Many professional services companies create marketing materials to provide their clients with relevant information for their business needs. CBIZ Inc. is one of the best in their industry at doing just that and e design has had the privilege of creating the CBIZ MHM Business Tax Planning Guide for the past four years. This Tax Guide serves as a tool to help businesses with growth, investments, estate tax planning and more.

As with all the materials that e design creates for CBIZ (which is a lot!), this Guide follows a vision of branding but is always unique in it’s own right. We created other graphics to tell the story of the Tax Guide which includes an email signature graphic, an email blast announcement and a button for the CBIZ home page.

Several years ago, e design created a Corporate Standards Guide for CBIZ which included the usual branding information: a corporate palette of colors, fonts, logo usage rules, etc. Although the Standards Guide is a vital tool, it also gives us the flexibility to think outside the box and deliver the best design and ideas as possible with each piece of collateral that we produce. This is why we’ve been able to give the Business Planning Tax Guide and so many other communication pieces a unique look while staying true to the CBIZ messaging and mission.

Branding isn’t about copying corporate rules verbatim; it’s about pulling pieces together as a whole to tell a story. Consistency is key when branding many pieces for a single business, but no business should have standards so strict that every piece of communication looks identical. Sounds a little boring, eh? Not to mention the world we live in expects change, excitement and keeping up with the latest trends.

If you’re interested in creating exciting corporate branding materials (no, that’s not an oxymoron in our opinion), don’t hesitate to get in touch. We get our kicks in corporate design! You can tell by looking at our other branding projects we’ve completed over the years. And don’t forget to grab a copy of the CBIZ MHM Business Tax Planning Guide!

With that, #WordArtWars was born on twitter.

I realize there are many people that are forced to use Word daily in their businesses and I feel your pain. I also realize that Word is an essential tool and mostly universal so it’s often the go-to program when creating business documents.

Hopefully, after seeing the ridiculous things that you can create with this program, it will lessen the pain and give you a few laughs.

Below are submissions I’ve been sent by twitter friends–or created myself–over the past few weeks. Feel free to submit your own “art” (be sure to “at” me @erinedesign) and enjoy!

Growth, we all have learned, is no longer automatic. The past has less to teach us than we need to know. Consumers are jaded, markets fragmented and disposable dollars scarce. Risk is everywhere, and pressure produces rigidity, making it difficult to try new things. More than ever, time is our enemy.

This, as every visionary knows, is a rare moment of opportunity: one that rewards creativity and compensates companies that have learned to cultivate the brilliance of individuals and instill an effective process for innovation in their corporate cultures.

Despite commonly held beliefs, real invention is rarely the terminus of a carefully developed brief. It begins before the assignment is written, and is inevitably the difference between efforts that lead to meaningful new ideas and those that produce derivative results. It is an ability to identify inchoate opportunities and see openings where others can’t. Invention never should be saved for problem solving. It should be engaged first to recognize the most rewarding problems to solve. It is not for the faint of heart or narrow-minded.

Happily, we have a plan.
It’s called design.

Design is a profession based on conception: on helping to define an opportunity, then develop a solution that will fulfill it. Subsequently, design includes the identification and management of the team that will bring it to life, whether it is a product, communication, event or place.

This information has been reprinted with permission from AIGA. AIGA encourages anyone interested to download the booklet “What Every Business Needs” and use it to increase the level of respect and understanding for design.

The booklet includes a 12 step process by which businesses can create value and market demand through innovation. It is done in partnership with designers.

If you would like to discus how e design can help your company, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info[at]erinedesign(.)com  (info[at]erindesign(.)com)  .

8Faces is a new magazine for devotees of typography. That’s us!

The more I post (and you read) these blog entries, the more you will realize how obsessed I am with type. This magazine feeds that obsession and I’ve studied both issues they’ve released from cover to cover. Several times.

This is only the second issues of this beautiful magazine and I did a happy dance when it arrived. It’s printed on heavy stock with a foil-blocked cover, a small run of 2500 limited editions, and is a true collector’s item.

The magazine has one core question at its heart — if you could only use eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose? — and poses this (and many others) to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of course type design itself.

8 Faces is available internationally but each issues sells out quick. Stay up to date with the latest info at 8faces.com. I’ll keep you posted when I hear rumblings of another issue coming.

This makes me way more happy than it probably should. Hooray for type!