises to migrate existing applications to public and private clouds.

In July 2009, Appistry won an American Business Award as the ‘Most Innovative Company of the Year in Computer Software and Services Industries,’ and Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini has called their solutions ‘fresh, radical, and powerful technology.’

Notable: In 2008, Appistry reported 200 percent year over year growth and expanded its list of Fortune 500 clients, which includes FedEx, Lockheed Martin, General Electric and Northrop Grumman.”

We just completed another ChalkTalk for a new client yesterday where we went through our competitive positioning process.  Once again, having your client really think about their differentiators, market challenges and market opportunities crystallizes a competitive difference that has legs.  In this case, we identified a simple approach the client was using that was almost a give-away, not only as a differentiator, but as a new revenue stream and a “trojan horse” for sales.  You could feel the electricity in the air as the sales and marketing teams absorbed the impact of what we were doing and the potential it held.

Whether you call it positioning, competitive positioning, re-positioning, de-positioning, you-name-it positioning — at the end of the day it’s all about owning and differentiating your offering — and making everyone else’s offerings look less desirable.  If you haven’t done this for your company in a while, do it.  Who knows what you’ll find!

(Posted by Michelle Pujadas; image via Creative Commons courtesy of Jesus Solana)

Michelle and I are on the flight back to Philadelphia after facilitating a Chalk Talk to help a new client refine its message. Once again, I was witness to the power of how getting to the right message can inspire and inject excitement into a company.

Like others I’ve been a part of, this Chalk Talk was a definite high. We knew an hour into the session that we were on the right path and that the client knew they were on the right path, too. Even in raw form, you could see how the new message was creating a sense of excitement and possibility and getting them to think bigger about where their brand could go.

That’s the power of having the right message.

If you’re like me, you probably hear or read about a new product every 30 seconds.  I suspect that, also like me, you don’t remember more than a handful of those products.

But if you are the one launching a product to audiences within your own industry, they’ll be sure to stand up and take notice, right? Well unless you just launched the next iPhone, it can be a challenge – a big one!

In the fall of last year, we faced such a challenge with a client in the financial technology sector – CashEdge. Their services enable financial institutions to engage customers in new ways. After launching a couple of products earlier in the year, they wanted to introduce a new, cutting-edge, third-party transfer product before their annual customer conference.

Should we do another product press release and send an html email to our customers? Sure, we could have done that. But we wanted – and quite honestly needed – to tell this story in a new light. The company was at the point in their corporate evolution where their story had changed and this new product really was a compelling example of that change. The challenge – how do we make it compelling to anyone outside of our strategic planning meeting?

We decided to go big – yet simple. This was a great time to do something we’ve been hoping to do for this customer for a while – create a new vision and do a brand refresh. Given their unique position and expertise in the market place we decided to tell the new story in three simple, yet strategic words - “Intelligent Money Movement.”

Of course no story is complete without the pictures so we put our creative team to work and executed a total brand refresh by updating the logo and designing an entirely new website and new collateral to support the new story.

Occasionally we need to resuscitate a brand and reposition it for the changing marketplace. Sometimes going big is exactly what you need to do. Next up…an iPhone designed just for online banking needs? Well, maybe someday.

Posted by Cheri
(Image by borman818 via Flickr licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-2.0 Generic)